for the benefit of miss lynn b.

[spatch]

From a writeup-cum-article entitled Hello Kitty Has No Mouth and She Must Scream:

In the quarter-century plus that this Feline Merchandise-ball has rolled back and forth across Japan, it's only stressed the obvious: Japanese are weird, strange people who do odd things in large groups. Hello Kitty is just an easy-to-demonstrate manifestation of that. "The universalization of cute" or "The icon-laden society of cutting-edge-japansese", the media will write, grappling for the right combination of words to describe a general trait in the Japanese Population: Adapt it, sell it, improve it, and sell it again, hopefully all within the same week.