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In the real world, Hello Kitty was born in Japan in 1974, when a young Tokyo-based company called Sanrio asked designer Ikuko Shimizu to invent a cartoon animal who would appeal to the preteen girl in everyone. Sanrio, which already had a bear and a dog (and, curiously, a strawberry) in its growing cast of characters, needed the new critter to decorate a plastic coin purse it was planning to produce.

Shimizu “wanted to create a cat that was kittenish for sure,” author Marie Y. Moss writes in the book Hello Kitty Hello Everything, “but one that would certainly prefer a catnap to catnip.” And so the designer drafted a white cat wearing a red bow and blue overalls. On November 1, 1974, Sanrio introduced the first picture of Hello Kitty. She sat between a bottle of milk and a pet goldfish, and had turned her head sideways to face her newfound friends. In a word: cute. Or more accurately,kawaii, the distinctively Japanese breed of cuteness that injects adorable attributes into all aspects of the country’s consumer culture.