Apparently Hello Kitty Was Never Exactly a Cat

Like us you've probably spent your whole life thinking that Japanese cultural phenomenon Hello Kitty is just that: a cat.

And apparently we've spent our whole lives being wrong. Shamefully, shamefully wrong.

Instead of being a cat, Hello Kitty is merely the personification of a cat. A British one at that.

Sorry, the whiskers, pointed ears and the cat face must have thrown us all these years.

Credit: Sanrio

The news was uncovered by Christine R. Yano, an anthropologist from the University of Hawaii who is curating a retrospective for Hello Kitty at the Los Angeles Japanese American National Museum this coming October.

As she explained to the LA Times, in her notes for the exhibit she understandably described Hello Kitty as a cat.

I was corrected — very firmly... That's one correction Sanrio made for my script for the 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."

Kitty is actually named Kitty White and she has a full back story. She is a Scorpio. She loves apple pie. And she is the daughter of George and Mary White.

She has a twin sister. She's a perpetual third-grader. She lives outside of London. I could go on. A lot of people don't know the story and a lot don't care. But it's interesting because Hello Kitty emerged in the 1970s, when the Japanese and Japanese women were into Britain. They loved the idea of Britain. It represented the quintessential idealized childhood, almost like a white picket fence. So the biography was created exactly for the tastes of that time.

When the internet collectively screamed at this news, Sanrio Tokyo clarified things a bit, saying, "Hello Kitty was done in the motif of a cat. It's going too far to say that Hello Kitty is not a cat. Hello Kitty is a personification of a cat."

So calm down everyone, she's a cat personified as a little British girl! The tail really should have given it away.