[1] Guinness World Records, Largest Collection of Hello Kitty Memorabilia - Japan Tour, 2017.

[2] Ben Gabriel, “I Have No Mouth but I Must Scream,” The New Inquiry (blog), February 16, 2012, para. 2.

[3] Brian Ashcraft, “The Largest Hello Kitty Goods Collection In The World,” Kotaku, para. 2, accessed July 8, 2017.

[4] Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, (London ; New York, N.Y: Penguin Classics, 1992), 165.

[5] Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (London; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 64.

[6] Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 83.

[7] Sharon Kinsella, “Cuties in Japan,” in Women, Media, and Consumption in Japan, ed. Lise Skov and Brian Moeran, 1st edition (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996), 225–26.

[8] Horatia Harrod, “Miffy Creator Dick Bruna: ‘Hello Kitty Is a Copy of Miffy. I Don’t like That at All,’” The Telegraph, February 17, 2017, para. 17; Rosie Millard, “The Man Who Made Miffy,” Financial Times, March 25, 2011, para. 17.

[9] Marco Pellitteri, The Dragon and the Dazzle: Models, Strategies, and Identities of Japanese Imagination: A European Perspective (John Libbey Publishing, 2011), 78.

[10] Frank Rose, “What Richard Wagner Can Teach Us about Storytelling in the Internet Age,” Deep Media (blog), May 8, 2011, para. 5.

[11] Anime’s Media Mix, 84.

[12] Steinberg, 91.

[13] Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 30.

[14] Claire Bishop, Installation Art (London: Tate, 2010), 14.

[15] Patrick W. Galbraith, “A Room of Their Own: Otaku In the Popular Imagination,” in Otaku Spaces (Seattle, WA: Chin Music Press Inc., 2012), 16.

[16] Galbraith, 16.

[17] Galbraith, 16–17.

[18] americanhikikomori15, “What Hikikomori Is And What It Isn’t,” American  Hikikomori Blog.Com (blog), March 4, 2019.

[19] Laurence Butet-Roch and Maika Elan, “Pictures Reveal the Isolated Lives of Japan’s Social Recluses,” National Geographic, February 14, 2018.

[20] William W. Kelly, ed., Fanning the Flames: Fans and Consumer Culture in Contemporary Japan (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004), 9.

[21] “Dinner with Waifu / Otaku Dates,” Know Your Meme, January 28, 2012.

[22] Takashi Murakami, Little Boy: The Art of Japan’s Exploding Subculture (New York; New Haven: Japan Society, Inc. / Yale University Press, 2005).

[23] John Funk, “Korean Otaku Marries Anime Body Pillow,” The Escapist, March 5, 2010; Thomas DeMichele, “People Can Legally Marry Inanimate Objects - Fact or Myth?,” Fact / Myth, May 23, 2016.

[24] “South Korean Lee Jin-Gyu ‘marries’ Pillow Lover Fate Testarossa,” The Daily Telegraph, March 16, 2010, para. 4.

[25] Michael A. Vidalis, “Gesamtkunstwerk,” GreekArchitects, June 30, 2010, para. 3.

[26] Vincent Kozsilovics and Carlotta Montaldo, “Takashi Murakami Case Study,” Observatoire de l’art contemporain, December 14, 2016.

[27] Steinberg, Anime’s Media Mix, 84.

[28] Kristen Sharp, “Superflatworlds : A Topography of Takashi Murakami and the Cultures of Superflat Art,” 2006, 249–50.

[29] Marilyn Ivy, “The Art of Cute Little Things: Nara Yoshitomo’s Parapolitics,” Mechademia 5, no. 1 (November 10, 2010): 5.

[30] Comic Market Committee, “What Is the Comic Market?” (COMIKET, 2014).

[31] Ivy, “The Art of Cute Little Things,” 17.

[32] Ivy, 20.

[33] Ivy, 20.

[34] Ivy, 5.

[35] Rachel “Matt” Thorn, “Girls and Women Getting Out of Hand: The Pleasure and Politics of Japan’s Amateaur Comics Community,” in Fanning the Flames: Fans and Consumer Culture in Contemporary Japan, ed. William W. Kelly (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004), 7.

[36] Joseph J. Tanke, Jacques Ranciere: An Introduction (London ; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011), 90.

Gunji Masao is a retired policeman who holds the Guinness World Record for the most extensive collection of Hello Kitty memorabilia in the world, since 2017. [Video 1] Located in Chiba, Gunji’s Hello Kitty house is a picturesque wooden structure, painted in baby pink and decorated all over with Hello Kitty motives. On the entrance and the inside, the house contains over 5000 Hello Kitty items, collected for 35 years—to be exact, 5169 objects, and counting. The result is an impressive “dream scene” of totalizing cuteness. When asked what he likes about Hello Kitty for the Guinness World Records YouTube channel,[1]  Gunji answered, candidly, that it “is because of her expression.” “For some reason when I’m sad she looks a little bit sad as well, and when I’m happy she looks happy,” Gunji explains, and continues: “Hello Kitty has always cheered me up when I was unhappy.” Most people would find this baffling: after all, Sanrio’s mascot is famous, and infamous, for her lack of expression.[2] Two deadpan black dots form her eyes, plus a small nose, and no mouth. In another interview, for a Japanese television channel, Gunji goes as far as stating that he feels sad for unsold Hello Kitty items on shops’ shelves, so he ends up buying them all.[3] [Figure 1a, b] The comments on Brian Ashcraft’s Kotaku article about Gunji’s collection are demonstrative of the anxiety generated by such “slyness” of things that manipulate and entrap humans: “5,169 things that share 1 soul,” one commentator, writes, to which another responds, “5,169 things that share 0 soul. They stare deeply into you looking for an opportunity to steal yours.”

Gunji’s Hello Kitty house and his compulsion to keep buying unsold items out of pity (kawaisō, “that poor thing”) supports Sianne Ngai’s claim that cute commodities reimagine the Marxist formulation of capital’s interobjectiveness (as “a social relation between men themselves which assumes… the fantastic form of a relationship between things”[4]) by clothing it in a fantasy of humane one-on-oneness,[5] akin to a parent-child or owner-pet relationship. However, when this intimate bond between the buyer and the cute commodity is multiplied to absurdity, the inhumanity of their liaison begins to leak through the phantasmatic fabric. And according to the comments on Kotaku, the kawaii character itself assumes the vampiric, predatory contours that Marx often sardonically attributes to capitalism—in this case, the accumulation of Hello Kitties brings out her soul-sucking abilities. More precisely, the Hello Kitty house is a fine example of what media theorist Marc Steinberg calls the kyara’s “immaterial force of attraction, and a material propensity for distribution”[6] that both binds things together and spreads them.

Indeed, Hello Kitty is the ultimate kyara. Shimizu Yūko, a designer at Sanrio, created the adorable cat in 1974 as the company sought to capitalize on Japan’s “fancy goods” craze by decorating stationery and other items of bric-a-brac with cute characters.[7] For this purpose, there was no need for originality or talent; in fact, Kitty heavily resembles Miffy (or Nijntje in the original version, meaning “little rabbit”), a beloved character that had been created twenty years earlier, in 1955, by Dick Bruna, a Dutch illustrator and graphic designer of De Stijl descent. [Figure 2] The latter did not hide his contempt for the Japanese knockoff,[8] which took Miffy’s “pure-blooded” Rietveldian palette of primary colors, precise designs and narratives, only to bastardized them with pink ribbons in the service of pure marketing. More recent kyara, like Broccoli’s Di Gi Charat (1995, the mascot of retail chain Gamers) or Crypton Future Media’s Hatsune Miku (2007), have continued and expanded on this concept of self-sufficient characters that, as philosopher Azuma Hiroki suggests, do not require stories to live long and prosper in global markets. [Figure 3]

Contrary to traditional characters whose focus is on narrative substance, the kyara is “a very stylized type of character… an icon with an easily recognizable name that lends itself to many different forms of marketing.”[9] As an abbreviation of “kyarukutā,” the Japanese transliteration of the English word “character,” the kyara aptly translates the notion of a compressed or abstracted character that does not exist within a narrative work. In the age of the “transmediagesamtkunstwerk,”[10] the “total work of art” that finds expression through multiple media, the kyara offers a valuable asset: synergy. Steinberg emphasizes that the kyara is unspecific to any medium yet transposable across media, and is transformed by its various incarnations in a snowball effect.[11] In short, every time a kyara materializes as a TV series, a comic book, a toy, and so on, this new materialization affects all existing materializations, and the sum of these parts change the meanings and form of the immaterial kyara itself. According to Steinberg, the kyara wield massive interobjective networks in which “the mediatization of things… precedes their becoming mediators between people.”[12] The fact the kyara’s interobjectivity precedes their intersubjectivization (i.e., their role in human-human relations) aligns with what philosopher Timothy Morton calls “the sly solidarity between things.”[13] It is such recognition of the agency of “inanimate” objects and matters that sparked the appearance of twenty-first-century philosophies such as New Materialism, Thing Theory, or Object-Oriented Ontology.

As Gunji’s Hello Kitty house shows, Hello Kitty adheres not only to individual objects, but to whole spaces and places, and consequently to the people who inhabit them. When expressed as a spatial concept, the kyara’s viscosity arouses a sense of unreality. Taking after Ilya Kabakov’s idea of “total installation,” art historian Claire Bishop classifies this derealization as a “dream scene,” a “model of viewing experience... that not only physically immerses the viewer in a three-dimensional space, but which is psychologically absorptive too.”[14] The “dream scene” is a phenomenon widely observed in otaku culture. For one, in the skyscrapers and public spaces of otaku neighborhoods like Akihabara in Tokyo, the “otaku Mecca,” packed with animanga merchandise on the inside and covered with giant banners on the outside, promoting popular animated series and games. [Figure 4a, b]

Architect and scholar Morikawa Kaichirō, who curated the Japanese pavilion at the 9th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 2004, is an essential figure concerning this re-evaluation of the spaces and places of otaku culture. Morikawa’s exhibition OTAKU: persona = space = city reflected on how the otaku’s private space of individual hobby had, over the past decades, taken over and transfigured the city’s public spaces. The exhibition’s catalog was boxed with a plastic-figure assembly kit of a giant loli character straddling an iconic rail bridge in Akihabara, like a moé revisioning of the classic sci-fi film Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958). [Figure 5a] This figure, made for the occasion by renowned bishōjo figure creator Ōshima Yūki, effectively captures the awe (and aww!) at the extent to which cute kyara can “colonize” our everyday lives, as well as the anxiety that they may continue to expand indefinitely, overwhelming us with the sheer magnitude of their massive physical distribution. In fact, in 2005, various photomontages of Ōshima’s figures in the streets of Akihabara circulated the internet, deceiving Western anime fans into believing that this “dream scene” was a real event. [Figure 5b]

The kyara also colonizes the otaku’s private spaces, e.g., bedrooms converted to anime and manga shrines, with endless shelves full of books and DVDs, walls coated with character posters or armies of anime figures on display. A closer look at the genealogy of otaku rooms demonstrates that they easily slip from dream to nightmare. Although books like Danny Choo’s OTACOOL: Worldwide Otaku Rooms (2009) and Patrick Galbraith’s Otaku Spaces (2012) have helped promote Japanese nerds to trendy otacool, [Figure 6a, b] at their core is the specter of Miyazaki Tsutomu, the “otaku killer” arrested in 1989 for the brutal murders of four children. As Galbraith explains, “Images of Miyazaki’s room were consistently reproduced in news coverage. The two-room bungalow was stuffed with boxes stacked to the ceiling, enough to block out the light from his window. The small mat where Miyazaki slept was encircled by magazines, manga, and 5,763 videotapes.”[15] [Figure 7] On television and newspapers, commentators reasoned that Miyazaki was addicted to computers and cartoons—the reason behind his crimes—and called him an otaku.[16] Since then, with the globalization of Japanese pop culture, much has changed about the public perception of anime and manga fans, but the nightmarish footprint of Miyazaki’s room never entirely vanished.[17]

At the extreme end of the otaku room spectrum, there are the rooms of hikikomori shut-ins—those suffering from acute social withdrawal, who will not leave their rooms for over six months, sometimes several years, as a coping strategy against excessive social pressure.[18] Although the reasons for this behavior are varied, and there is no correspondence between being hikikomori and being an otaku,[19] in the collective imagination, the two instances have become somewhat connected. Both tend to manifest spatially in the person’s private spaces. In the case of hikikomori, their condition can result in compulsive hoarding, in which objects command the complete subservience of humans to their disordered accumulation. [Figure 8] Although such images of hikikomori hoarding are widely circulated on the Internet, many hikikomori’s rooms simply stark or quite normal.

While these “total works of merchandise” in otaku culture may strike us as little more than a well-honed profiting strategy from the culture industry, there is an affirmative side to the kyara as “binder” of things (“5,169 things that share 1 soul,” as one comment on Gunji’s Hello Kitty house stated). William Kelly, for instance, argues that merchandise allows fans to have a “visual and tactile intimacy” with characters, who are otherwise abstract entity lacking a physical body. As Kelly puts it, “fans want the visual and tactile intimacies of ownership… paradoxically seeking this intimacy in highly commodified settings.”[20] The Internet meme Dinner with Waifu is an example of such “visual and tactile intimacy” with characters that merchandise can provide us, problematizing what may be a radical human-thing “sociality.” [Figure 9] According to Know Your Meme,

For all its self-deprecating humor on the otaku’s “dame‑orientation—an orientation toward things that are no good,”[22] the Dinner with Waifu does not involve an incapacity to distinguish fiction from reality, as moral panics surrounding the otaku often imply. Instead, what is at play is the self-aware logic of “je sais bien, mais quand-même,” formulated by Octave Mannoni in his influential essay Clefs pour l’imaginaire ou l’autre scène (1969). This self-awareness has originated several comical Dinner with Waifu image macros. For instance, the photographic image of a dakimakura sitting at a table with a slice of pizza and a romantic candle on the side, with superimposed phrases stating, “Sorry I can’t eat the pizza, I’m stuffed” or “Still a better love story than Twilight.”

Some otaku even marry their waifu in real‑life wedding ceremonies, occasionally grabbing the headlines of sensationalist media. One such case is that of Korean otaku Lee Jin-gyu, who “married” a dakimakura of Fate Testarossa from the popular anime series Mahō Shōjo Lyrical Nanoha.[23] [Figure 11] While the ceremony was a staged event with no legal value, reports that Jin-gyu has been dating Fate for six years captured the media’s attention. “They go out to the park or the funfair, where it will go on all the rides with him,” one friend reports. “Then when he goes out to eat, he takes it with him and it gets its own seat and its own meal.”[24] Such “unions” are deemed abject because they overflow the boundaries of human-human intersubjectivity, slipping into the broader, nonhuman realm of the interobjective (human-thing, thing-thing). As such, their existence poses a phantasmic threat to the biological perpetuation of the human species and its social orders. The marriage of real people to holograms, love pillows, or cardboard cutouts stages a totalizing “dream scene” where media‑commodities overthrow the foundations of human—or even, animated – exceptionalism.

“Works of total merchandise” represent a commoditization of concepts such as “total art style,” “total design,” and “total building,” upheld by proto-modernist and modernist schools like Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau, and Bauhaus. These included everything from structures to accessories, to furnishings, and even landscape and lifestyle design.[25] In the case of the kyara, it hovers outside the sphere of “proper” works (comics, film, music, etc.) in the form “related goods,” i.e., merchandise ranging from small bric-à-brac, like figurines and other paraphernalia, to large-scale enterprises. In the Hello Kitty house, the merchandise is so encompassing that it would be possible to get through the day without stepping outside a kyara’s thematic universe. In contemporary art, the work of total merchandise is a crucial artistic strategy for Neo-Pop and Superflat artists, such as Murakami Takashi, Nara Yoshitomo, Mr., Aoshima Chiho, and Takano Aya. All of these artists are prolific retailers, who communicate not only through “proper” artworks in painting, sculpture, installation, video, or comics—a medium in which Takano has been especially proliferous, producing alternative manga like Space Ship Ee (2002) Cosmic Juice (2009), and The Jelly Civilization Chronicle (2017)—but also using branded “related goods” and “art merchandise” as a medium in and of itself. As such, the Superflat movement has turned into a breeding ground of cute and immediately recognizable mascots, applicable to everything from toys to stationery to clothes, and all kinds of accessories sold by Murakami’s art production company, Kaikai Kiki, and other parties. [Figure 12]

The collaborations of Superflat artists with popular global brands are well‑known and remain controversial, among art critics and other commentators. For instance, in 2004, Takano Aya teamed up with fashion designer Miyake Issei to create a complete collection of clothing and accessories, with Takano’s paintings used as prints in rain boots, coats, hats, umbrellas, luggage bags, and more. [Figure 13] In 2010, she collaborated with cosmetics house Shu Uemura to make Abracadabra Fantasy, a Christmas makeup collection including palettes, cleansing oils, blush tints, lip tint and gloss, brush sets, and false lashes. As for Murakami Takashi, beside his emblematic collaboration with Louis Vuitton starting in 2003 (including two short video commercials Superflat Monogram and Superflat First Love), he has also designed collections for Miyake in 2000, Uemura in 2013 (6♡PRINCESS, inspired by Murakami’s animated film 6HP), [Figure 14] independent Japanese watchmaker Hajime Asaoka (the customized watch Death Takes No Bridges), and Vans in 2015, among others.[26] Murakami’s collaborations with Louis Vuitton included the colorful redesign of the brand’s monogram mixed with anime eyeballs, the Cherry Blossom Collection in 2005, the Monogramouflage Collection in 2008, and a temporary Louis Vuitton concept store in the Museum of Contemporary Art of Los Angeles dedicated to Murakami’s products in 2007. He and Mr. have also collaborated with Supreme to create a line of skate decks. Nara Yoshitomo’s merchandise features a vast array of goods ranging from plush and ornamental toys to coasters, stamps, stationery, t-shirts, exclusive edition watches, alarm clocks, and more. 

Murakami is the one artist who most extensively explores the notion that the kyara “cannot be reduced to any one of its incarnations but must be thought of both in its material forms and in the ways that it exceeds them.”[27] Murakami’s kyara include his trademark laughing flowers, DOB, Kaikai, Kiki, and even a self-portrait where Murakami represents himself as a chibi or “super-deformed” character (i.e., cute caricature with a large head and a small body), accompanied by his dog Pom. [Figure 15] These kyara change shape to adapt to different media (painting, sculpture, video, toys, clothes, etc.) yet allow the different materialities to communicate and influence each other. For instance, Murakami’s character DOB is known for its shapeshifting abilities. Originally, DOB was a cute hybrid of Mickey Mouse and Sonic the Hedgehog, but over the years he has known many incarnations, from various monstrous many‑eyes creatures with sharp teeth to more abstract forms in which DOB seems to collapse into a whirlpool of shapes and colors. [Figure 16] While some forms retain only a bare minimum of DOB’s standard features, such as its “jellyfish eyes” or the name “DOB,” all these manifestations are bound together by the kyara’s immaterial “surplus.”

The kyara’s elasticity allows for a provocative blurring of the line between the “high art” market and the realm of mass-produced merchandising goods. Murakami’s Superflat Museum (2003) demonstrates this aspect of the kyara most effectively. [Figure 17] The Superflat Museum was inspired by shokugan or “food toys” for children sold in Japanese convenience stores, small boxes containing a snack and a carefully crafted toy featuring characters from popular anime or videogames.[28] In Superflat Museum, some of Murakami’s most famous—and, therefore, most expensive—works, like Hiropon, Miss Ko2, the DOB and mushroom sculptures, or Inochi-kun, are turned into cheap collectible miniatures. Murakami’s “art merchandise” engages with the ideal reconciliation of mass-production and the art world at the core of Bauhausian utopias of democratization of art and design. By “infiltrating” all kinds of established commercial goods, be them high-end Louis Vuitton monogram bags or cheap shokugan toys, Superflat troubles Western expectations about art’s exclusivism, gnawing at (but not eradicating) the boundaries of original and copy, the banal and the auratic.

The viscosity of the kyara in Japanese pop culture also prompts us to think of the gesamtkunstwerk in terms of a 12th art, one not defined in terms of the medium, but in terms of the producer: fan labor, that is, derivative works created by fans. One rare use of kyara and fan labor in the context of contemporary art is Nara Yoshitomo’s Yokohama Project, or Hamapuru, held for Nara’s landmark exhibition and retrospective I Don’t Mind If You Forget Me, in 2001. [Figure 18] Like Murakami’s kyara, Nara also became known for his trademark characters: naughty children, sausage dogs, and other cuties. And like Murakami and other Superflat artists, Nara’s kyara are also merchandised into purchasable goods such as toys and stationery. Unlike Murakami, though, Nara’s fandom in Japan is mostly composed of women who identify with his works.[29] This aspect is particularly interesting given the intricate historical relation between Japanese women and fan labor, namely, during the first five years, the vast majority of the Comic Market (or Comiket, one of the world’s largest comics conventions specializing in dōjinshi, i.e., amateur manga) participants were women, and even today, over half of the participating artists are female.[30] [Figure 19] In her essay “The Art of Cute Little Things: Nara Yoshitomo’s Parapolitics,” anthropologist Marilyn Ivy presents an in-depth analysis of the Yokohama Project:

The hundreds of dolls created by fans based on Nara’s kyara were put into large acrylic letters, spelling the exhibition’s title, I Don’t Mind If You Forget Me. [Figure 20a, b] Ivy reports the strong emotional responses by fans, who used expressions such as “I was so happy I could hardly stand it,” “I thought it was really wonderful that I could participate,” and “I started to cry a little” to describe their experiences.[32] There were also letters addressed to Nara, which used expressions such as “brothers” and “sisters” to refer to other fans and “children” to the stuffed dolls.[33] Such passionate fan engagement suggests that Nara’s Yokohama Project was not about the forcefully activated spectatorship of much participatory art, but the centrality of affective identification and reciprocity in fandoms as a way of attaining intimacy in our “advanced capitalist everydayness.”[34]

The participatory energy prompted by Nara’s Hamapuro brings us to Kelly’s proposition that “fans are the most aggressive appropriators and the most brazen producers among consumers.”[35] Indeed, fans’ capacity for communal production creates an alternative “dream scene,” as absorptive as that of “pure” and overwhelming consumption, which has become a vital part of “totality” in contemporary mediatic milieus. Through fan labor, the kyara’s embrace, with all the implications of intimacy that the word “embrace” conveys, holds an emancipatory potential that does not necessarily surrender to the capitalist order of the total merchandise—that, as we have seen, often carries an uncanny sense of thing-totalitarianism. Instead, if as Jacques Rancière’s puts it, “Emancipation is the possibility of a spectator’s gaze other than the one that was programmed,”[36] then the kyara’s drive towards “totality” and “transmediality” can be reframed in terms of a boundary-distorting or synergetic drive for short-circuiting the roles of specialist and amateur, using and doing, reception and production.

See in CUTENCYCLOPEDIA – END, THE, Metamorphosis & Nothing That’s Really There.

See in PORTFOLIO – GRL KABINETT.

REFERENCES in Gesamptcutewerk.