"Hello Kitty's Kawaii Paradise" is the first theme park dedicated to Hello Kitty, a Japanese popular cat character, opened in the Odaiba district here on Friday, China's Xinhua news agency reported.

"Hello Kitty's Kawaii Paradise" - "kawaii" is Japanese for "cute" - is launched inside the vast Venus Fort shopping complex in Odaiba, which is undergoing rapid development as it looks to attract both Japanese tourists and travellers from overseas.

The indoor amusement park will have a floor space of more than 890 square metres on the first floor of Venus Fort and PleasureCast Co., the subsidiary of Namco Ltd. that will operate the facility, is expecting more than 700,000 visitors in its first year alone.

There are two theme parks, Harmonyland and Sanrio Puroland, run by the company that feature Hello Kitty, but this is the first dedicated to the cute cat....

http://www.bernama.c...x.php?id=537672

The headline reads like the park is in China, but the article reads like it is in Japan (as reported by the Chinese news agency...)

Hopefully, it is located in Japan since a few parks in China have shown little regard for appropriate licensing & the IP of other companies...

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/disney/chinas-unlicensed-knock-off-of-disneyland.html

<EDIT>

...yeah, looks like Odaiba is an area in Tokyo:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odaiba

I've never understood the appeal of Hello Kitty. But then I was never a 5 year old girl either...

For what it's worth...the post headline was changed from "China" to "Japan" after my original post... (Hmmm...'Terpie--don't you usually call out other people for changing the content of a post after the fact and not mentioning it? )

XGatorHead-- I'm with you on that one! Although, a friend of mine just got back from a long term work assignment in Tokyo, and he said he was amazed at how Hello Kitty was everywhere in Japan. Not just with little girls...but adult men carrying Hello Kitty backpacks! (Yeah, I know...hard for me to believe too )

I sometimes carry a Disney Princess backpack, but that's only when I pick GatorGirl up from school and she hands me her backpack!