Vintage 1980s Hello Kitty Cotton Napkin Handkerchief 🎀 Pink - Sanrio Japan NOS

Size: 11.25 inches ~

A pile of presents, a sundae with a cherry on top, a picture on the easel and one very bad morning with the newspaper: Hello Kitty lives a whole day in the four corners of this pink-bordered 1980s handkerchief. In Japan, where children are still asked to carry a hanky to school every day, this is exactly the kind a Hello Kitty fan wanted in her pocket.

Vintage 1980s Hello Kitty cotton napkin handkerchief with a pink border, new old stock. Size: 11 1/4" square.

The Four Corners

The handkerchief is light cotton, cream-white with a bright pink border finished in a narrow stitched edge. Each corner holds one little scene, turned on the diagonal to face outward, so whichever corner ends up on top when it is folded in quarters shows a full picture. HELLO KITTY runs under every scene in rounded pink letters, and a caption below it names what she is up to.

• Presents, in orange: Kitty, her bow printed pink, wraps both arms around an orange box tied in green ribbon, with a blue box and pink bow beside her and a blue envelope sealed with a pink heart.
• Ice cream, in blue: Kitty in a blue outfit holds a cone with a red scoop, a small blue bird hops up on one side, and a blue sundae with a cherry waits in a red footed dish on the other.
• Drawing, in green: Kitty in green works with a crayon at a blue drawing board set on a pink easel, red and orange crayons lined up beside her.
• Bad news, in red: eyes shut tight, Kitty holds up a blue paper headlined "bad news" in letters of every color, between a milk bottle marked with a pink M and a red jar marked with a pink fish.

The printing is on one side only; turned over, the scenes show through the fine cotton in reverse.

Condition

New old stock. Besides the one opened for photos, these napkins were bundled in original packaging and stored away for decades. Clean cotton and bright color.

A Girl Named Kitty White

Sanrio designer Yuko Shimizu drew Hello Kitty in 1974. The name came from Lewis Carroll: early in Through the Looking-Glass, Alice plays with a cat she calls Kitty. In 1975 the character made her debut on a little vinyl coin purse sold in Japan, and in 1976 she crossed the Pacific, arriving in the United States through a Sanrio shop in San Jose, California. Setsuko Yonekubo led the design work from 1976, and Yuko Yamaguchi took charge in 1980.

Her official profile reads like a children's book. She is Kitty White, born on November 1 in the suburbs of London, England. She measures five apples tall and weighs three apples, and she shares her birthday with her identical twin, Mimmy, the sister who wears a yellow bow on her right ear.

What she is not, according to Sanrio, is a cat. When University of Hawaii anthropologist Christine Yano wrote "Sanrio's cat" into the script for a 2014 Hello Kitty exhibition at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, the company asked for a correction: Kitty is a little girl. She is never pictured on all fours, and her pet is a cat named Charmmy Kitty. The news traveled around the world in a matter of days.

How a Silk Company Found Its Cat

Sanrio began on August 10, 1960, when Shintaro Tsuji opened the Yamanashi Silk Company with one million yen. Two years later he tried rubber sandals with flowers painted on them, watched them outsell plain ones, and started hiring cartoonists to put cute characters on his products. In 1973 the company renamed itself Sanrio; Tsuji said the name was an alternate reading of Yamanashi, "Sanri," plus the "o" of an excited cry. To stop paying licensing fees on borrowed characters like Snoopy, Sanrio built its own studio, which produced Coro Chan in 1973 and Hello Kitty the following year. Tsuji stayed at the head of the company for sixty years. In June 2020 he passed it to his 31-year-old grandson, Tomokuni Tsuji, then the youngest head of a listed company in Japan.

The Handkerchief Country

Few places take the pocket handkerchief as seriously as Japan. Plenty of public restrooms there offer no paper towels and no dryer, so drying your hands means bringing your own cloth, and Japanese public schools have children carry a handkerchief or a small towel every day. A hanky is for hands, for the sticky heat of summer and for a tear at a sad movie; blowing your nose into one is bad manners. Small, cheerful and useful, a character handkerchief is the sort of little gift Sanrio's business was founded on.

A Queen's Square

The country has an annual Handkerchief Day, too. The Japan Handkerchief Federation chose November 3 in 1983: the Culture Day holiday, and the day after Marie Antoinette's birthday. The legend behind the choice is a good one. Handkerchiefs in 18th-century France came round, oblong and every shape between, and the story goes that the queen found the muddle so irritating that she had Louis XVI sign a decree in 1785 ordering that "the length of handkerchiefs shall equal their width throughout my entire kingdom." True or not, square is how handkerchiefs have been made ever since, and this 11 1/4" hanky follows the queen's rule to the inch.

Kitten Writing and the Kawaii Boom

Hello Kitty was born into a craze. During the 1970s teenage girls in Japan took up a big, round, childish style of handwriting, drawn with fine mechanical pencils and scattered with hearts, stars, smiling faces and Latin letters. People called it marui ji, "round writing," koneko ji, "kitten writing," and burikko ji, "fake-child writing," and many schools banned it outright. Kazuma Yamane researched it as "Anomalous Female Teenage Handwriting" between 1984 and 1986, and Sharon Kinsella, who studied Japanese cute culture, found that the girls had invented it on their own as an underground trend rather than copying manga. By the 1980s the style had moved onto magazines, comics and packaging. Hello Kitty was an immediate success in that cute-crazy market and became the model for the kawaii merchandise business that grew out of it, which is why a Japanese character hanky of the decade speaks in cheerful little English captions like Presents, Ice cream, Drawing and Bad news.

Fifty Years On

UNICEF made Hello Kitty its children's ambassador to the United States in 1983, and Japan appointed her an ambassador for tourism in 2008. Retail sales of Hello Kitty goods reached about $8 billion in 2013. More than 25,000 fans came to the first Hello Kitty Con in Los Angeles in 2014, the Hello Kitty Stratocaster found its way into the hands of Krist Novoselic, Courtney Love, Dave Navarro and Lisa Loeb, and Avril Lavigne put out a single named after her in 2013. Kitty reached her 50th anniversary in 2024. Next comes the movie: Warner Bros. Pictures Animation and New Line Cinema have set July 21, 2028, for a Hello Kitty feature directed by Leo Matsuda. Producer Beau Flynn spent close to ten years persuading Shintaro Tsuji, and it is the first time Sanrio has ever let Hello Kitty go to the movies.

Questions People Ask

What size is this Hello Kitty handkerchief?

11 1/4" square, with a pink border.

Is it new?

It is new old stock, kept in its original packaging for decades; one was taken out to photograph.

Can it be used as a napkin?

Yes. It is sold as a napkin handkerchief, and the soft cotton works for either job, or for framing.

What are the four scenes?

One per corner: Kitty with her gifts, with a sundae, at the easel, and hiding from the headline, each captioned under the words Hello Kitty.

Who created Hello Kitty?

Yuko Shimizu designed her for Sanrio in 1974, and Yuko Yamaguchi has led her design since 1980.

Why is Handkerchief Day on November 3?

It sits beside Marie Antoinette's birthday, honoring the legend that she had handkerchiefs made square.