The company that creates Hello Kitty made a surprising revelation during the iconic character’s 50th anniversary, leaving some fans confused and in denial afterwards.
Hello Kitty was created by the Japanese entertainment company Sanrio in 1974. “Hello Kitty is not a cat,” Jill Koch, Sanrio’s senior vice president of marketing and brand management, said on Thursday’s Today show, “She’s actually a little girl.”
Koch later said on TV that Hello Kitty, who weighed three apples and was five apples tall, grew up outside London with her twin sister Mimmy, her parents and the family cat Charmmy Kitty.
According to the Sanrio website, Hello Kitty’s hobbies are “baking cookies and making new friends.”
USA TODAY reached out to Sanrio on Friday but did not receive a response.
Here’s some background on Hello Kitty and the reaction of fans who aren’t too keen on the idea of the character being a girl.
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Who is Hello Kitty?
Yuko Shimizu, the Sanrio employee who created Hello Kitty, told the BBC that the character’s design was “a white cat with a red ribbon in its hair”, adding that the inspiration for the character came from her own childhood.
“When I was a child, my father gave me a little white kitten as a birthday present,” Shimizu told British media.
Sanrio told the BBC that Hello Kitty’s real name is Kitty White and that she was born in Britain. The company later confirmed that the character is indeed an eight-year-old girl.
According to the BBC, Shimizu left Sanrio at the age of 27, two years after creating Hello Kitty.
“Hello Kitty is a cat in my eyes.”
Hello Kitty fans have expressed concern about the recent news, with many not accepting Koch’s explanation.
An X user named Carmen shared a post on Friday saying, “To me, Hello Kitty is a cat.”
Another X user, atta (furnal equinox), questioned Hello Kitty’s London upbringing, saying, “Isn’t Hello Kitty Japanese?”
Emily Lazar posted that she needed “answers” from X, wondering if Hello Kitty had been “larping this whole time?” According to the FBI, larping is when “participants assume the role of characters in a fictional environment and interact with each other in real time.”
Lazar was responding to another user who said in X’s post that Hello Kitty is a “girl cat and I’ll never change my mind,” to which Lazar replied, “Yeah, for the sake of my sanity and childhood I’m sticking with it lol.”
Dazeinthegarden posted to X, “Hello Kitty is definitely a cat and has a pet cat. They exist in the same universe, just like Mickey has Pluto and Goofy.”
