This week's collection of whimsical and curious stories was originally supposed to shed some light on the Schleswig-Holstein question (a set of curious diplomatic issues including everything you love about the 19th century such as problematic succession laws, nation states, and of course Otto von Bismarck) but then your author stumbled upon an article about Japanese mascots (and also Finnish mythology) late on Saturday night - and so here we go. We will have a look at the whimsical world of Japanese mascots and leave 19th-century diplomacy and Finnish sagas to another day.
In today's Japan, seemingly every company, government, and cause relies on a cartoonish, hilarious, and adorable mascot to represent them. The rise of the yuru-chara (as they are known in Japanese) has been linked to the success of Hikonyan (seen below), a Samurai-like mascot created in 2007 celebrating the 400th anniversary of the founding of Hikone castle and credited with causing a significant increase in tourism and especially merchandise sale.
Hikonyan - mascot of Hikone castle
14 years later, Japan's thousands of mascots are big business and bring a touch of whimsy to everything ranging from the serious to the mundane. Even COVID-19 has inspired new mascots: there is Quaran, the quarantine fairy, Shinjuku's, a hand-washing superhero, and Koronon, the anti-coronavirus cat.
Quaran, the quarantine fairy
Some other curious examples include Anebon (a temple bell who strikes himself with a squeaky rubber mallet), Jijomaru (a disaster prevention chihuahua), Shachicoff (a pro-wrestling orca who looks like a turquoise shark), Chicchai Ossan (a balding middle-aged man with a beer belly who is the popular, unofficial mascot of Amagasaki City), Eppy (an epistylis microorganism representing the Sewer Science Museum in Aichi), the unfortunately named Fukuppy (mascot of Fukushima Industries*), and Kanitori-kun (a three-eyed mix of a bird and a king crab who is the mascot of Kaike Grand Hotel in Tottori - see below)
Kanitori-kun - the mascot of Kaike Grand Hotel
By far the strangest of all these creatures must surely be G-nenjer, a potato ninja with a screaming mouth and googly eyes who seems entirely capable of spawning a new vegetable-themed genre of horror movies
G-nenjer
However, the great popularity of mascots has also caused some fierce and unseemly competition. The annual and popular mascot competition of Iwate Prefecture was discontinued in 2020 citing over-zealous tactics by some of the competitors. You see, winning this prestigious competition can propel a mascot out of obscurity and be a serious boost to the fortunes of its owner. Products bearing the image of Kumamon, a black bear from the south-western prefecture of Kumamoto and winner of the inaugural competition, are now generating more than $1bn in sales annually. Since votes for the most popular mascot can be cast online, the Omuta city government created thousands of email IDs for its workers to cast online ballots for its entrant (there is a limit of one vote per email ID per day). Municipal workers were also tasked by Fukuoka Prefecture and Mie Prefecture to vote multiple times for their mascots coming close to winning the competition in 2018 (and being subsequently disqualified).
For all those who cannot get enough of mascots, here is an excellent twitter feed devoted to the sillier ones (Link)
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*Not related to the Fukushima Prefecture and the nuclear power plant disaster. Fukushima Industries is a manufacturer of industrial cooling systems based in Osaka and only shares the name with the Prefecture hit by a large tsunami in 2011.
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