Пенал-тубус "Hello Kitty", 21x7 см

Sanrio, the maker of the Hello Kitty line (now expanded to more than fifty cute characters), grosses more than $1 billion a year through sales and licensing. Since the 1980s, animated films have taken first and second position in domestic cinemas almost every year, leaving films with real-life adult actors dead at the box office. Today, about half of all domestic film revenues come from anime. The conquest of cute happened slowly, taking about thirty years to sweep all before it. The first step was when cute toys of the 1970s became cult objects for adult women in the 1980s; the next step was when, as Japan sank into recession in the 1990s, young male wage earners developed a taste for big-eyed cuddly creatures, and by the end of the century the conquest was near-complete. In 1999, a stuffed doll called Tare Panda with a round face, droopy eyes, and a soft body swept Japan, selling $250 million worth that year alone; most of the buyers were adult men. Takemono Katsunori, a thirty-four-year-old company worker in Tokyo, enthused, «A mere glance at it makes me melt.» Mary Roach powerfully evokes the extent to which cute has conquered: To anyone who knows Japan... the pull of the cute is a powerful and omnipresent force ...»