It all started with Hello Kitty

For an expressionless little white fur ball, Japan's Hello Kitty puts up a mean fight in the cultural jungle.

Once the defining measure of girls' craze for cuteness within Japan, the pop feline today can be found staring out from the handbags, sweat shirts, notebooks, and now debit cards of children and night-clubbing art students alike around the globe. And as she marks her 30th anniversary, Hello Kitty's combination of Mona Lisa mystery and saccharine sweetness has become an unlikely symbol of the shift in Japan's global reach from cars to culture.

Hello Kitty - which earns $1 billion a year for its owner, Sanrio Co. - isn't alone among Japanese cultural creations in finding an audience in the West. In recent years, Japanese characters such as Pokémon and the fantasy series Yu-Gi-Oh! have become staples of children's entertainment. Japanese horror films - think "The Ring" - are international hits. Anime - animated flicks - and "manga" comics have made inroads, appealing to global audiences with their Dickensian plots and appealing style.

Nobuyoshi Kurita, a professor of sociology and pop media at Musashi University in Tokyo, says the newfound yen for all things Japanese underscores a global move from a materialistic to an information culture. "Stereos and cars used to be considered symbolic of modern Japanese culture," he says. "But now it's animation."