Category: Japan Page 3 of 7

Kanagawa Mascot Gathering


Today I went to an event in sunny Atsugi City in Kanagawa Prefecture, hosted by local mascot, Ayukoro-chan, a tiny pig with a fish on her head. Most of the yuru-chara who came along were  from Kanagawa, but also there were Sanomaru (a samurai puppy with a bowl of noodles on its head, from Sano City, Saitama), Chiba-kun (a red dog in the shape of its home prefecture, Chiba), and Fukkachan (a Welsh-onion-antlered creature from Fukaya City, Saitama). Here are some of the photos I took:

Ayukoro-chan, mascot of Atsugi City and host of this event.

Fukkachan wearing a pig snout to look like Ayukoro-chan.

Chiba-kun, mascot of Chiba Prefecture

Ebinya, mascot of Ebina City

Yamaton, mascot of Yamato City

Sanomaru, of Sano City

Japanese Mascot Rave


Last month I checked out the Moshi Moshi Nippon festival, held in several locations around Shibuya and Harajuku, Tokyo. It is a fun free annual event to promote Japanese fashion, music, and arts to the world, and quite rightly I found a couple of yuruchara there.

Appearing at Harajuku’s Onden Shrine were Coroton the giant round pig (mascot of Maebashi City, Gunma Prefecture, a place known for its pork dishes) and Shimockey (an unofficial mascot for the hip Shimokitazawa area of Tokyo).


Coroton gave an charmingly clumsy dance performance at the shrine, before Shimockey arrived and spun some records on the DJ decks. Shimockey is quite an impressive DJ, and wowed the small crowd with the help 0f an exuberant, bewigged MC. Coroton stuck around to dance to the house music. This was an entertaining, silly spectacle and the highlight of the day for me.

Mito-chan’s Birthday Party

Mito-chan

Last week I paid a visit to the picturesque Kairakuen Park in Mito City, Ibaraki Prefecture. It was the birthday party of local mascot, Mito-chan, and lots of other mascots were there to celebrate. Among the characters present were the reigning Yuruchara Grand Prix champion, Unari-kun the eel/aeroplane from Narita City, and the ever-popular Hikonyan, the samurai cat from Hikone City. The highlight of the festivities was a shambolic but entertaining mascot relay race.

Here are some pictures I took at the event.

Hikonyan

Unari-kun

Coroton and Kamisukoko-kun

Poskuma

Tochimaru-kun

Tororu

Nakamaro-chan

Hinomaru-kun

Momoppi

Jyozuru-san

Atago-chan

Ibalucky

Hikonyan meets Mito-chan

Mascot relay race

Spaboon: A New Comic About Mascots

All this mascot-watching has got my creative juices flowing. Using some of my own tentative character designs, I’ve made a new satirical comic about Spaboon, a failed Japanese pharmaceutical company mascot.


Spaboon is a half-spoon, half-baboon hybrid, so when he is laid off by Epoch Pharma Corporation, his prospects are extremely limited, and he finds himself unemployed. In issue one, he falls in with a group of activists.

You can pick up issue one here: Spaboon Issue #1

Ski Resort Character Grand Prix 2017-2018


For four years running, the winter sports website Fuyusupo has held a vote to decide the nation’s favourite ski resort mascot. The results of this year’s contest were announced at a special ceremony in Makuhari Messe in Chiba Prefecture on Sunday, so I went along. The event resembled a big warehouse sale of ski gear, with a small stage for the mascot ceremony. I don’t think anybody else had come to see the mascots, but a small cluster of curious bargain-hunters eventually gathered around the stage when the announcements began.

Ticket-kun and Ponta

Out of the contest’s fifty entrants, half a dozen were in attendance, along with the website’s mascot, a ski-lift-ticket-loving dog named Ticket-kun.

The winner of the 2016-2017 Ski Resort Character Grand Prix had been a snow-covered conifer named Jukki-kun, representing Zao Onsen Resort in Yamagata. I spotted him in the audience at this year’s event, proudly showing off his trophy.

Last year’s winner, Jukki-kun

The new winners, Muhyoko-chan and Taiki-kun, with their trophy.

As it turned out, the winners of this year’s prize were also mascots from Zao Onsen (there are three). Named Taiki-kun and Muhyoko-chan, the champions were two more snow-coated trees.


In second place was a raccoon dog named Ponta, from Chausuyama Ski Resort (not to be mistaken with that other raccoon dog named Ponta, the mascot for the Ponta shopping point card.)

In third place was the unfortunately-named pig, Pork-kun, from Joetsu International Ski Area.

Pork-kun

After the voting results were revealed, the mascots played “janken” (rock, paper, scissors) with volunteers from the small crowd, and the winners got prizes. I was lucky enough to beat one of the Grand Prix victors, Taiki-kun, and I won a one-day ski-slope pass for Zao Onsen ski resort. If only I didn’t have to travel hundreds of miles to Yamagata to use it!

Searching for Kan-chan

Kan-chan

Earlier this month I managed to catch a rare appearance by Kan-chan, the notorious “enema penguin” mascot of Ichijiku Pharmaceuticals. Ichijiku manufacture fig-based laxatives and enemas, so Kan-chan was not only designed to resemble an enema, but also made in the shape and colour of a fig. The addition of eyes, a beak, and feet give Kan-chan the cute factor required of all mascots.

I had been hoping to encounter Kan-chan for months, and I had previously planned to track the strange creature down at a pharmaceuticals expo late last year, but that event was cancelled due to rain. I was delighted when I discovered that Kan-chan would be appearing once again at a special Ichijiku event held at the foot of the famous towering structure, the Tokyo Sky Tree, so I hurried along before work.

Intestinal vending machine

In addition to meeting the bizarre mascot, visitors were also able to get free gifts in plastic capsules dispensed from a vending machine designed to look like an intestine. I won an exclusive Kan-chan key-ring, which I will treasure.

Kan-chan keyring

Furusato Festival 2018

All this week, the Furusato Matsuri (home town festival) is being held in the enormous Tokyo Dome. It’s mainly an excuse to sample local delicacies from all over the country, but plenty of mascots can be seen milling around there. I went there on Sunday, and here are a few of the characters I encountered:

A melancholy duck with a leek for a tail, Gaya-chan (left) is the mascot of Koshigaya City. Tairyouhousaku-kun (right) is the Furusato Festival’s mascot.

The ubiquitous Kumamoto Prefecture mascot, Kumamon, clowns around on the stage.

Ikaaru Seijin the alien squid hails from Hakodate, Hokkaido.

Lerch-san is perhaps Japan’s tallest mascot, and promotes skiing in Niigata Prefecture. He is modeled on Theodor von Lerch, an Austro-Hungrarian soldier who introduced skiing to Japan.

Shimanekko is a cat with a shrine roof for a hat, and the mascot of Shimane Prefecture.

Kii-chan, the mascot of Wakayama, is excited about 2018 (it’s the year of the dog).

Potato-headed Hinojaga-kun, from Tokyo’s Hinohara Village, pretends to give a speech.

CHI-BA+KUN, a dog in the shape of the outline of Chiba Prefecture, promotes the Aqua Line Marathon to be held later this year.

Public-Spirited Japanese Mascots Shovel Snow

When it snows in Japan, the local mascots can sometimes be seen supporting their communities by helping to clear the snow from roads and pathways. Perhaps this is because the costumes are the warmest clothes available. Here are a selection of cute characters shifting snow.

1. Yabee Bear
2. Otocky

3 . Cup Noodle

4. Kumamon

5. Happy-Ryu

6. Gensan

7. Togoshi Ginjiro

8. Jigen-kun and Shironyan

9. Hikonyan

10. Koakkuma

Japanese Mascots: The Year in Review 2017

2017 was an eventful year for mascots in Japan. Let’s look back at some of the highlights.

Chiba Lotte Marines’ Mysterious Fish

This spring, the Chiba Lotte Marines baseball team introduced a highly original new mascot to the world. Surely the first mascot to evolve before the audience’s eyes, The “Mysterious Fish” is an angler fish that vomits out its own skeleton, which then runs off on two legs.

Grulla Morioka FC Mascot, Kizuru

Another striking sporting mascot to debut this year was Morioka Grulla Football Club’s giant paper crane, Kizuru. Funds for Kizuru’s costume were raised by crowdsourcing. The Kizuru costume was an impressive sight, but his head fell off during his first ever performance.

Gunkanjima Mascot, Gansho-kun

A new mascot for Nagasaki’s spooky abandoned mining island, Gunkanjima was unveiled in July. Looking like Jabba the Hut, Gansho-kun’s lumpy brown body was inspired by the brown rock of the island. The island has a dark history (Korean immigrants were forced to work in the mines unpaid) so there were complaints that Gansho-kun was inappropriate, and he has kept a low profile since then.

Tarao-kun, mascot of the Babel art exhibition.

Throughout the year an exhibition of 16th Century paintings, titled Babel, toured the country, and a mascot was made to promote it. Yes, even an exhibition of renaissance art has a goofy mascot in Japan. Tarao is a fish with hairy human legs and is inspired by a Bruegel etching.

The drone version of Yukimaru-kun

Meanwhile, the locals of Oji City, Nara Prefecture, were wowed by a drone version of the city’s popular dog mascot, Yukimaru. The flying pooch waggles its legs as it glides through the air.

Tokunoshima mascot, Mabooru-kun.

The tropical island of Tokunoshima also introduced a marvelous new mascot in 2017. Mabooru-kun is a bull who looks decidedly grumpy about being slowly devoured by a massive snake. The Tokunoshima government are hoping to attract tourists to the island with their new PR mascot. Highlighting the threat of being killed by the snakes that live on the island is certainly a novel approach.

Kan-chan, mascot of Ichijiku Pharmaceuticals

Another new character who made a splash this year was Kan-chan, mascot for Ichijiku Pharmaceuticals, purveyors of enemas and fig-based laxatives. Accordingly, Kan-chan is part-fig and part-enema, with a bit of penguin mixed in for cuteness. Making a colon-cleansing device adorable is quite an achievement.

Sugitchi retires.

While we said hello to so many new faces in 2017, we also bid farewell to a veteran mascot. Sugitchi, the cedar tree mascot of Akita Prefecture, retired in November after a decade of hard service. Apparently, the Akita government had only licensed the character from its creator for 10 years.

Yuruchara Grand Prix champion, Unari-kun, is celebrated with a parade in Narita City.

The dream of every Japanese mascot is to win the annual Yuruchara Grand Prix. Winning this popularity contest, in which members of the public vote online for their favourite local character, is the pinnacle of mascotting achievement. This year’s champion, announced in November, was Narita City’s Unari-kun, who polled 805,328 votes and beat 1,158 rivals to the top spot. He’s a hybrid of an eel and a plane, but is more often mistaken for a penguin. Narita City held a parade for the returning hero a week after his victory.

Candidates to be the 2020 Olympic mascots

And finally, in November, the shortlist of potential mascots for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics was released to the public. Elementary school students throughout Japan will be voting for their preferred candidates, and the winning pair will be announced on February 28th.
The country waits with baited breath, and next year looks set to be another vintage year for Japanese mascots.

Minamo and Kitokito-kun

Last weekend I ran into a couple of regional mascots by chance in Sangenjaya, Tokyo. Minamo, the mascot of Gifu Prefecture, and Kitokito-kun, the mascot of Toyama Prefecture, were both there at a joint promotional event for their hometowns.

Minamo

Kitokito-kun

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