Japan's pop culture exports: It all started with Hello Kitty

Japanese animation has also built on a key advantage: giving its recent characters far less of an identifiable national character than, say, those generated during animation's 1950s golden age in the United States. "The lack of national character in the settings and characters that appear in anime enable it to be well received in Western countries," says Kurita.

For many, their first taste of Japanese anime came with the groundbreaking dystopian 1988 classic "Akira," by Katsuhiro Otomo. While the early fans of manga and anime were generally science-fiction aficionados or early adapters of Internet culture, the word has now spread to the degree that "anime is poised to go, perhaps, really mainstream" in the West, Napier says.

Anime received a significant boost in profile when Hayao Miyazaki's "Spirited Away" won the First Prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 2002 and the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, a distinction normally given to a Disney film. Anime has also featured in highly popular US productions, with sequences in Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill" and Linkin Park's video for "Breaking the Habit," which won the MTV Viewer's Choice Award this year.

One little-noticed characteristic of Japanese pop culture is the social message sometimes involved. Akira, produced at the height of Japan's economic bubble, was interpreted as a polemic against the destruction of social values and the enslavement of man to technology.

Many of Miyazaki's films have an environmental theme, and portray the damage caused by industrialized societies on the natural world. The popularity of one of his early films depicting cute yet mysteriously powerful forest-dwelling creatures named "Totoro" helped reinvigorate the environmental movement in Japan, according to Professor Kurita.

The vacuous Hello Kitty even has a social conscience - despite criticism that she encourages submissiveness and infantilism in women. She was recently named "UNICEF Special Friend of Children" in the US to help raise funds for girls' education, while in Japan she is associated with blood-donation groups and fundraising for the early detection of breast cancer.

But Kitty isn't all hugs - there's also some serious money involved. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government estimates the size of Tokyo's anime industry alone at 1 trillion yen (about $9 billion).

Kurita says Kitty's original designers probably didn't realize they were creating a character that is a fortuitous match for many elements of traditional Japanese culture, including simplicity and a strange allure that invites individual interpretation. "These elements still underlie [today's] high-tech, industrial society," he says. "I think the basis of Kitty's appeal for many people is as a tonic for the weariness they feel with [that society]."

• Sanae Kawanaka contributed to this report.

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