Christine Yano​, an anthropology professor from Hawaii, did not intend to spend much of her adult life talking about a bubble-headed anthropomorphised cat. I mean, who would? After the age of nine, most of us abandon our Hello Kitty lunch box. 

But Hello Kitty's guileless charms found a way. 

Dr Yano's accidental obsession with the cartoon cat has produced a book, Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty's Trek Across the Pacific, spawned from a jokey lecture she gave on Japanese pop culture in 1998. 

"The idea of me writing the book was: I've got to get this cat off my back! That was my intention," she says.

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Kitty is just so cute. Cute and mute. She's a cypher, a logo: and yet magically so broad in her appeal that she has become a carrier for and a manifestation of Japanese soft power throughout East Asia and beyond, Yano says. She's the globally recognised ambassador for Japan's cute or "kawaii" culture. 

"It starts with a very, very clever design," says Yano, of the cartoon cat's extraordinary appeal. "It is designed with abstraction, a certain amount of colour, a certain spareness – in that spareness, in what people have called her blankness, you're able to fill in. She's always different, and always the same."

You may be surprised, as Yano was, to learn that Hello Kitty has an involved backstory, lovingly embroidered by her creator-designers at Sanrio: she is not a cat but actually a little English "girl" called Kitty White who lives near London, with a pet cat called Charmmy Kitty. Over the years Kitty has featured on more products than perhaps any character ever, and pulled off more costume changes than Madonna: punk kitty, hipster kitty, kamikaze kitty. Yes, kamikaze kitty, in a cute little camo-coloured Mitsubishi Zero. Aww!

It would be going too far to suggest any military-industrial collaboration between the Japanese government and Sanrio. Would it?

"I don't know that Sanrio would ever admit to that notion of rehabilitating Japan's postwar image," said Yano, "but there it is, open for that interpretation."

But the fact the Japanese government has adopted Hello Kitty as official tourism mascot for Korea and China (where there is also a Hello Kitty theme park), two neighbouring countries which suffered much under Japanese imperialism, may be no accident. She is basically the opposite of the Imperial Japanese Army.

"Hello Kitty is positioned as a symbol of innocence, in Japanese kawaii, or cute culture. She's infantilised, feminised, and adds a kind of innocence," Yano says. "That becomes really important in its marketing. We have to consider what it might mean in terms of soft power and cultural diplomacy and what that position of innocence might mean, if the suggestion is that Japan itself may occupy that kind of position - and how problematic that might be."

Soft power, like charisma, is a mysterious and logic-defying force, first defined by Joseph Nye in 1990 as a crucial part of a country's diplomatic arsenal. You can only get so far with military and economic power – look at China, powerful, increasingly rich, and not much loved by its neighbours. But if citizens of other countries are attracted to the culture and values of a country, to its national charisma, that can get you a long way, says Dr Susan Harris-Rimmer from the Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy at the ANU. "In business terms, it's like the national equivalent of goodwill. Goodwill has real value," she says. 

Hello Kitty, with her jaunty little bow and iconic bubble-head, seems almost custom-built for the Instagram age. But her fundamental design has barely changed since she first appeared in 1974. In recent years, Sanrio has worked tirelessly to spruik Kitty, a $7 billion brand, to place her in front of new generations of fans and reconnect old ones, Yano says. The world's first Kitty Con, a convention for the 26,000 people who paid to go, was held in Los Angeles last year (many took up the offer of free Hello Kitty tattoos for ticket holders); and a major exhibition to mark her 40th birthday was held at the Japanese-American National Museum in Seattle, also in 2014. Australia is not immune to Kitty's charms: Adelaide has a Sanrio-licensed Hello Kitty cafe, and now Sydney is getting its own in Chatswood, opening next month. 

Now, as Japan alarms its neighbours with a constitutional realignment away from self defence, is it really any accident that Hello Kitty is on the march again? You decide. 

Dr Yano is speaking at a Japan Foundation event "Soft Power and Cultural Diplomacy" on Tuesday, October 13.