How the creator of Hello Kitty has fans in a tizzy but no less enthused

Is a ‘personified cat’ ultimately a cat or a person? A cat with personable traits or a person with catty traits? And what makes a cat a cat and a person a person, and what degree of mixing makes them personifications of either or both? Pointy ears, whiskers, round eyes and a propensity to meow could, after all, also describe a person, that too from anywhere — including London, where Japanese kawaii, or cuteness, purveyor Sanrio has situated its ‘Hello Kitty’ character. Maybe Sanrio is implying that by first asserting that the bewhiskered (but tailless) ‘Hello Kitty’ is “a cheerful and happy little girl with a heart of gold” — the daughter Londoners George and Mary White, with a twin sister called Mimmy and a pet cat of her own called Charmmy Kitty — and then saying elsewhere that “It’s going too far to say that Hello Kitty is not a cat. Hello Kitty is a personification of a cat.”

Familiar as many are with cat-toons Felix, Topcat and Tom —whose intrinsic felineness is quite unmistakable — most people (and a few concerned cats) remain none the wiser about what ‘Hello Kitty’ is, except the Japanese, who are used to feline-human crossovers thanks to anime and manga. Had Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s scheduled visit to Japan this week not been so jam-packed, he could perhaps have set some time aside to decode this Japanese mystery.