What's This Hello Kitty Craze?

"What's this Hello Kitty craze?"

Seeing this craze first hand in Taiwan made me go bonkers. They say God is everywhere, but in Taiwan, Hello Kitty is everywhere! The good thing is that you can see Hello Kitty, but you can't see God!

All through our stay in Taipei and travels through Hualien, Taichung and Kaohsiung, we had that creepy feeling that Hello Kitty was following us.

Now Hello Kitty was created as a comic character by a Japanese lady, Yuko Shimizu, for her employer, Sanrio in 1974. Immediately afterwards, Sanrio's sales - stationary and other kids' products skyrocketed. 

And then this phenomena spread through East Asia to Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea and later to South East Asia. But its popularity in Taiwan was astounding. There are Hello Kitty cafes, Hello Kitty sweets, Hello Kitty debit cards and lots more. This phenomenon prompted the Chinese University of Hong Kong to research it.

My first introduction to Hello Kitty happened on the aviation spotters website, Airliners.net - it was there, in the mid-2000s I discovered that EVA Air had Hello Kitty stickers on their jets.  

And today, I discovered that EVA Air also maintains a Hello Kitty microsite...

But yesterday when we flew EVA Air to Incheon, the inflight reading material was full of Hello Kitty, too much of a cuteness overload!

There she is - Hello Kitty peering at me from EVA Air's duty free catalogue...

Hello Kitty toys...

Hello Kitty logojets...

Some more Hello Kitty dolls...

Models of Hello Kitty jets...

And if you thought this was too much, you won't believe this! Taiwan even has a Hello Kitty themed maternity hospital - how bizarre does this phenomena get? Perhaps there is a case for a sociological study on it...