A University of Hawaii anthropology professor sent reverberations around the world Thursday after letting the cat out of the bag: Hello Kitty is actually a girl, not a cat.
Who knew?
Apparently very few — because the bombshell unleashed by Christine Yano went viral after it appeared in a Los Angeles Times column on Tuesday.
The revelation was picked up by media outlets across the globe and sent Hello Kitty fans into a spin on social media. An array of celebrities, Katy Perry and Josh Groban included, opined on the subject on Twitter.
Yano, a professor in the College of Social Sciences but currently a visiting professor at Harvard, is the author of "Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek Across the Pacific," a 2013 book that tracks the pop culture phenomenon all the way back to when it was created in 1974.
But it wasn’t until she was writing text for a Hello Kitty exhibition at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles that she found herself admonished by manufacturer Sanrio Corp. for describing Hello Kitty as a cat.
"I was corrected — very firmly," she told Times columnist Carolina Miranda. "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."
A Sanrio spokesperson in Los Angeles confirmed the professor’s tale Thursday, issuing the following statement: "Hello Kitty is a girl."
The company went on to describe Hello Kitty: "As tall as five apples and as heavy as three, Hello Kitty is a bright girl with a heart of gold. She loves to bake cookies and play the piano, and dreams of one day becoming a pianist or maybe even a poet. She has a gift for music and English, and a soft spot for Mama’s apple pie. Hello Kitty and her twin sister Mimmy are the best of friends."
Other revelations: Her real name is Kitty White. Her birthday is Nov. 1. A British girl, her birthplace is in suburbs of London. In addition to piano and baking, her hobbies include making pancakes, origami, foreign cultures, tennis and collecting little stars, ribbons and other "cute little things."
Yano has been researching "cute culture" in Japan ever since she began teaching a UH course on Japanese popular culture in 1998.
Her exhibit, "Hello! Exploring the Supercute World of Hello Kitty," runs in Los Angeles from October to May 2015, with plans for traveling to different museums for three to five years. There’s no word yet on whether it’s coming to Hawaii.
