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

What Does Hello Kitty Read When the News Is Bad? Hello Kitty "Bad News": A 1980s Handkerchief That Still Carries Her Very First Props

Size: 11 1/4"

Look closely at the "Bad news" corner. Kitty is reading a newspaper, and on either side of her sit a milk bottle marked M and a goldfish bowl. Those two props go back to the very first Hello Kitty product ever sold, a small clear vinyl coin purse released in Japan in March 1975 that showed her sitting between a bottle of milk and a fish in a bowl. Years later the same little milk bottle and fishbowl were still keeping her company on everyday cotton goods like this handkerchief.

The Handkerchief

A cotton cloth napkin and handkerchief, approximately 11 1/4" square, white with a blue border stitched all the way around. Each of the four corners holds a different scene, with "Hello Kitty" in blue letters and a caption in its own color:

• Drawing (green caption): Kitty in a green outfit at a yellow easel, with red and orange paint bottles beside her.
• Presents (orange caption): an orange gift tied with green ribbon, a yellow box tied in blue, and a yellow envelope lettered MINNY and sealed with a blue heart.
• Bad news (red caption): Kitty squinting over a yellow paper headlined "bad news," between the M milk bottle and a red goldfish bowl.
• Ice cream (yellow caption): Kitty in yellow holding a striped treat, with a yellow chick at her side and a sundae in a red footed dish.

Her bow is blue in all four scenes, matched to the border; Sanrio's own character profile gives Kitty a red bow and her twin sister Mimmy a yellow one. The design is printed on one side, so the corners show through faintly in reverse on the back. Besides the one opened for photos, these napkins were bundled in original packaging and stored away for decades, unused; colors are bright and the cotton is crisp.

Sanrio: From a Silk Shop to "Social Communication"

Shintaro Tsuji founded the Yamanashi Silk Center Company in 1960 and renamed it Sanrio in 1973, from the Spanish words for saint and river. His insight was that people wanted cute designs on small, everyday things they could give one another, a philosophy the company calls social communication. When Sanrio needed a name for its new character, Tsuji chose "Hello" to fit that motto, after considering "Hi Kitty."

Kitty White, of the London Suburbs

Designer Yuko Shimizu created Hello Kitty in 1974. Her first name comes from Kitty, the cat Alice plays with in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass. Sanrio's official story makes her Kitty White, born November 1 in the suburbs of London, five apples tall and three apples heavy, with a twin sister named Mimmy. The British background was chosen because Britain was fashionable with young people in 1970s Japan. After Shimizu left, Setsuko Yonekubo led the design from 1976, and in 1980 Yuko Yamaguchi became Hello Kitty's lead designer, the decade this handkerchief comes from.

Legends, Rumors and the Great "Not a Cat" Uproar

The missing mouth. The most repeated question about Kitty has several official answers. Sanrio says she has no mouth so that people can project their own feelings onto her, and that she speaks from the heart rather than in any one language. Yamaguchi once said the mouth is simply hidden in her fur.

She is not a cat. In August 2014 anthropologist Christine Yano, of the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, Hawaii, was preparing a Hello Kitty exhibition for the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, California, and called Kitty "Sanrio's cat" in her script. Sanrio corrected her: Hello Kitty is a little girl and a friend, and she is never shown on all fours. The remark went around the world in a day, and Sanrio followed up that Kitty is a personification of a cat, which settled nothing.

The purse in the vault. The story goes that only one of the original 1975 coin purses survives, locked away at Sanrio's headquarters in Japan.

Why handkerchiefs are square. Legend has it that Marie Antoinette preferred square handkerchiefs, and that on June 2, 1785, Louis XVI decreed that the length of handkerchiefs shall equal their width throughout his kingdom. Some tellings put the royal size at around eleven and a half inches, within a hair of this one.

Why a Handkerchief: Japan's Hanky Habit

In Japan the handkerchief, hankachi, is daily equipment rather than an heirloom. Many public restrooms, particularly in older buildings, have no paper towels or dryers, so people carry their own square of cloth to dry their hands, blot sweat in humid summers, or spread across the lap for a boxed lunch. In the early twentieth century carrying one was a mark of good manners, especially for girls, and it became part of school etiquette. Character handkerchiefs are still a standard small gift and souvenir, which is exactly the kind of everyday present Sanrio built its business on.

What Kitty Changed

The little 1975 purse became Sanrio's surprise best seller that year, and Kitty became the character that carried Japanese kawaii goods around the world. UNICEF named her a children's ambassador to the United States in 1983 and to Japan in 1994, and in 2004 gave her the title UNICEF Special Friend of Children. By the late 1990s Hello Kitty had become a fashion statement for grown-ups too, taken up by celebrities such as Mariah Carey. She marked her 50th anniversary in 2024, and a Warner Bros. and New Line animated feature is scheduled for July 21, 2028. Pieces from her first decade under Yamaguchi, printed with the original props, are the part of that history collectors now hunt.

Display and Use

At 11 1/4" square it frames neatly in a standard shadow box, drapes over a shelf edge in a Sanrio display, or folds into a vintage lunchbox as a backdrop. It is cotton, so it can also simply be used the way it was meant to be.

🎀 About these

The supply is finite - once these last unused 1980s Sanrio handkerchiefs are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.