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The history of the Hello Kitty vibrator
By Peter Payne
October 4, 2004
Sanrio is one of the top character licensors in the world, having more or less
created the business model of doing business by creating something that doesn't
really exist and licensing its use to other companies. Sanrio produces nothing
-- all their characters, like the Little Twin Star, Minna no Ta-bo, Bad
Batz-Maru, exist as legal entities and nothing more. Their most successful
character, Hello Kitty, or Kitty-chan as she's known in Japan, is now now
thirty years old.
One of the many companies that license Sanrio's characters for their products
was a Japanese company called Genyo Co. Ltd. Genyo made a wide variety of
products, from bento boxes to children's toys to chopsticks, many with the
Hello Kitty character on them. They scored big in the late 1990's with an
off-the-wall hit, a series of Hello Kitty toys which featured a different Kitty
figure from each of Japan's 47 prefectures, each representing something the
prefecture was famous for. (The figure from Gunma Prefecture, where we live,
represented a wooden kokeshi doll.)
In 1997, Genyo designed a product that would live in infamy: the Hello Kitty
vibrating shoulder massager, which really is a shoulder massager (trust us --
it says so on the package). Sanrio approved this design without batting an eye,
and the product enjoyed modest sales in toy shops and in family restaurants
like Denny's and Coco's. It wasn't until 1999 or so that people began to catch
on to the fact that the Hello Kitty massager had other potential uses, and with
amazing speed, they started popping up in adult videos in Japan. The next thing
anyone knew, they had changed into a cult adult item, sold in vending machines
in love hotels -- after all, what self-respecting man wouldn't buy his girl a
Hello Kitty vibrator when she asked him for one?
The emergence of the Hello Kitty vibrator as a cult adult item caused friction
between Sanrio and Genyo, and Sanrio ordered the company to stop making the
units. Genyo refused, since it had paid a lot of money to license Kitty for
their products. There seemed nothing Sanrio could do, since they had approved
the item for sale (see the official Sanrio sticker on the boxes). The answer
came when the Japanese tax authorities raided Genyo on suspicion of tax
evasion. It seems that some creative accounting was going on between the
president of the company, a Mr. Nakamura, his vice president, and the owner of
the factory in China where the units were made. All three were arrested, and
Sanrio had the excuse needed to yank Genyo's license. They seized the molds
used to make the vibrators and destroyed them.
And so, the sad, weird chapter of the Hello Kitty vibrator is at an end. The
last of the Kitty vibes are gone, so now what will the world do
for wacky comic -- and sexual -- relief?
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Adult
world abuzz over vibrating condom
10-4-2004
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