Fans of Hello Kitty, a popular Japanese cartoon character, yesterday morning lined up outside the Taipei Beimen Post Office, as Chunaghwa Post and Sanrio Co launched a series of cobrand products featuring the cartoon cat.
Hello Kitty is a global superstar, whose popularity has already lasted for 45 years, Chunghwa Post chairman Wu Hung-mo (吳宏謀) said at the product launch ceremony, marking the company’s first cooperation with the Tokyo-based firm that designs, licenses and manufactures products featuring popular Japanese cartoon characters.
The secret to the character’s enduring popularity is that Sanrio continues to design products that keep up with the times, Wu said.
Photo courtesy of Chunghwa Post
Some who fell in love with Hello Kitty 45 years ago are now grandparents and share their passion with their grandchildren, he added.
Hello Kitty does not have a mouth, so she does not have to wear a mask during the COVID-19 pandemic, Wu said, adding that the cartoon character helps keep people happy and healthy.
Chunghwa Post and Sanrio have worked together to develop nine Hello Kitty-themed products that people can send as gifts to their relatives during the holiday season, Wu said.
The products include greeting cards, tote bags, thermo bottles, a cooking pot, sticky notes and tape.
“We hope that the products will draw younger people to our services, which few of them purchase nowadays,” he said.
Some Hello Kitty fans said that they started lining up outside Taiwan’s oldest post office before 6am to buy the entire set.
The company has only 888 sets available for sale, Wu said, adding that it hopes that the products would generate NT$35 million (US$1.23 million) in revenue.
More Hello Kitty merchandise would be introduced in the next few years, he said.
People can place orders for the Hello Kitty products at post offices, the Postal Museum in Taipei and on the company’s online stamp shop at stamp.post.gov.tw.
A small number of Taiwanese this year lost their citizenship rights after traveling in China and obtaining a one-time Chinese passport to cross the border into Russia, a source said today. The people signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of neighboring Russia with companies claiming they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, the source said on condition of anonymity. The travelers were actually issued one-time-use Chinese passports, they said. Taiwanese are prohibited from holding a Chinese passport or household registration. If found to have a Chinese ID, they may lose their resident status under Article 9-1
Taiwanese were praised for their composure after a video filmed by Taiwanese tourists capturing the moment a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Japan’s Aomori Prefecture went viral on social media. The video shows a hotel room shaking violently amid Monday’s quake, with objects falling to the ground. Two Taiwanese began filming with their mobile phones, while two others held the sides of a TV to prevent it from falling. When the shaking stopped, the pair calmly took down the TV and laid it flat on a tatami mat, the video shows. The video also captured the group talking about the safety of their companions bathing
PROBLEMATIC APP: Citing more than 1,000 fraud cases, the government is taking the app down for a year, but opposition voices are calling it censorship Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday decried a government plan to suspend access to Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu (小紅書) for one year as censorship, while the Presidential Office backed the plan. The Ministry of the Interior on Thursday cited security risks and accusations that the Instagram-like app, known as Rednote in English, had figured in more than 1,700 fraud cases since last year. The company, which has about 3 million users in Taiwan, has not yet responded to requests for comment. “Many people online are already asking ‘How to climb over the firewall to access Xiaohongshu,’” Cheng posted on
A classified Pentagon-produced, multiyear assessment — the Overmatch brief — highlighted unreported Chinese capabilities to destroy US military assets and identified US supply chain choke points, painting a disturbing picture of waning US military might, a New York Times editorial published on Monday said. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s comments in November last year that “we lose every time” in Pentagon-conducted war games pitting the US against China further highlighted the uncertainty about the US’ capability to intervene in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “It shows the Pentagon’s overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically
RSS