Kitty on top

In the unlikely event that the date is not already in your PDA, Monday -- Nov. 1 -- is Hello Kitty's 30th birthday.

She has been called the world's most famous feline, though you might not want to mention that to Garfield. It's one of the curiosities of pop culture that a treacly bubble-headed cartoon cat from Japan who was invented as a logo -- she's not even a cartoon or movie character -- has become a global commodity and American home design icon.

Cultural anthropologists consider her popularity worthy of academic pursuit. ("She represents a kind of neofeminism," posits Christine Yano, a professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii, who is writing a book about her.) She's been featured in a journal with no less gravitas than Foreign Policy, in an article about Japan's global cultural influence.

"You can buy individually wrapped Hello Kitty prunes," marvels Foreign Policy writer Douglas McGray. "You can buy a toaster that burns Hello Kitty's face into a piece of bread. You can buy a Hello Kitty vibrator."

Mostly, though, she is adored by ordinary children, women, and even some men. On any given day, stores such as Kitty World on Newbury Street, a veritable Hello Kitty emporium, are packed with customers of all ages adding to their holdings of Hello Kitty products -- purses, coffee makers, paper, towels, plush toys, CD holders, pencils, books, and more.

"I just love Hello Kitty," gushes Kitty World regular Monica Delgado, 31, of Brookline, interviewed by telephone. "Right now I am eating off of a Hello Kitty plate. My steering wheel cover is Hello Kitty. I have Hello Kitty towels, stickers, and pencils. I have a Hello Kitty lamp. I have a Hello Kitty wastebasket. My birthday is always Hello Kitty."

She adds: "If I had a little girl, I'd dress her only in Hello Kitty stuff."

What is up with Hello Kitty?

At face value, she's just the flagship character for Sanrio, a $1 billion company that has superimposed her face on some 22,000 products from pencils to electronics.

But there is something about Hello Kitty's defenseless, vacant appearance, her silent demeanor, her cute dot eyes that, implausibly, compel competent, fully formed adults like 32-year-old Reading dentist Li-An Su to scour Filene's Basement for Hello Kitty "pajamas and shorts and cute things" because "they make you very happy," she said. Something about her minimalist personal style that's inspired designer creations by the likes of Betsey Johnson, Cynthia Rowley, Kimora Lee, even famed architect Michael Graves, who contributed a cat house -- "the Hello Kitty Purr-vilion" -- to a charity auction for Hello Kitty's birthday.

Yet with no mouth to speak of, Hello Kitty is a cipher. All she does is stay quiet and act nice. How un-American is that?

"Kitty beguiles on several levels," write New York Times reporter Ken Belson and BusinessWeek editor Brian Bremner in their 2004 book, "Hello Kitty: The Remarkable Story of Sanrio and the Billion Dollar Feline Phenomenon." "The most obvious one: How did a cartoon character so simple in design -- a round head, button nose, a red ribbon and no mouth -- achieve near cult-like status internationally?"

A brief history of Hello Kitty's life traces her roots to Tokyo, where Shintaro Tsuji, founder and president of Sanrio, Japan's largest character goods company, oversaw her development, along with about 450 other characters, in the 1970s.

Hello Kitty was the biggest hit -- so big, in fact, that in the late 1990s, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates offered Tsuji $5.6 billion for the rights to Hello Kitty, according to Belson and Bremner. The first product was a small vinyl coin purse, but over time the company signed licensing agreements with hundreds of companies in Japan and other countries, including the United States, where Tsuji set up a subsidiary in 1974. Around the same time, Sanrio developed a saccharine back story for Hello Kitty. Her family name was "White." Her birthday was Nov. 1, 1974. She has a twin sister. She has lots of animal friends, and loves "eating yummy cookies her sister Mimmy bakes," according to the official Hello Kitty website.

"Hello Kitty is not an animated character," said Kazuo Tohmatsu, a spokesman for Sanrio in Japan, in an e-mail interview. "She is a symbol of friendship, peace, and kindness."

It's not hard to understand Hello Kitty's popularity in Japan, with its reverence for the graphic arts, from woodblock prints to anime and comics books, and especially for its love of all things cute. Hello Kitty "is at the center of the culture of cute, or kawaii," contend Belson and Bremner.

In Japan, "the whole idea of cuteness transcends gender and age to a great degree," said Merry White, professor of anthropology at Boston University and author of "The Material Child: Coming of Age in Japan and America," which discusses the significance of Hello Kitty in Japanese culture.

"Being cute and being childlike is often positively weighted in Japan, as opposed to the United States, where it's seen as being unhelpfully dependent," she said. "Kitty can be seen as something that needs nurturance. You can care for Kitty. She is relatively passive. She doesn't have a mouth, and can't talk back. She is called Kitty-Chan; "chan" is a suffix used for "cute little kid." This is why Kitty is so loved in Japan: It's not considered childish to be childlike."

But why has this translated to America, land of super-sized everything, where "cute" is not what most people aim for?

To be sure, she has plenty of detractors who "cough up fur balls over her overwrought cuteness," as Belson and Bremner write.

They include feminists, here as well as in Japan, "who have espoused notions that women have too long been treated as children," said Merry White, or who see Hello Kitty as a symbol of women who have been robbed of their voices. They include the anticonsumption crowd, who see Hello Kitty merchandise as "shlock, with no lasting value to society," said Belson, who notes in his book that Hello Kitty was named best "corporate whore" of 2001 by an Asian-American pop culture magazine. They also include social satirists, who find no shortage of material in Hello Kitty's sugary universe, including a Florida company, David & Goliath, which manufactures a line of "Goodbye Kitty" merchandise, such as T-shirts depicting a mouthless cat as roadkill, in a blender, or inside a waffle iron.

But Hello Kitty prevails, no doubt helped by Sanrio's savvy marketing, which includes the constant introduction of new merchandise to enhance her "natural collectability," said Bill Hensley, marketing director for Sanrio. "She is more than an icon, she's a tradition," said Karen Huang, assistant manager of the huge Sanrio store in Times Square, which has a large repeat clientele, including nostalgic adults who remember Hello Kitty from childhood. "They'll drop a couple of hundred dollars in one shopping trip," she said. "Especially when you have children, you are passing the tradition on."

Is it all about merchandising, or is Hello Kitty deeper than that? Belson thinks her mouthlessness makes her a Rorschach cat. "She is very reflective," he said. "You are invited to superimpose on her your emotions."

"She is such a blank, it gives consumers more of a space to put in whatever they want, which might include irony," concurs Yano, who teaches a course in Japanese popular culture at the University of Hawaii. Maybe, she suggests, Hello Kitty is telling women, "I, too, can retreat into mouthlessness if I want to. I don't want to be the aggressive female all the time."

Or maybe not. "I think it's a cute thing," said Hello Kitty collector Vanessa Berry, 22, of Jamaica Plain, who works at Starbucks. "It puts a smile on my face, and cheers me up."

Ken Belson, co-author of "Hello Kitty: The Remarkable Story of Sanrio and the Billion Dollar Feline Phenomenon," speaks twice tomorrow on the phenomenon: at noon in MIT's Tang Center, 70 Memorial Drive, E51-095 (free; call 617-258-8208), and at 6 p.m. in the Omni Parker House, 60 School St., Boston ($8 for members and students, $10 for non-members; sponsored by The Japan Society of Boston; call 617-451-0726).