Opinion | From Anne Frank to Hello Kitty (Published 2014)

Ahhhhh, the “cute” factor. Japan is a gentle, nonviolent country and that core cultural thread is sewn throughout eCommerce and mobile communication.

Japan had something different to offer: “Asia for the Asiatics.” That slogan may sound banal today, but for a region long colonized, it was a powerful, revolutionary idea. Even Romulo conceded that it was “morally unassailable.

As ambassadors of aloha, Hawaiian women have been susceptible to the eroticization of their bodies and the insistent commodification of their aloha.

And they were different: they were worse. The tragedies of the Holocaust are endless, but one stands out among them in the historical record. As the Jews were being culled as casually as a virus-infected stock of fowl, they comforted themselves with the thought that their brothers outside of Europe and the Good Samaritans of the nations, particular

whether it was a Nazi collaborator serving as the paper’s Berlin bureau chief at the most sensitive moment in modern history, a communist propagandist helping to midwife American recognition of the Soviet Union, the creation of a jihadist boy-martyr almost out of thin air, the cover-up of radiation sickness resulting from the use of nuclear weapons

Commodified Hawaiian culture—the “luau,” the “hula girl,” and “aloha”—became part of the American vernacular and everyday life.