Local Hello Kitty Museum

Floating above an abstract map of Japan, Naoya Iwama sets up 62 local versions of Hello Kitty to represent the 62 Fukoku’s branch offices in Japan.

Naoya Iwama designed an exhibition hall for Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance Company featuring the image character of the company, Hello Kitty.

The hall – located at the first-floor entrance hall of the Fukoku Seimei Building in Uchisaiwai-cho, Tokyo – is devoted to the company’s original local versions of Hello Kitty (Local Kitty) from the 62 branch offices in Japan, which combine specialties, history, or persons from each area.

An abstract map of Japan is drawn on the floor, above which the Local Kitties with regional characteristics are floated, resulting in an expression of the Japanese islands utilizing the entire space. It is a composition that enables visitors to understand the nationwide network of the company by going around the hall as if travelling throughout Japan, and to experience Japanese traditions and regional characteristics through the unique Local Kitties.

The entrance is decorated with a Noren (short split curtain) with family emblem-like Hello Kitty, as a symbol of this exhibition that integrates Japanese tradition and pop culture. The Noren is a border between the everyday office space and the unusual exhibition hall. Excessive interior decorations are eliminated as much as possible, in order to translate the simple and constitutive design of Hello Kitty into a space. The space consists of a white floor, white frames suspended from beams, the map of Japan that is drawn with occasionally narrowed or widened black lines that remind us of the outline of Hello Kitty, and the floating visual exhibition of the Local Kittys from the branch offices. By lowering the frames to eye level, the enclosed area seems like an exhibition room. At the same time, the areas outside the frames serves as traffic lines. These ultimately express a loosely-connected Japan as a whole.