50 Years Later and Hello Kitty Is Still Making Us Question Reality

There are a few dark truths that I remember learning that shattered core illusions I held throughout key parts of my childhood. The members of Gorillaz aren’t based on real people. Bill Nye is apparently mean in real life. Hello Kitty is not a cat.

I remember learning about Hello Kitty’s true nature in the mid-2010s. I immediately, conveniently tossed it out of my head. It simply hurt my brain too much to process that Hello Kitty was not a kitty. She is a little girl. Hello Kitty.

Thanks to Hello Kitty’s 50th anniversary and a subsequent Today Show segment that went viral on TikTok, many people are finding out this unholy truth for the first time. Turns out, time doesn’t make everything easier. Even if you already knew about Hello Kitty being a “little girl” before.

HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE?

The revelation of Hello Kitty’s true nature was initially unveiled in 2014, when a Hello Kitty exhibition went up at Los Angeles’ Japanese American National Museum. The one correction Kitty’s parent company Sanrio sent over was that Hello Kitty is a little girl. Not a cat.

Christine R. Yano, the curator of the exhibition, relayed the reasoning Sanrio gave her to the Today Show:

Hello Kitty is not a cat. She’s a cartoon character. She is a little girl. She is a friend. But she is not a cat. She’s never depicted on all fours. She walks and sits like a two-legged creature. She does have a pet cat of her own, however, and it’s called Charmmy Kitty.

While we’re bursting illusions, Hello Kitty’s actual name is Kitty White. She’s British and has a boyfriend named Dear Daniel.

If I can play devil’s advocate for a moment, I can kind of understand Sanrio’s logic. A cat is a four-legged creature that meows and purrs. Cats don’t walk around on two legs and say human words. Notice that Sanrio doesn’t say that Kitty is human. Just “a little girl.” No species attached.

But naturally, tons of people jumped to the conclusion that Kitty was human if she was a “little girl” and not a cat. Later in 2014, Sora News 24 even called Sanrio HQ to follow up on Yano’s remarks, and the representative firmly said, “We never said she was human.”

Still, parent company or not, my entire being fundamentally disagrees with this evaluation of a character with two cat ears, whiskers, and a little pink kitty nose. By this logic, Goofy is not a dog, because Pluto is a dog. Jokes have been made for ages about how the hell it’s possible within the Disney universe to have a humanoid dog and a pet dog. But Goofy’s obviously a dog … right?

OK, I literally wrote the above sentence, “Disney’s not going around saying, ‘Goofy’s not a dog,'” and then fact-checked it to be sure. I was greeted with the news story that Goofy’s voice actor said in 2022 the verbatim sentence “Goofy is not a dog.” And corrected the reporter that Goofy nebulously “seems to be somewhere in the canine family.”

So f**k me and all childhood logic, I guess.

Finding your new favorite Sanrio character for your scarred soul

Even the Hello Kitty fan wiki lists her as a “cat.” There’s no consensus here, but by Sanrio’s logic, any of their characters who stand on two legs are likely not what they seem. Cinnamoroll, Chococat, Puchao—my whole life could be a lie.

Thankfully, there are some Sanrio characters that still follow basic reason, including my favorite one, whose official webpage clearly states that he is indeed a “cat.” Ladies and gentleman, meet Kabuki Nyantaro.

Kabuki Nyantaro is the official mascot for Ginza’s Kabuki-Za theatre—that big, white, famous one. In addition to unquestionably being a cat, he is also perfection. He’s got a little bell on his collar. He’s got an obi, like my sovereign Yamato. He is visibly fluffy as hell. His ears are two different colors. He is all.

Sanrio has over a hundred characters. In the unthinkable chance you reject Kabuki Nyantaro, there’s a lot of potential new favorites to find as you search your soul in this post-logical world where Sanrio Hello Kitty is not a kitty. Gudetama, at least, is definitely still an egg yolk.