From the Vault: Yuru-chara: Japanese Mascots, Part 1
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Hello and welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Joe McCormick and it's Saturday, so we are heading into the vault for an older episode of the show. This is the first part of the series that Rob and I did last year on the Yuru Kiara Japanese mascots. This originally published July 9th, 2024. Enjoy. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And I am Joe McCormick. And today on Stuff to Blow Your Mind, we're going to be starting a series, probably a couple of episodes, on a cultural phenomenon, the wobbly mascots of Japan known as Yuru Kiara. Rob, what got you interested in Yuru Kiara?

Well, my family, we recently visited Japan, and it was an amazing experience, highly recommended, you know, full of culinary, historic, natural, cultural, and pop culture discoveries. We tried to cover just about everything during our time there, from Shinto shrines and historic landmarks to Ghibli Park, the Tokyo Pokemon Center. And, you know, as with any visit to another country and another culture, there's so much fun and wonder to be had in the little thing.

And I think one of our favorite pastimes, especially as we traveled around in the country and especially as we use public transportation, was the endless parade of

of these curious mascots, these Yuru Kiara. And it was just, you know, every time we would encounter another one, we were like, oh, look at this little one. We've got to, and we have to research it, you know, bust out our phones once we were able to find ourselves seated or stationary on the train, figure out who this individual is, what they represent. It was a great deal of additional fun. Now, we'll go into a lot more detail about what Yuru Kiara are and the forms they take in these episodes later.

But generally, they are characters that can appear in the form of like 2D representations, like drawings, or also in costumed embodied form. Were you mostly just seeing them like on signs and in media and stuff? Or did you actually come across physically costumed Irukiyara? Yeah.

Sadly, we never encountered any physically costumed mascot characters, Yuru, Kiara. Mostly, I mean, exclusively, we're encountering them on informational signs, sometimes, you know, promotional material and so forth. And very rarely on merchandise. I didn't encounter a lot of them that were heavily merged, though some of them are, as we'll discuss.

But yeah, it was like oftentimes would be like in the midst of going from point A to point B and momentarily being distracted, but also momentarily being, you know, getting an emotional boost from seeing one of these little cute characters and figuring out what they're trying to say to you. Yeah. So, oh, it's a pair of bipedal sentient Japanese leeks who are talking about the agricultural products of this prefecture. Exactly. Yeah.

So, Yuru Kiara have garnered a fair amount of attention internationally already. I imagine many of you are more than aware of them. I believe John Oliver did a piece on them many years ago, and it has continued to revisit.

the topic over the years. But for those of you who are new to the concept, you can basically start with the Western concept of a mascot character, say a Ronald McDonald. You know, like there is an example, Ronald McDonald and his team of McDonald's mascots. They're sometimes physical in costume or makeup form. They're oftentimes illustrative, sometimes downplayed, sometimes exaggerated, but they're there and they represent the brand.

Then you have things like what the Starbucks siren is.

with the double tail. You know, I have never seen anyone dressed up as that in an official capacity for Starbucks, but it's very much a part of the brand, and you recognize it like, okay, there it is. It's a creature. It doesn't have much personality, but you could say it's sort of a mascot. Yes, I think the Starbucks Mermaid and Ronald McDonald are a good comparison, except a couple of differences. With most Hirokiyara, I think they tend to be

More shaped like pillows than either of those characters, where Ronald McDonald and the Starbucks mermaid are more kind of humanoid, like leaner, more humanoid representations. Most Yuru Kiara, though there's some variation between them, most of them are more like a large walking plushie. Yeah, like Grimace of the McDonald's crew would be a better example. He would fit the mold more of the Yuru Kiara, as would, I would say, the Michelin Man.

Yes. Yeah. Or the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Exactly. Yes. But another thing is that both of those are corporate mascots. And so we're familiar with like corporate mascots in America, like sports team mascots. But imagine if...

a broader range of cultural institutions and objects could have mascots. So you can have a mascot for a town, a mascot for a region, a mascot for a piece of public infrastructure, a mascot for an agricultural product. Yeah, that's, that's where, uh, it, it instantly begins to become obvious, I think, to, to, to, to Gaijin and Westerners that, uh, you realize, oh, well, uh,

a chemical company that is not marketing anything towards children will have one of these, as will like the local sewage treatment plant. So it's it runs in directions you might not expect. And then you find or have I have found anyway, sort of digging into it. Then there are there are like corporate companies that you might expect to have gotten into it that seemingly haven't. Like as far as I can tell,

Pilot Pins, the pilot corporation based in Japan, they have no Yuru Kiara that I can tell. Maybe I just couldn't find them. So not every company is getting in on this. And it seems like it's more often that you do find them in various city or prefecture-associated organizations. All right, so what does this word mean, Yuru Kiara?

It's actually fairly complex to break down as a translation.

One paper I was looking at for this is a 2016 paper called Who is Hikonion? The Phenomenon of Japanese Yuru Kiara by Jillian Ray Sutter. Again, this 2016 publication. And they point out that the term here is short for the code mixed Yuru mascot character. So you already know what mascot character is. And that just becomes Kiara. But the Yuru here may be translated as loose, easy,

lazy, careless, half-hearted, or lenient, according to Sutter. And I've also seen lax and soft invoked in translation as well. Yeah, so I did a little digging on this word, urui, which is spelled usually in English, Y-U-R-U-I. And it seems to have a

some different clusters of connotations. So Japanese speakers, write in and correct me if I'm getting anything wrong here, but I'm doing my best to figure out all the different, to untangle all this. It seems like it literally means loose, slack, or soft.

But when applied to a person or creature indicates something like relaxed, chilled out, laid back or lazy. So I think in this facet of the words, meaning the dude from The Big Lebowski would be a type of Yorui.

But it would also seem to apply to characters that are more gentle, lighthearted, sweet, and non-threatening. So something that is Yorui maybe has some overlap with cuteness, but is also like no big deal. Also, an academic essay that I'm going to cite later in this episode says,

translates yuru kiara as wobbly characters and that brings in another aspect of them i don't know if wobbliness is itself at all implied by yurui but uh the the author who coined this term originally uh specified that an important thing about them is that they have sort of like awkward awkward

or unstable movements. I think that's a key part of their cuteness appeal. But anyway, I don't know if we really have a term in English that connects all these different connotations that I'm seeing with Yorui. But the way I understand it is that these Yorui characters are soft, they're easygoing, they're a little bit awkward, they're cute, they're non-threatening, and they are not telling you to hurry up and get those spreadsheets finished. They're just...

hanging out. Yeah, I think that's pretty accurate from what I've read and what I've seen. And the interesting thing is, though, even though they are very lax and very chill, and they might be doing nothing more than just being that, representing this company or this public works department, but also they can and sometimes are invoked in situations or

or in causes that are serious, but they keep that laxness. So I'll get a specific example of this in the second episode we do, but it's like your particular mascot may be like, hey, I'm just being chill. I'm vibing. I'm cute and approachable, but try not to fall on the train tracks. Yes. Yeah. Let me remind you about public health precautions, but in a very non-threatening, chilled out way. Exactly. Now,

they are pretty much without exception cute. I think if you look around, there are so many of them. There's basically an unknown number of them. And

There's not uniform quality. Most of them are amazing, but some of them, there have been occasionally one or two that I've seen where it's like, I don't know that this concept is really working. Maybe they should have workshopped this a little bit more. But they are pretty much without exception cute. And therefore, I think they're a fine example of the larger Japanese concept of cuteness, kawaii, and its various subsets.

Rob, I don't know if you came across the same thing, but there are a few that I almost understood to be considered cute in the way that they fail to be cute.

That they're like something that is understood as an attempt to be cute that is unsuccessful and is in fact ugly, which itself is cute. Yeah, yeah. I know what you're talking about. And this might actually relate to some of the subsets of kawaii that I find pretty interesting. Like, for instance, there is or was, I'm not sure if this term is still relevant, but kawaii noir, which is dark cute. So it's creepy cute.

And therefore, sometimes it may feel like it's like falling short of true cuteness or the mask of cuteness is slipping away from horror. One of the academic essays I was reading about Yuru Kiara talked about this concept of gross cute. It's a type of cuteness in Japanese culture that didn't apply to any particular Yuru Kiara, but to other bear characters in cartoons, specifically, I think, like a rotting zombie bear.

Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. There was one called, um, angry bear. I think I remember this was years and years ago. That is like an actual bear. And he ends up mauling the cute human characters in his vicinity because he's an actual bear. Um,

But there's, yeah, there's this other area that I believe is referred to as pitiful cute. And I, and I think there is also some sort of level of crossover in Japanese language between pitiful and cute that maybe doesn't like they're too separate in English and maybe they're more connected in Japanese. It's my loose understanding, but,

You have this pitiful cute area that I think arguably includes such examples as Guditama, the lazy egg, which I know a number of you are familiar with now because he's really blown up and has his own Netflix series. He's amazing. And then there's this other character that I only discovered while in Japan, and this is Opancho Yusagi. She is like a little pink rabbit in like

like granny underpants. And I think her name basically means like Pampers Rabbit. And she goes about trying to do things that are sweet and cute and have like sweet, cute, meaningful experiences, generally in like two panel cartoons. And,

and something goes wrong. And so there is kind of this, she often looks kind of weird in the second panel because she's either embarrassed or she's angry. Expectations have not met up with reality. Yeah, you shared this with JJ and me, and I thought this was really funny. It seems like they're often centered around like an awkward social misunderstanding. Like there was one comic you shared with

waving and then this character waving back at them. But then it's clear that the original character was waving for a cab. Yeah, it's that sort of thing. And it's really good in it. You don't know most of it has no language associated with it. So you can look it up on Instagram and plow through them, which is what I did.

I mean, I also want to stress, I also did things like I saw Mount Fuji while I was there, but I mostly end up talking about things like this. Oh, but wait, doesn't the Mount Fuji region have its own mascot? Oh, yes. Yeah. And I'll definitely come back to that. Yeah. Anywhere you go, there's some sort of, it basically comes down to like how visible are they going to be, you know, how many posters and so forth. Yeah.

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But I want to come back to just the concept of cuteness and kawaii in broader detail here, because I think it is key. It's one of the key sort of tripod legs or even like table legs to understanding this whole concept. And I was looking around for a good source on this, and I found an article on Ian Magazine.

titled The Great Regression by Tokyo-based translator, writer, and speaker Matt Ault, who also co-wrote a trio of very fun books on yokai, yuri, and ninjas, which two of those I've read with my son, the other one I have on the shelf ready to go, in addition to other books dealing with Japanese culture that he's penned over the years.

And so this this article in general is a very good read. It deals with this idea that there's like this larger trend in the world of adults taking an interest in things associated with childhood, arguably when they should not be, which I want to stress here is not a not a concept that I feel 100 percent OK with. It's just kind of like a judgment call of how grownups spend their lives and make their choices.

Well, yeah, we could take normative judgments out of it and just talk about the phenomenon. It does seem like there's been a clear trend, I think, in the last couple of decades, at least in my knowledge in the U.S. context of, you

More of a tendency for adults living adult lives to engage with, say, media meant for children. I mean, especially like, you know, nostalgic media that they liked when they were kids. And, you know, you can ask interesting questions about like what drives that kind of that kind of interest.

Yeah, yeah. And I want to stress that the alt article here is very good and is ultimately not trying to grind an ax in that direction. But my sort of gut response to just the concept of it is like I end up going back to that old C.S. Lewis quote.

you know, when I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up, you know, because like ultimately, like what are adults supposed to be doing? You know, you get into that whole question and also like the unreality of the idea that

that in the old days adults didn't do things like play games or craft fiction for children and so forth. I feel like the most childish thing one could actually say is like, you know, that's for babies. I'm not a baby. Yeah. Nothing makes you sound more like a baby. Yeah.

So anyway, in this article, Alt lays out this idea, this concept that many people in the contemporary Western world have entered into a kind of global second childhood in response to various social, economic, global health factors over the last decade or two.

And this is wrapped up in the whole idea of the Great Regression. And in this, the idea is that, as arguably occurred in Japan during the 90s, quote, when the youth and young adults of a hyper-connected post-industrial society lose faith in the future, the Great Regression is inevitable.

And I have to admit, and he points out as well, that this sounds grim. And again, I personally feel a certain amount of resistance to the idea. But he goes on in an interesting direction here, arguing that this large-scale cultural interest in the things of childhood can be a net positive and that this is where it gets into the mindset that I can connect with. Alt writes, quote,

Under the right circumstances, regression can nourish. It can be a form of progression, a form of experimentation and creative play. It can pave the way for new ways of thinking and living. It can spawn new trends and identities and lifestyles. These become essential tools for navigating the strange new frontiers of modern life. And as we adopt them, they transform our definition of what it means to lead healthy adult lives. So the historic underpinning here is that

as, as Alt lays out, Japan's post-war economy was extremely ascendant, uh, from the 1970s through roughly 1991 and was even expected to overtake the U.S. economy, something that ended up being echoed and warped in contemporary, uh, certainly American culture at the time, even in racist and hateful ways, like, you know, up to and including, um, acts of physical violence, uh,

Uh, and it's also in other ways, like you see it referenced in the sci-fi tapestries of, uh, you know, futuristic cyberpunk visions, you know, this idea that the future, there's something about the future that will be predominantly Japanese, um, that sort of thing. And you still see that in sort of like retro futuristic cyberpunk visions. It like just becomes sort of baked in to the concept and into the world building.

But then in 1991, there's this economic burst. People coped or didn't as best they could. And there was this kind of slide away from the capitalist pursuit of the salaryman, you know, the stereotypical, you know, employee worker that's out there just really busting it. And then, you know, at the end of the day, you know, you have a few beers and then you go to sleep and you wake up and you do it all again. Right.

And there was a slide away from all of that into interests that were previously more niche. And this, Alt says, brings us to Kauai. Quote, salarymen may have built Japan Inc., but when it crumbled, young people picked up the pieces. The real trendsetters were young women, ranging from schoolgirls to office ladies, the female counterparts of the salarymen. They began unabashedly incorporating symbols of feminine childhood into their adult identities.

upending entire industries through the power of kawaii, a Japanese word that overlaps with cuteness, but which is also a state of mind that refers to being adorable, playful, just begging for cuddles like a kitten or a baby. By 1992, One Woman's Magazine anointed kawaii the most widely used, widely loved, habitual word in modern living Japanese.

So it's a kind of fascination, especially beginning with younger women in Japan, but sort of taking over the whole culture in a way and becoming a very economically important concept.

Yeah, absolutely. And one that even though, you know, there are there's a load about Kauai that's distinctly Japanese and, you know, we're already talking and we'll continue to talk about that. But obviously, it's also something that anyone can look at and feel connection to. You know, it's it's ultimately it has universal appeal. So anyway, all goes on to argue that while critics love to see all of this, either in Japan or elsewhere, as a moral failure, as an inward escape into fantasy, he stresses that it's much more than that.

And in the example of Japanese pop culture, it didn't just result in an endless inward gaze, but also resulted in new modes of social change, adaptation to changing times, and the advancement of whole industries.

So anyway, it's a great article worth checking out in full. But I think the key things to keep in mind for our purposes here are that, number one, there was a hypercharging of kawaii in Japanese culture during the 1990s. And again, too, it doesn't occur in a bubble. But it also is in a bubble, if that makes sense. Like,

And this doesn't mean that there was nothing cute prior to that. I mean, to the contrary, there was this strong element of cuteness, appreciation of like small decorative objects and so forth in Japan. And this was like just a hypercharging of that. And you can also point to examples like Hello Kitty, one of the ambassadors of Kauai dates back to 75.

And, you know, as we've discussed in the show before, you have this longstanding Japanese fascination with house cats and cats feature very strongly into various forms of kawaii. And also kawaii as manifested in Japanese handwriting goes back to the 70s and so forth.

And I think you can make similar observations about this, you know, ideas of regression over here. You know, people are pointing out, oh, you have you have adults with no children going to Disney World, adults with no children buying Lego sets. You know, these are things that preexisted any observations of widespread regression by decades. So, you know, none of this is coming out of nowhere. I think it's hard to deny the appeal of Legos to anyone. Yeah. The way they snap together. That's just good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. My son and I just built an ornithopter. It was challenging and rewarding. Anyway, coming back to Yuru Kiara, again, it's just essential that these are not just aimed at kids. They're representing a wide range of regional governments or governmental agencies and all sorts of different businesses, but not all businesses. For instance, I ran across one very adorable picture.

pig, uh, Yuru Kiara, that is a, a pink pig, very cute inside of like bubbles. Like he's covered from bubbles. Like he just got out of a bubble bath. His name is Awabuta and he is the mascot of Eagle Star Chemicals.

So it's companies like that. I don't know anything about Eagle Star Chemicals, but I'm assuming that they're not particularly child-oriented in their marketing and so forth. But they have this adorable mascot. Why is the pig surrounded in bubbles? Oh, no, this is not a pig that's dissolving in a vat of lye, is it? No.

No, he's happy. He's cute. Okay. It's a happy pig. It does look happy. It does not look to be dissolving. Now, as we've pointed out, these mascots, these Yurokiyara, often are personified and brought into physical reality via a costume.

And as Eddie Y.L. Chang points out in the 2018 article, Let the Euro Chiara Do the Job, they essentially have the life of a celebrity spokesperson. They make public appearances, again, in suit form. They participate in charity and outreach initiatives.

And I have to read this passage from Chang's article. This was published in the Japanese studies journal Mirai. And this is this is brilliant. Quote, Yuru Kiara do not just have a realistic profile and job. Part of their public relations work involves them having a life.

For instance, and he refers to a picture in the article, in figure seven, we see Rinko-chan from Katsuragi City in Nara Prefecture, quote unquote, falling for Sentokun and baked a cake for him for his second birthday in an attempt to win his heart and become his girlfriend. Yeah.

It is striking that this was reported in the Nara Keisei Shimbun business newspaper, an indication that Yuru Kiara are considered by people as social members in a world where the line between reality and fantasy is often unclear. And I need to stress that Sento-kun is a young boy with deer antlers, because Nara is known for its deer, and Narinko-chan is like a cartoon princess.

And this is news of this not even engagement, but possible girlfriend-boyfriend scenario was published in what I can only imagine would be like if there was a Wall Street Journal article about it in the U.S. Uh-huh.

Sento-kun, by the way, I should point out, is one of the mascots that I had read described as ugly in a cute way, according to some people. It is just a bald boy with antlers. Apparently some people find the antlers off-putting, but in a way that actually comes full circle and makes it cute. I would agree with that. I think that was the roller coaster I went on when I first glimpsed him. I was like, I don't know. Okay. Okay. It's cute.

By the way, if you really want to like supercharge your knowledge of what these various Yuru Kiara look like, I highly recommend checking out the Instagram feed for Mondo mascots. You can get hit by new ones every day. It's a wonderful experience, especially if you are not in Japan where you can encounter them in the wild.

Now, one thing that Sutter points out in her article that I referenced earlier is that, yeah, these mascots are not only far more popular compared to, say, U.S. mascots, but they're also far more numerous. And indeed, their full number is probably uncountable and potentially out of control.

that has been a topic of some concern. I don't know how, ultimately, how concerned you can get about mascots getting out of control, but it has been on everyone's radar for a bit. I'm going to go out on a limb and say I'm not worried about it. Well, there are some details that

Maybe one has to take into account here, but she cites a 2015 story in The Guardian detailing a move by the government of Osaka to cut down on the number of mascots in Osaka government offices. And ultimately this ended up resulting in their cutting down from something like 92 to 69 mascots in 2015.

I don't know if that held, if they've been able to hold it at 69 or if that has gone up again. And according to Bloomberg, that same year, the Japanese government announced a nationwide crackdown on Euro-Kiara from a cost-cutting standpoint.

So, again, it's not the idea that people are saying, you know, I don't think that the Kashiwa City Sewer Department needs its own mascot, though it does or had one named Rinko-chan, a lotus fairy riding on a leaf.

It's not that politicians and government workers were saying, we can't have cute things like this in life. They were just saying, you know, it's costing too much money. Someone has to design them. If you have a suit, someone has to wear that suit. If you're printing up a bunch of promotional materials with that character, well, then that's an added cost. And some of the estimates that I've read with particular mascots, it was getting pretty pricey.

And I get it. Like, imagine if for stuff to blow your mind, we decided, OK, not only do we need our own Euro Chiara for the show, but we need separate Euro Chiara for Weird House Cinema, for each of our Wednesday short form shows. Listener Mail needs one. We need a vault centric Euro Chiara.

it would be a bit much. And I could understand our corporate masters being a little resistant to the addition of an additional four to five mascots. Okay. Here's what it is. A super kawaii rendering of Christophe Lambert. But the old man version from the beginning of Highlander 2. Just make it cute somehow.

I can imagine it. I can imagine. But I can also imagine what it was at Lamb Bear Productions being. Oh, there you go. Yeah. Oh, there. Yeah. Is there a way you could animize it like by 35 percent? Yeah, yeah, yeah. He would be he would have lamb characteristics, little tiny like buds of ram horns, maybe. OK. And then you have Ramirez and maybe he's a bear. I don't know. We're getting there. Yeah.

So anyway, I, you know, it is a, is a Gaijin tourist for my part. I never got tired of seeing this endless parade of cute mascots, um,

But I could see where the prize could get out of hand. But on the other side of the issue, I can, you know, I see, I realize not only my own enthusiasm, but I've also seen this referenced in various articles dealing with them, talking about how they've really caught on, not only with Japanese residents, but also with tourists, also becoming instrumental in international relations. So, you know, I wonder if it's something that

While they maybe do the cost-cutting, it's something they could lean into even more from a tourism standpoint. Kind of like a birdwatcher's guide, but just for Yuru Akiyara. Oh, well, the way I understood it, especially some of the regional and township mascots were specifically, at least in part, aimed at attracting tourists. Oh, definitely. Yeah, there are ones that are associated directly with tourism.

But it's like, I don't want to just know about the tourism related ones. I want to know about the sewage departments, you know? Yeah. They're all so interesting. I want to catch them all. And there have been attempts to reckon with the multitudes of mascots because I don't know if they're doing it in the most recent years. But for a while there, they were holding in Japan a Euro Chiara Grand Prix. That's right. This began in 2011. Yeah.

as a way to specifically to help revitalize various regions in Japan by highlighting their mascots. And it featured like a really cool website, which is still around. You can look it up. And lots of mascot pictures and participants could vote online for their favorites in both a regional and a business division. But by 2020, apparently, I think the last one was in 2020 because it was deemed that this had just become too competitive.

I feel like if it were taken too seriously, it would not be Yorui.

That's right. It's supposed to be laid back. It's supposed to be lax. And ultimately, yeah, it's like if you're putting all this effort into getting votes, that's not laid back. If you're spending close to a million dollars on your lax character, I don't know how lax they are anymore. So I guess we have to take that into consideration with these criticisms. Thank you.

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Now, where does this cultural concept come from, the term yuruki-ara? Most of the sources I was looking at give credit to a Japanese manga author and I think sort of social critic and essayist named Jun Miura, who coined the term yuruki-ara as,

I've actually seen different years cited for this. An essay that I'm going to get into in just a bit pins it in the year 2004. But according to Miura, there are three characteristics that define a yurukiyara. The one we've already mentioned is the concept of yurui, which has these connotations of like soft, loose, relaxed, laid back, weak, gentle, non-threatening, no big deal.

The second characteristic is a strong sense of love or passion for the home region that they represent. And then third is awkward, wobbly, strange, unique, or unstable movements. And that seems like a very specific kind of criterion. But maybe later in the series, we'll come back to that and zero in on the unstable movements, because I think that is a more psychologically important criterion than one might assume at first.

An interesting thing about these criteria is that they sort of implied that the character must have an embodied form. So a lot of times these mascots only appear as, you know, as drawings, as two-dimensional representations. But it implies that they must at some point move, right, to have these strange, unstable movements. And so I think this does connect to the fact that most of these characters do have an embodied form, are at some time and place a human inside a suit.

But anyway, I think it would be useful to just look at a few examples of Yuru Kiara that stick out to us. Yeah, yeah. And I want to start with one that ties into what we were talking about earlier about tourism and both domestic and international, because the one I want to highlight first is ultimately a pretty simple one. This is not a complex or super weird one, but one that...

that my family fell in love with rather quickly. His name is Hakujiro, and he is the mascot of Hakone Geopark. So Hakone is a beautiful mountain area with sometimes views of Mount Fuji. It kind of depends on where exactly you are and what the clouds are doing, because it's a shy mountain sometimes.

Luckily, we got a little peak there at the peak, but you're not guaranteed that with Mount Fuji. But anyway, this region is full of natural hot springs. It has some fun museums. The ways to get around are amazing because you have, of course, great trains, but then cable cars, gondolas, pirate ships are part of the public transportation system there to get across crisscrossing this lake there.

And there's been so much more. There are restaurants and so forth. It's a beautiful area. And every step of the way, we saw signage with Hakujiro there to tell us what we were doing right, where to go, and how much we should be enjoying Hakone. And he does occasionally take physical form in a costume, but we did not see him in such form. It was not one of those days.

OK, so the design of this character is nothing too elaborate. It is just a cute person. I'm not sure if it's a boy or what. And they're very cartoony, just a bright, glorious face. They're so happy. And this person is wearing a hat shaped like the mountains of Hakone, like three peaks, a bigger one in the center. And it's just still amazing. I just felt the looseness every time I looked at him.

I was a little surprised that there wasn't a lot of merch for this guy, because by the end of our brief stay in Hakone, I wanted more. I was like, yes, let me have a shot at the Hagajiyo merch, but there was barely any of it. But of course, this is not the case with every Yurokiyara. Some of them are merchandise superstars.

That's right. So if you know Rob and I, you probably know that we're going to be drawn to some of the weirder and more obscure mascots as we as we highlight some more in the next episode or two. But we should definitely mention the heavy hitters as well. And one of the most famous Yuru Kiara in Japan and around the world is Kumamon.

which is a mascot created in the year 2009 to represent the Kumamoto Prefecture of western Kyushu and to boost local products, spur trade, and attract tourists. This character was debuted at the same time that a high-speed rail line connecting the region was completed in the year 2011, I believe.

Now, I will get to a source in just a minute that disputes the essential nature of what I'm about to describe. But I have to start just by reporting my own perception and first impression looking at Kumamon. And that is that Kumamon looks like an adorable bipedal black bear.

sort of pear-shaped in the body with a white muzzle, large eyes with curious curved brows, sort of arched eyebrows over them, and prominent bright red cherry cheeks."

Kumamon was the winner of the Yuru Kiara Grand Prix in 2011. I think that was the first year they had the competition. So he's a big early winner and incredibly popular. Yes, absolutely adorable looking, very huggable. Just, yeah, phenomenally cute.

And reassuring. Very soft. Yeah, yeah. Now, like many urokiyara, Kumamon plays a big role in marketing and advertising for a particular region. In this case, again, the Kumamoto Prefecture. And Kumamon in particular has been judged a huge success at this goal.

I was reading an IEEE paper by Nakasato and Tanaka about using machine image analysis to predict the popularity of these mascots. By the way, the results of that was that people seem to like bright colors, especially on the yellow-green spectrum. So bright yellow-greens seem to be the most popular. But Kumamon, of course, is an exception. Anyway, in the

In the intro of this article, they just happened to summarize a Japanese news article, which included a figure from the Kumamoto branch of the Bank of Japan, estimating that Kumamon alone had generated 124 billion Japanese yen worth of economic activity just in the two-year period from 2011 to 2012. I tried to look up

a conversion rate and that's something like 770 million us dollars today don't know what that would have been in 2012.

But yeah, so this is big business, an adorable creature, a beautiful, incredibly cute design, a cultural phenomenon, but also a big moneymaker. Yeah, you can't argue with those figures. No matter how much it costs to design it or make the costume, this guy paid off. Now, the likeness of this character is used in all different kinds of marketing contexts. He seems to pop up in magazines.

you know, photos like in a costume with a, with a beautiful natural landscape behind him. Like, Hey, come, you know, come visit, uh, Kumamoto prefecture, uh, but also appears on the packaging of products, uh, and so forth. But some uses of this character go hard and go hard almost into depicting

bizarre territory. One example is I found an article from 2016 about a recent promotion for Kumamoto tourism, which involved filling a hall in Osaka Station with dozens and dozens of Kumomon representations of various sorts. Some are three-dimensional models. Some are 2D cutouts, like, you know, cardboard stands. Some are banners that hang from light posts.

One is a giant, just a giant Kumamon head that has like spotlights aimed at it. Curiously, a lot of these representations have little variations on the character. So one is wearing a pink scarf. One is holding an apple. One has its eyes closed. Usually they're wide open. So these strange little variations. And.

All of these images are of this same excruciatingly cute bear-like organism. But the way they're lined up in these columns stretching down the hall, it's almost like you are looking at a bunch of stormtroopers standing at attention on the Death Star. It's a bit menacing. And from what I can tell, Rob, I don't know if you picked up on the same thing. It seems like some cultural uses of Yuru Kiara seem to embrace this kind of irony. Yeah.

Yeah, I know when I look at it, there's certainly the feeling of like, okay, an army of Kumamons are here for me. But also it's like, well, Kumamon, he represents the way I want to feel. And now there are all of them here and they all have different expressions, different emotional states. And I realized that maybe I'm not one person either. Maybe I'm multiple people just spread out across time and that there's no definite identity or reality.

I don't know that that was their intention. So another strange, ironic use of Kumamon. I was not aware of this meme when it popped up, but apparently sometime around 2011, this adorable rosy-cheeked bear became the subject of a minor meme in which he was depicted in front of something that's on fire. And the text was always, for the glory of Satan, of course.

Now, this was not an official usage, right? This is like a meme thing. No, no, no. Memes on the internet. Okay. And in fact, I want to turn to an essay that in one part does address perplexity of people over why Kumamon is used in this meme. So I was trying to learn more about Kumamon, and I came across a fascinating essay on this character and on the broader Urukiyara phenomenon.

It was called Kumamon, Japan's Surprisingly Cheeky Mascot by Deborah J. Ochi.

in a book called Introducing Japanese Popular Culture, published 2023 by Rutledge. This book is edited by a professor of Japanese literature at the University of Oregon named Elisa Friedman. But again, the essay is by Deborah J. Ochi. So I'm not going to have time to get into everything the author brings up in this article, but I'll go through and hit some highlights that I thought were interesting.

One is about the literal origin of this character. So Kumamon began as part of a regional advertising and PR campaign called Kumamoto Surprise, the goal of which was to give Kumamoto residents a new sense of local pride and to sort of delight tourists and visitors with what Kumamoto had to offer in terms of natural landscapes and local cuisines.

And the story goes that originally a Kumamoto-born designer named Koyama Kundo set out to design a logo just on the theme of Kumamoto Surprise. But his art director, who was named Mizuno Manabu, included as a surprise this new character, Kumomon, which allegedly went through 3,000 draft variations before he reached his final form. That's how the story goes. I don't know. 3,000 drafts? What do you think?

I mean, that's evolution right there, right? Oh, yeah. All the generations. So I've already described him. He looks like a black bear with a very cute face, wide eyes, kind of curious expression, the red rosy circles on the cheeks. But what were the visual influences on Kumamon? According to this essay, the creators have cited...

Santa Claus and a New York Yankees baseball player named Matsui Hideki. I initially found this somewhat perplexing, but it makes more sense the more I thought about it. So I will say that Santa sort of has the Kumamon build. And

What all three share in common is prominent cheeks. So Santa Claus is often depicted with rosy red cheeks. I don't know anything about baseball, so I was not familiar with this player, but I looked up pictures of Matsui Hideki and the essay doesn't make this connection, but I noticed he has, in some pictures where he's got a leaner physique, he has very prominent cheekbones. And in other pictures where he's older, he has just a very, uh,

Very like cute, you know, cute, prominent cheeks. Yeah. I mean, I look at him and I'm like, OK, yeah, handsome baseball player, prominent cheekbones. But it's hard for me to imagine the transition from this plus Santa Claus to equal Kumamon. But I believe it. I'll accept it.

Should we take a moment to say anything about the role of Santa in Japanese culture? Like, despite the mostly non-Christian context, a number of people in Japan do observe Christmas in some way, not as a religious holiday, but just as a kind of a fun cultural holiday. And there is some role for Santa Claus in Japanese culture or Santa-san. Yeah, yes. Santa has proved to be...

an export in some ways. I mean, Japanese Christmas traditions also include, uh, Kentucky fried chicken, uh, which is its own, um, whole story. But I haven't researched Japanese Santa culture a lot. I've looked into Chinese embrace of Santa in the past where he ended up, uh, like basically entering, uh,

the Chinese popular mindset during the nineties and ended up playing a saxophone due to associations with Bill Clinton playing a saxophone. Probably, uh, these are things that often happen like without, you know, they just happen and you don't know how an idea is going to move from one culture to the next, what it's going to drag with it. And then when it gets over there, you know, where, what kind of form it's going to take up and take on either temporarily or permanently, you know, as, as,

as you know something comes over from another culture and whatever's novel about it may be accepted you know and then there's also how does it fit into pre-existing values and ideas you know where does it sort of like naturally fit and uh and so forth so forth so i imagine there's a fair amount of that going on with santa being brought in um we've talked in the past too about how in

Like in Chinese traditions, there are these ideas of Chinese and more mortals, you know, that in some ways like remind me of Santa Claus. You know, the idea that it's an old man with a beard that lives at the North Pole. Yeah. And some, you know, translations of an understanding of the story. And so you're like, well, that's kind of sounds like Santa Claus to me. So I don't know. All sorts of things like this, I think, end up occurring when when one cultural motif is is brought over into another.

I think you can also think about some cross-cultural similarities and characters like that, not necessarily as even having influenced one another at any point, but there are just some character types that are kind of easy for the mind to get to. Yeah. And a lot of cultures will come up with characters with some similar characteristics. I think it gets to the appeal in general of Yurokiyara, though, because these are all individuals that you can look at one and you don't need to know...

like how their design came together. You don't need to know what they represent. If anything, you don't have to know like what corporation or prefecture they're associated with, but you just instantly get why they're appealing. There's something about them that transcends all language and cultural understanding. And you're like, yes, yes. Come into my life. Uh, you know, the, the, the, so many characters like that, uh, in, in pop culture. Yeah.

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Ochi in this essay mentions another possible influence on the design of Kumamon, which is that he is thought in some ways to resemble a sort of local stereotype of the Kyushu man who is described as stocky, tough, and

and subject to turbulent emotions. So I'm not sure I understand this sort of intra-Japanese stereotype perfectly, but I'm interpreting it in the same way that we have regional stereotype characters in America, like, you know, the forget-about-it New York man or the barbecue Texas man, that kind of thing. Okay. And so if you took this stereotype and then made it cute...

And he used it to represent the region, which, you know, it sounds more appealing the more I think about it, because you take that which on some level and I don't know to what degree they were doing this on any level with this particular Japanese scenario. But you could imagine part of it being, well, let's take this thing that might be a little intimidating and we make it cute. We you know, we we pull the fangs from it and we turn it around and make it something that that ultimately ends up attracting people.

Yes, but, you know, there's another way that the cuteness of these characters can be deceiving, because it seems to me that certainly with Kumamon, and I think with many of these other mascots that we'll get to in the next episode, the more you dig, the more layers of intended symbolic meaning and cultural reference seem to emerge, right?

For example, according to this essay, the red rosy circles on Kumamon's cheeks, Ochi says that the red circles symbolize that Kumamoto is also known as the land of fire. And they are also supposed to be a reference to the mark of a particular feudal lord of Kumamoto during the Tokugawa shogunate.

And then also they are reminiscent of the Hinomaru or the Sun Circle, the rising sun, which is used on the Japanese flag. And the essay points out that these red circle cheeks appear on other Japanese characters such as Pokemon's Pikachu. Right.

That's right. Yeah. Now that you mention it, Pikachu has those notable red spots. And then you've mentioned another one here, Oppenman, who I was not familiar with, but I looked up pictures of this superhero-ish character. And he has like a big rosy red nose and two big red rosy cheeks. So his face is highlighted by three big rosy red circles.

So anyway, I mentioned earlier that Kumamon is a big business. And this is true. Kumamon not only exists as a mascot promoting Kumamoto and its products, but also as a motif in a type of consumer item known as Fanchi Guzu, which is a term derived in part from English, meaning fancy goods. And in the essay's words, these are, quote, small, cute, decorative personal items often marketed to young women.

And an example given is Hello Kitty merchandise. So some of these characters, especially Kumamon, have been popular not just in promotions, but as imagery in themselves sought after for for their own value in the form of like cute decorative knickknacks.

Now, Rob, you brought this up earlier that Yuru Kiara are not just visual images or likenesses, but characters and their creators give them narratives, backgrounds and personalities. You brought up the I think the romance between two different mascots. So they have like histories and hobbies and preferences. I came across references to at least one mascot that was said to be a fan of heavy metal music. And maybe we'll get back to that in a subsequent part here.

But the author of the essay mentions several things about Kumamon's bio in particular. So they say his birthday is March 12th and he is five years old. I don't know if he ages or if he is perpetually five years old. I mentioned his arched eyebrows, which I initially interpreted as curious features.

But another way of reading them is surprised. And in this way, he connects to the theme of Kumamoto surprise. The creators do say that he is male, though this is specified, quote, in the human, not animal sense. They say he is curious and loves playful mischief. And so an example of the playful mischief is that sometimes at public events when he's in costume form, he's

He will show off strange behavior that seems to baffle his human handlers. One example given is that like he will sit down on the ground when it's time to dance. Yeah.

Well, that makes sense, too, when you get into the fact that ultimately these mascots are going to be portrayed by a person in a costume and then it becomes a performance art. Then it becomes a basic like, you know, silent clowning routine. And therefore, like some of the basics of entertaining costume work are going to be in play. Now, one thing that I thought was interesting that this essay gets into is that.

Often, Yuru Kiara do speak, but from what Ochi says, at least in the context of Kumamon, they don't speak in person, in the embodied form. So the person in the costume is never going to make a statement out loud, but the character may have their words appear in print or be spoken for by an attendant spokesperson. And I thought that was kind of interesting because it reminded me of

Other characters, specifically, I was thinking of silent protagonists in video games. And examples of this would be characters like Marlowe.

or Link from Legend of Zelda, or Gordon Freeman in the Half-Life games, the protagonist of the Portal games. These are characters that we never hear speak, at least not in sentences. We might hear little exclamations or noises or single words. Mario might say Yahoo or a little thing, but will not make a full statement. And they're...

These characters are usually not understood to actually be mute within the storylines of the games in which they appear. The way I've always understood it is that within the story, they can speak and the other characters have heard them speak and sometimes react to them as if they are speaking in the moment, but we do not hear them speak out loud ourselves. And this seems to have some kind of magical relationship to the fact that

When we're playing the game, we are them. Some kind of magic would be broken if we heard their voice speaking full, coherent sentences. And so that seemed in some ways parallel to the idea of that, like with Kumamon, you're not going to hear the...

person in the suit speaking as Kumamon, but Kumamon is understood to be able to speak. It's just that like words will only appear in print or something. And I think that is a key difference from some of the Western counterparts that you might compare them to, like Grimace talks, Ronald McDonald talks, you know, the Starbucks mermaid doesn't talk, but the Starbucks mermaid doesn't do anything. Yeah. Yeah.

And I wonder if a difference here is that these mascots often represent localities or polities of some kind. And so there are lots of people who are

being represented by them in some ways. You sort of like are Kumamon if you are a Kumamoto resident as sort of the avatar of your region. So I wonder if there's a similar logic at work that kind of prevents them from speaking in person, even if they can be understood to have personalities and the power of speech, just only being able to give quotes in print. I think that's a great point because some of these images you included in our notes of Kumamon in his natural habitat

Like he looks like I want to feel if I go there, you know, and I think that's intended. So there's that aspect to it for sure. Like he represents that. And it would destroy the magic if he spoke. And I guess also you could add maybe too that

The various physical suit performances I have seen footage of, of these various mascots, there's a kind of shyness to them that is part of the cute factor. You know, sometimes they're peeking from behind doorways or, you know, around corners at you. They're being a little shy and that's part of their cuddliness, you know, like if they were chasing you down, it would not be the same vibe. Yeah.

Now, there's a bunch of stuff about Kumamon that I would like to get into, but I might save some of it for part two, especially if we start talking about connections between these characters and Yokai. But one last thing I wanted to get to while talking about Kumamon right now.

One of my favorite parts of this essay, it is the insistence that despite appearances, Kumamon is not a bear. What? Okay. He looks like a bear to me. So what is he? Is he some kind, some other kind of animal that just looks like a bear?

And here I just have to simply read from Ochi's essay. The answer makes reference to the concept of kigurumi, which means costumed character. So a kigurumi is a person in a costume. Ochi writes, quote, "...another misconception about Kumomon is that he is a bear, the animal he most resembles. When I contacted Kumamoto Prefecture to use his image in my chapter, I was told that any such statements must be removed."

Most Japanese people, along with foreign and domestic media, say Kumamon is a bear and are surprised to learn otherwise. Perhaps this reminds readers of the wildly popular news story of August 2014 in which Sanrio insisted that Hello Kitty is not a cat. Yep, I remember that. The paragraph goes on. Not only is Kumamon not a bear, he is not a human in a fuzzy suit. As I was told by the Kumamoto brand promotion office...

Quote, the Kumamon you see in the real world is not a Kigurumi. The thing you see is his flesh and blood. So I, this really got the gears going. So they're not denying that the Kumamon costume looks like a bear. They are denying that it is a costume, but it is also not a real bear. Hmm.

Yeah. And this, I guess they're kind of like leaning into this kind of like unreality, this third case, you know, it's like it's almost like it's a supernatural being. Like you would say that like getting into the world of Yokai, which we'll get into more in the next episode, it's like saying, well, a kappa is not a turtle and it's not a man. It is, and it would be wrong to say it's a hybrid of the two either. It is its own thing. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, boy. This is yeah, it gets into I wonder if part of this, too, is like a Western impulse to need to strictly classify everything like we need to know, you know, what species this particular mythological creature has without stopping to remind herself that it exists in myth. And therefore it has special classification. Well, I was thinking about it.

in another way, which is that if you ask the question, is Kumamon a bear, you could mean sort of two different things by that question. One is, is a bear what it is supposed to resemble? And the other is a sort of literal or reductive question. Like, are you currently playing along with the game? So we, we have, you know, normally, um,

If a person in a costume or a cartoon representation of an animal, if I'm thinking about that, there are two possible ways to think about it. Either I'm playing along, which involves accepting the thing as the thing it resembles or represents. So a cartoon cat is a cat if I'm playing along. Or...

There's being reductive, which would be taking a literal objective perspective and saying, no, it's pixels on a screen that are intended to look like a cat. Or in the case of a person in a suit, it is a human being inside a suit that is supposed to look like a bear. And this is neither one. It's like they're still asking you to play along. They're saying, no, no, no, we're not

being literal and reductive that it's a human inside a suit what it actually objectively is we're still playing the game but we're not asking you to see the character as the thing it looks like it is only what it is on the outside no questions about what's underneath

Okay. It's kind of like the concept of kayfabe in pro wrestling then, I guess. It's like if you were to ask about, say, I don't know, The Undertaker, and you were to say, well, is The Undertaker a zombie? No, he's not a zombie. Is The Undertaker like a guy from Texas pretending to be a zombie? No, he's not that either. He's this other thing. You've got to approach it. You've got to play the game, like you say. He is what he is. Yeah. He is as presented.

So I thought that was like worthy of a symbiotics lecture or something. Interesting. I'm going to keep thinking on that. Hmm.

Oh, one very last thing I want to get to before we wrap up for today is there is a section of this essay where people are just trying to make sense of why Kumamon is being used in the For the Glory of Satan memes. Now, I don't really know. I wasn't familiar with these memes back in the day. I didn't make them, obviously. But if I had to guess, I would just think it's the irony. It's just like he's cute and thus it's funny to

make a cute thing say something that is uh you know menacing or sinister yeah the juxtaposition right it's just like the elmo um you know hellfire thing yeah exactly

One thing mentioned here is a Japanese news report that's trying to make sense of the meme and, uh, says, and they, they speculate that it may have stemmed from the similarity between the word Kumamon and the word in English demon or the names of specific demons, uh, in Christianity, Mammon or Ammon. Uh,

And that, I don't know, that just seemed like, I don't think that's what it is. But it's funny because that's the same kind of logic we sometimes employ when we're trying to figure out why a cultural connection is made. It's like, maybe it has to do with these sound-alike words, but I really don't think that's it. Yeah, the mammon thing came to my mind when we were talking about the hellfire thing earlier.

But then I was like, it's like they can't be it on a mainstream level. Like that's that's more of a like a deeper demonology cut that surely wasn't part of the decision making process. And yes, me. But then apparently this same news report speculated in the other half that the answer is what is, in my opinion, almost certainly correct. It's just the juxtaposition of like the cuteness and the evilness of Satan. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it's the same reason that the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man runs amok. It's the reason that we have so many different stories, horror tales that involve like a murderous Santa or a monstrous Santa. It's the juxtaposition. It's the twisting, the flipping of the concept. Okay, do we need to break part one there? I think so. I think that's a good place to break it off, but we will be back in our next core episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind with additional...

explorations of the world of Yuru Kiara, some more examples of note that we thought were pretty interesting. We'll also get into some of these connections that get into religion and folklore. So make sure you tune in for that. And in the meantime, certainly write in and share your favorites with us.

We'd love to discuss that in future episodes of the Lister Mail episodes that we run on Mondays. Also, if you reside in Japan, have visited Japan, are Japanese and so forth, and have additional thoughts on all of this, yes, write in. We'd love to hear from you on all that as well. Please. Reminder, the stuff to blow your mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, Mondays Lister Mail, Wednesdays we have short forum episodes, and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.

Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at StuffToBlowYourMind.com. Stuff To Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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