BREAKING NEWS.
It has been revealed today that popular Japanese cartoon character ‘Hello Kitty’ is not, in fact, a cat.
Drop everything and keep reading RIGHT NOW. If there’s one news story you need to be across this week, it’s this one.
This is Hello Kitty:
As you can see, Hello Kitty has a cat head, including whiskers and pointy ears, and a cat body, including a tail.
So, it’s only natural that in the forty years since Hello Kitty burst out of Japan and onto the international scene, everybody just assumed she was a Japanese cat.
WRONG.
Hello Kitty is a girl. A HUMAN girl. A human BRITISH girl. YOU’VE ALL BEEN FOOLED.
Don’t panic, we’ll get through this together.
Anthropologist Christine R. Yano is a professor at Harvard, who literally wrote the book on Hello Kitty (“Pink Globalisation: Hello Kitty’s Trek Across the Pacific”). This year, Yano is curating a Hello Kitty retrospective at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles.
When she sent her notes to Sanrio (the company behind Hello Kitty) for approval, they got back to her with some fairly important corrections. Yano told The LA Times:
Top Comments
Well she needs laser hair removal treatment, pronto.
So, she's a girl with an unfortunate caudal appendage and a cat ear headband like Taylor Swift wears. Seems legit.