Hello Kitty, goodbye panda

THIS spring the world’s first Hello Kitty-themed train began service in Taiwan. It proved so popular that almost all the head-rest covers on the seats were snaffled by passengers on the first day. Last week EVA Air, Taiwan’s second-largest airline, announced that it would increase the number of Hello Kitty flights to Paris. Ten of its destinations have a service that features pillows and slippers branded with the white cat. Taipei airport has a Hello Kitty check-in area, gift shop and even a breast-feeding room.

Taipei has Hello Kitty shabu-shabu (hot pot) restaurants offering tofu in the form of the cat’s face and squid-balls shaped like her bow, all washed down with a Hello Kitty fizzy drink. Night-market stalls offer a variety of Hello Kitty apparel, including boxer shorts.

The craze is about more than infantile consumerism: Hello Kitty has become an unlikely token of Taiwanese identity. She is part of a wider embrace of Japan’s kawaii, or “cuteness”, culture. And this is a way for the Taiwanese to define themselves as different from China, which lays claim to their island, by cleaving to Japan, their former coloniser.

The message is clear from the livery of the Hello Kitty train: each of the eight carriages is decorated with Hello Kitty in different parts of the world: Taiwan and then each of the seven continents. The Taiwanese Hello Kitty drinks bubble tea beneath Taipei 101, the capital’s landmark skyscraper; she is separated from the Chinese version (who visits pandas and the Great Wall) by a kimono-wearing Japanese feline. In Hello Kitty world Taiwan has its own car; China is lumped in with other Asians in a separate one.

The obsession is thought to have been started by McDonald’s, a fast-food chain, which gave out Hello Kitty toys with its meals in August 1999. Its supply of half a million toys ran out in just four hours. Later that year Chunghwa Telecom sold out of 50,000 telephone cards within five minutes of making them available.

Love of kawaii reaches politics, too. In elections this year, the independence-minded Democratic Progressive Party, which defeated the pro-unification Kuomintang (KMT), released a Japanese-style animated campaign video of Tsai Ing-wen, its successful presidential candidate, as a flying cat-woman “lighting up all Taiwan”. The video was not in Mandarin, the island’s official language, but in Taiwanese, once scorned by the KMT.

Some Taiwanese idealise Japanese rule. Lee Teng-hui, a former president, even said that during the second world war Japan—not China—was Taiwan’s “motherland”. Now Hello Kitty allows the Taiwanese to be Taiwanese by outdoing the Japanese at being Japanese.