Hello Kitty might just be a straight rip off of Dick Bruna’s agonisingly kawaii Miffy (or Ray Goossens’ Musti depending on who you ask), but she’s just become Japan’s ambassador of tourism. We all already knew Japan was the best country in the world, but this just helps to confirm it.
You might argue that a tourism ambassador needs to be, you know, a person, but I feel their tourist industry is in much safer paws this way. Heck, I’d visit Japan on this fact alone. It comes after the success of announcing Japan’s Anime ambassador as another popular, fictional [albeit robotic] cat, Doraemon. And builds upon Hello Kitty’s already wonderful presentation on MasterCard debit cards several years back.
Their aim is to bring in 10 million tourists annually by 2010. I hope it’s a success, as we might start to see other sweet characters become ambassadors. A Hello Kitty blog will be starting in June to help build promotion. Yet sadly it’ll be in Chinese as that’s the market which Hello Kitty’s tourism arrival is targeted at. It’s funny though, seeing as Hello Kitty lives in London and all.
万歳 ハローキティ!