The flamboyant designer of Japanese cartoon and global mega-brand Hello Kitty defended the cute cat against new rivals yesterday as the character prepares to celebrate her 40th birthday.
Speaking on the sidelines of the Hong Kong Book Fair, Yuko Yamaguchi took the concept of life imitating art to another level, wearing a Kitty-style strawberry dress with dyed auburn hair piled into two buns topped with a red ribbon — the cat’s signature accessory.
As Kitty enters her next decade, she faces increasing competition from more cutting-edge cartoons like Brown and Cony, the bear and rabbit mascots of Tokyo-based messaging app Line, which has taken Asia by storm in recent months. However, Yamaguchi insisted Kitty would cope with growing older in a digital age.
Photo: AFP
“There are new cartoon characters that are coming out daily... [but] I think Hello Kitty is the only one that can adapt to the changes in the world,” Yamaguchi said.
The moon-faced mouthless white cat first appeared in 1974 on a coin purse in Japan and has since built up a worldwide fan base, appearing on everything from handbags to sex toys.
Her image is licensed by Japanese company Sanrio, which says on its Web site that it makes more than US$5 billion in retail sales each year. Hello Kitty is its flagship brand. Yamaguchi, who was at the Hong Kong fair to tie in with its new Japan Pavilion, has been the lead designer of Hello Kitty since 1980 and promotes herself as the character’s best friend.
“She is very motivated and open and wants to face the future,” she says of the character.
There are plenty of detractors of Hello Kitty’s sweetness — entire blogs are dedicated to tearing down the cute icon, with online spoofs depicting her as a horror movie character.
However, Yamaguchi said her appeal can endure.
“There are already three generations of fans that like Hello Kitty, so I hope that there will be more fans like that in the future, like people in a family loving Hello Kitty together,” she said.
The main Hello Kitty 40th birthday celebrations will take place later this year, including the first ever fan convention, which is to be hosted in Los Angeles at the end of October.
Taiwanese firms have increased investment in the Philippines in recent years as Manila’s ties with Washington deepen and global supply chains continue to shift away from China, an expert at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. The Philippines had not been among Taiwanese investors’ top choices in Southeast Asia, CIER Taiwan ASEAN Studies Center director Kristy Hsu (徐遵慈) said at a seminar in Taipei. However, Taiwan’s investment in the country has grown significantly since the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching US $257 million last year, a high in recent years, she said. Although Taiwan’s total investment in the Philippines still lags
Intel Corp regards Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) as a longstanding partner, as the US chipmaker would continue outsourcing production of advanced chips to TSMC, Intel chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) said yesterday. “I don’t look at people as competitors. I look at the collaboration... Nvidia is also, you know, a good friend,” Tan told a news conference following his keynote speech at the Computex trade show in Taipei. “It’s a very trusted partnership for us... We are a big, top customer for them, and we’re going to continue doing that,” he said, referring to TSMC, the world’s largest foundry
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday said it would work with US chipmaker Intel Corp to jointly develop and deploy next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and intelligent computing platforms in a move to capture booming demand for AI computing systems. Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康), said in a statement that the partnership would combine its global manufacturing scale, system integration expertise and AI data center deployment capabilities with Intel’s strengths in processor architecture, silicon technologies and software ecosystem. The companies said they plan to work on equipment used in AI data centers, including server racks powered by
Artificial intelligence (AI) agents would supplant smartphones as the center of people’s digital lives, fundamentally reshaping personal devices and driving a major computing upgrade cycle, Qualcomm Inc CEO Cristiano Amon said yesterday. In his keynote speech for this year’s Computex trade show in Taipei, Amon said that the rise of "agentic AI" — AI systems capable of reasoning, planning and carrying out tasks autonomously — would transform how people interact with technology across phones, PCs, vehicles and wearable devices. Describing the technology as the next major evolution in computing, Amon said that "2026 is the year of agents.” For decades, smartphones have sat
RSS