This might be surprising if your concept of cartoon characters is based on American models. Sure, all kinds of improbable things exist in American cartoons that we don’t think twice about. Walking, talking animals – that’s so normal it’s boring. Sponges that wear pants, whatever. But not usually a fillet of fish that gets on Twitter and says “Please eat me, I’m delicious.”

But for the last few decades at least, cute characters that are live, walking, sometimes talking, foods, have been totally normal in Japan. And it turns out they have historical precedents that go WAY back.

Anpanman: The Granddaddy Of Modern Food Characters

Anpanman: He’s your classic superhero. He wears a cape, he fights for truth, justice and the Japanese way. And… he’s a bread roll with sweet bean paste inside.

His friends are other types of bread – plain sliced white bread, buns filled with melon or curry – as well as humans who apparently see nothing odd about the situation.

Anpanman apparently never gets stale. After starting as a manga in 1973 and as a TV show in 1988, it aired its 1,000th episode in 2009and its 25th movie in 2013.

Anpanman also set the stage for using these characters for merchandizing, having been used to promote almost every conceivable product including other foods (isn’t that kind of like cannibalism?). I’ve even seen him on boxes of okonomiyaki mix, which isn’t something I imagined was marketed to children.

Perhaps Anpanman’s most direct modern descendent is Kogepan – modernized in part by making him the emo version. Unlike the cheerful, pink-cheeked Anpanman, he’s full of existential angst: Having been left in the oven too long, till he’s burnt, Kogepan is depressed about no one wanting to buy him. Yes, instead of rejoicing that he’ll escape being eaten, he’s miserable that he can’t fulfill his life’s work as a bun. He drowns his sorrows in milk, which makes him drunk.

Like Anpanman, Kogepan’s friends are all different kinds of bread, but his relationships are far more conflicted. He’s jealous of the pretty, unburnt breads, the Kireipan, and I can’t blame him – the cheerful little strawberry breads annoy even me.

But bean paste buns are far from the only walking, talking foods, as we’ll see on the following brief journey through Japanese foods, characters and history.

Beyond the Bun

Traditional sweets like Anpanman have always been big in the food-character market. In another animation from the 1970s, a taiyaki, the fish-shaped pancake filled with beanpaste, comes to life and swims in the ocean:

およげたいやきくん

Later in the 90s, three dango brothers and their tango song had a huge hit:

だんご三兄弟

Nowadays though, almost any food can be made into a character. It’s easy to make fruits and vegetables come to life by giving them faces and arms and legs. From just one company, San-X, there are over a dozen, including Amagurichan, a chestnut who’s impatient to be eaten, Mikan Bouya, a mikan (a citrus fruit like a tangerine), Mamepyon, a family of peas, and Soreike Otamachan!, an onion.

Elsewhere we find an NHK character who is a bitter melon and the incredibly adorable Nameko mushrooms.

Prepared dishes can come alive too. In the picture book and anime Oden-Kun, all the different ingredients of oden are made into creatures: you’ve got your boiled egg, your various fish cakes, and your chunk of daikon radish:

Fusion Food

Food character designers often go beyond giving a fruit or bread a face and limbs, resulting in strange, unnatural chimeras combining food with other creatures. A simple example is Momobuta, who’s a cross between a peach and a pig:

Hokkaido, too, has been all aboard the hybrid food train. The northern prefecture is known for a few main things, one being a bear, the other being various types of food (salmon, melon, onions, to name a few). How do you combine those things? Oh, let me count the ways.

First, let’s start with this melon-higuma mascot mashup.

Okay, so maybe this one’s not as “kawaii”

From there it can go many different directions, including bear+salmon, bear+onion, bear+crab, bear+squid, so on and so forth. Koichi happened to have the bear+crab and bear+squid combinations on hand and took a picture:

My favorite food-creature combination, though, is the San-X characters Nyan Nyan Nyanko. These little cats were presented in various scenarios over the years where they were incorporated and/or transformed into every conceivable dish and type of cuisine.

Their first appearance was a festival theme, where they were various traditional foods you’d buy at festival stalls, like takoyaki:

Next came traditional sweets eaten with green tea, which of course also had a cat in the cup.

Over the years they appeared as dim sum, burgers, onigiri, bubble tea, school lunch, sushi, Western sweets like cream puffs,… just about everything you can think of.

If you think too hard about this, it ought to be incredibly gruesome. Instead, it’s adorable. With every limited edition iteration you could buy stationery, stickers, plushes and what have you, so it is sad but good for my personal budget that the cats appear to have been retired in 2010 after ten years of appearing as various foodstuffs.

Classical Characters

Anthropomorphic food turns out to have some pretty ancient precedents in Japanese art. What’s funny about the early examples is that they also seem to presage another Japanese invention: the TV show food battle.

In the 15th century, a fashion started of illustrated stories of battles between food characters. In the Shoujin Gyorui Monogatari, an army of vegetarian foods, Shoujun, led by the lord Natto, battled against the seafood army led by the lord Salmon. The vegetarian army won, killing the lord Salmon in Nabe Castle.

The picture above is a similar battle from 1859. Although these stories are humorous, this one is said to have a pretty serious historical context: a cholera epidemic. The vegetarian foods won the battle this time too, supposedly symbolizing the fact that they were less likely to spread cholera (presumably because cholera is a water-borne disease).

Other Edo-period anthropomorphized food includes this lovely dancing ear of corn:

There are also precedents to the food-creature chimeras. The famous folktale of Momotaro, the Peach Boy, is about a boy who was born from a large peach floating in a stream. There’s at least one illustration where he is half peach, half boy

Maybe that version didn’t stick because it was too hard to believe that anyone was desperate enough for an heir to raise that creepy creature as their own.

Modern Battle of the Food Characters

With all this as background, it no doubt seemed totally normal for Sanrio to decide to have a new character contest where all twenty of the candidates were some kind of food, or something combined with some kind of food.

Fairly standard sorts of contestants included dog-mochi sweets, panda rice balls, an egg, and my favorite, a long negi onion.

Others were really stretching it, if you ask me, especially some of the food-animal fusions. Yeah, a giraffe’s horns do look a little like mushrooms, but if you have a whole bunch of mushrooms growing out of a giraffe’s head, it just gets creepy:

And I love tanuki like nothing else, but I cannot accept the combination of a tanuki and kiritanpo, a cylinder of pounded rice that a specialty of Akita and Aomori prefectures:

And the public seemed to agree with me that those were overdoing it, because the winner is the one that’s the foodiest of all. Kirimi-chan the salmon fillet has nothing added but tiny dots for eyes and a line for a mouth, and a tiny body. Simple, like Hello Kitty’s expressionless face. In fact, she might not look all that out of place in one of those fifteenth-century battles of the anthropomorphic seafoods.

So although she is brand new, she’s way more old school than anyone probably imagined.

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Japan’s special take on cute is unique enough that we even borrow the word “kawaii” in English to talk about it. But although there is some cultural variation in the details, cute is very much a universal concept, and you might be surprised at the fundamental role it plays in human psychology.

What is Cute, Exactly?

What makes something cute? Think about how characters and toys based on animals look compared to their real-life counterparts. Compare the bear above to this teddy bear:

Or take our friend the ubiquitous tanuki statue and his wild cousin:

…versus…

What are the differences? The snouts are shorter (in some teddy bears it’s gone, or close to it). The head and eyes are big and round. The legs are stubby and rounder and generally, everything is softer and more rounded than in real life.

But why are these the particular features that turn a dangerous animal that could bite your head off, like a bear, into something that makes us go “awwwwwww”? Scientists have actually thought about this subject, starting with the zoologist and ethologist Konrad Lorenz in the 1940s.

Lorenz proposed that the features that make up “cute” are all characteristic of human infants. We coo and squeal at the sight of heads that are large for their bodies, little button noses, and chubby, soft bodies. It also doesn’t hurt if the critter has a floppy, clumsy gait like a human toddler.

Basically, the more a a cartoon character or animal is like a human baby, the cuter it is. One interesting thing that shows this is the importance of round forward-facing eyes like humans have. An animal with eyes on the front of its face, like a panda, looks cuter to us than one with eyes on the sides of its head, like a horse. (If you don’t believe it, check out the next photo, which shows that if you want to turn a a horse into something absolutely horrifyingly cute, you move its eyes to the front of its face.)

Why The Short Face?

Lorenz theorized that there’s an evolutionary reason that these characteristics make you want to grab something and cuddle it. Human babies need a lot of care. If you’re a giraffe, your baby can stand up and run within moments of birth. If you’re a frog, you dump a whole bunch of eggs somewhere and get on with your life, figuring at least one of your hundreds of offspring will manage to survive on its own. But if you’re a human, your baby needs constant attention for months.

So the reason we go “awwww” in response to babies has an obvious evolutionary explanation: the people who reacted that way to round, soft creatures with big heads had babies that survived better. Those babies grew up to have more babies, and passed on the genes for wanting to cuddle things that look that way. On the other hand, the people who didn’t react that way to cute features would be more likely to leave their babies lying around in dangerous places, forget to feed them, etc. So resistance to cuteness would tend to eliminate itself from the gene pool.

This response is now so ingrained in our brains that we react the same way even when it has no evolutionary advantage to our species. We’re just as smitten by pandas as by human infants, despite the fact that they have no benefit to the survival of the human race whatsover. And we even create stuff that has those features, like Hello Kitty, sewage-treatment-plant mascots, and teddy bears. So if you’re one of those people who thinks all that cute stuff is stupid? Blame it on the babies.

This Is Your Brain On Cute

Psychologists have actually experimentally tested Lorenz’s theory that those specific features of “cute” result in a care-giving impulse. One study, for example, manipulated photos of real babies to make their heads more or less round, etc, and found that photos with more of those characteristics were rated as cuter, and made subjects feel more strongly that they wanted to care for them.

But research has also shown that cuteness has other effects – both positive and negative.

There’s one recent study out of Japan that’s probably going to be good news for everyone reading this. You’re on the Internet, so the odds are high that you spend some of your time at work looking at photos and videos of cats – or, if you’re not a cat fan, of whatever other cute animal floats your boat.

No doubt you try to hide this apparently time-wasting behavior, but instead, maybe you should send your boss a link to this article titled The Power of Kawaii: Viewing Cute Images Promotes a Careful Behavior and Narrows Attentional Focus. The research reported shows that looking at pictures of cute animals might actually help you to do your work better.

Two different kinds of tasks were used in the experiment. One was a game called Bilibili Dr. Game which is like the American game Operation. If you’ve never played, it’s a game where you have to remove very tiny body parts from very small openings on a “patient”, using very tiny tweezers.

The subjects played the game, and then they were shown photos: Either of dogs and cats, or of cute puppies and kittens. Then they played the game again, and the people who saw puppies and kittens got better scores the second time around. They also took longer to play the game, so the researchers concluded that seeing cute animals made them do their work more deliberately and carefully.

If your job doesn’t involve the same kind of fine motor control as the game of Operation, you may think this study won’t convince your boss to count looking at Cute Overload as work. Never fear! The experimenters also used another task, which involved looking for certain numbers in a large matrix.

Subjects also did better on this task after looking at photos of puppies and kittens, so the researchers concluded that cute animals made people more attentive. And there’s no job that doesn’t benefit from careful attention, right? So surf away for the those cute kitties.

Cute: The Dark Side

Other research has shown that the effect of cuteness isn’t always so benign. If you’ve ever told a baby that it was so cute you wanted to eat it up, you’ve experienced the effect studied in another recent study: cute animals actually make people feel more aggressive.

Subjects were shown a slideshow including cute baby animals, animals in silly situations, and “neutral” adult animals. One group was asked to rate how much the photos made them want to squeeze something or give an aggressive “want to eat it up” sort of response. The cute pictures made them feel that way more often. Then, another group actually put their money where their mouth was: they were popping bubble wrap while watching the slideshow. They popped an average of 120 bubbles when looking at the cute photos, compared to 100 for neutral ones and 80 for the silly ones.

Cute Clouds The Mind

Maybe being more aggressive at popping bubble wrap seems like no big risk, but there are lots of real-life situations where our uncontrollable response to cuteness affects our judgement about important matters.

For example, you probably wouldn’t hesitate to walk right up to a cute little Chihuahua and pet it, while you might cross the street to avoid a big dog. Turns out you’ve got it exactly backwards. There are fashions in what breeds are considered dangerous, but from German shepherds in the 1960s through Rottweilers and Dobermans to pit bulls nowadays, the breeds considered dangerous are always large ones. But the truth is, as this study showed, the dogs that are most aggressive towards humans are cute little guys: Dachshunds, Chihuahuas and Jack Russell Terriers.

Even professionals who work with animals are not immune to the bad influence of cuteness. A paper in the journal Conservation Biology showed that cute animals are much more likely to be studied by scientists and to get funding for their conservation. Apparently even scientists aren’t attracted to animals because they’re important to their ecosystems or more endangered: it’s more important that they be fuzzy, with 500 times more published studies on large furry mammals than on slimy little amphibians.

Cute animals also cloud our judgment about our fellow humans. An experiment in France found that women were three times more likely to give a guy their phone number if he was walking a cute dog, and another showed that a panhandler more than doubled his income when he had a dog.

So if you always considered “cute” to practically equal “harmless,” maybe you better think again. I have to wonder, how many other ways is cute messing with our minds that science hasn’t found out about yet? How is this affecting the psychology Japan, the “Kingdom of Cute”? Will they all just one day snap and eat each other up?

You know, that Hello Kitty…. I always thought there was something a little sinister about her. Now I know why.

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Additional Reference:

• New York Times: The Cute Factor

Kawaii Overloooooad

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Over the weekend, 141 brave souls dressed up as mascots from 25 prefectures across Japan and made history. They gathered in Sasebo, Nagasaki Prefecture, to break all the records and become the largest group of mascots to do the same dance together. Truly, so impressive a feat will not again be seen in our lifetime.

The song they’re dancing to in the video above is called “The Beard Dance”. A Japanese comedy band known as The Drifters is responsible for this monstrosity. Unfortunately for the mascots and everyone involved, the song is incredibly repetitive and annoying. Be prepared to go insane if you listen to it for the full 5 minutes.

To break the record, the mascots couldn’t just flop around as they pleased for 5 minutes. They had to be in the zone, man – in the zone! They had to like, dance in synchronized unison and stuff. If more than 5% of the mascots screwed up, they’d be denied the world record and bring endless amounts of shame upon themselves and their mascot families.

Fortunately they were allowed multiple tries because they failed twice before finally getting it right. After they nailed it on the third try, “We Are the Champions” started blaring and all the mascots went berserk. They were more excited than any mascot had ever been before. If only their faces could convey emotion.

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And for those of you who want to view one of their mind numbingly repetitive performances in its entirety, check the video above. I dunno about you, but that one girl mascot at the end dancing all by herself with no music really creeps me out. She gives me the willies.

Also, I realize that the people are in big, cumbersome mascot suits, but I was really hoping to see a bit more action out of this synchronized “dance”. Sure, they may have cinched the record in the end, but they certainly did not do it with enough pizzazz and style to impress me! Maybe next time they can include some cartwheels and back flips.

Mascots, Mascots Everywhere

As many of you probably know by now, it’s not surprising that there are enough mascots in Japan to put together a feat like this. Everything from recycling promotions to city governments has mascots. They’re responsible for just about everything. Promoting tourism, teaching kids to recycle, discovering cures for cancer, you name it – there’s a Japanese mascot on the case.

To learn more about these lovable mascots, or yuru kyara (gentle characters) as they’re known, you can check out Hashi’s full write up on them and a handful of the wackiest town mascots Japan has to offer in his post about them here.

And since Hashi loves Japanese mascots more than the rest of the Tofugu team combined (that’s a lot!), he also wrote a post about Kumamon, the cuddly black bear that sings him lullabies each night and makes him waffles every morning. Okay, so maybe Kumamon doesn’t actually do that. Hashi just wishes he did. One day, my friend – one day.

So tell me, what do you think about this record breaking event? Which one of the 141 mascots busting a move was your favorite? Let us know in the comments!

Sources:
RocketNews24

While people in fur suits are rarely seen outside of Disneyland or college stadiums in the US, mascots in Japan are pretty much everywhere. They’re instrumental in promoting tourism or giving a cute face to an organization.

Virtually every town, city, municipal service, company, sports team, and rail line in Japan has its own mascot. There’s even a mascot school in Tokyo to teach aspiring mascots the skills of the trade.

With so many mascots, you might think that they all become indistinguishable from each other. But in recent years, one mascot has towered over all the rest: Kumamon.

Originally created in 2010 as a mascot for a bullet train line in the city of Kumamoto, Kumamon is a bear (kuma means “bear” in Japanese), who’s become a runaway phenomenon in Japan.

He appears at all sorts of public events, ranging from festivals to TV appearances to meet-and-greets to promote Kumamoto. But somewhere down the line, Kumamon became bigger than Kumamoto.

City mascots are usually meant to promote tourism to its city of origin, but Kumamon’s popularity has completely eclipsed the city he was meant to represent.

In 2011, Kumamon came in first place in an online poll for mascot of the year, beating out a giant bird, and a circle with legs. Stiff competition!

Kumamon’s immense popularity has meant that his face has been stuck on anything with a flat surface. The Japanese are fantastic at marketing themselves and, around Kumamoto especially, Kumamon is everywhere.

There are Kumamon stickers, Kumamon buttons; Kumamon candy, keychains, and bags. And if you love Kumamon enough, you can even get a gravestone with his cheery face on it.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Kumamon merchandise has sold over ^$30 million since his inception.

Kumamon’s immense popularity hasn’t gone unnoticed overseas, either. In the West, Kumamon’s become a minor internet meme:

Like all Japanese fads, Kumamon’s popularity will eventually come to an end. Manufacturers will run out of products to slap Kumamon’s likeness onto, and the big black bear will join Sugi-chan and other figures of Japanese pop culture irrelevance.

But until that time comes, I’m sure that Kumamon’s popularity will be milked for all it’s worth. And hey, maybe after his career in Japan, he can moonlight as a football mascot in America.

But if there’s one thing we all know for sure about Japan, it’s that has tons of mascots. So how does Wapuu stack up against  other Japanese blogging characters?

Ameba, one of Japan’s biggest blogging sites really pales in comparison when it comes to the mascot department. Ameba somehow missed the memo about Japanese mascots being cute and chose possibly the weirdest mascot of all: an amoeba.

Who’s the cutest protozoa? You are!

Amoeba are microscopic single-celled organisms. To me at least, it’s a mystery how a formless blob represents blogging or is supposed to get people excited about Ameba. But considering Ameba’s astounding popularity in Japan, they must be doing something right.

Maybe Ameba should have taken a look at Typepad. Typepad is a blogging software a lot like WordPress, and about five years ago it decided on its official Japanese mascot, Toph:

Toph is the total opposite of the Ameba amoeba in a lot of ways: Toph’s a more recognizable creature (a legless fox, duh), a lot cuter, and doesn’t have terrifyingly blank eyes.

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From baseball teams to giant corporations to even tiny towns, it seems that Japan has a mascot for everything. People claim that Kobe alone has 42 different mascots for everything from the city itself to recycling campaigns. In Japan, these mascots are called yuru kyara, or “gentle characters.” The costumes that yuru kyara wear are called kigurumi which, when worn by civilians, can tread dangerously into furry territory.

So why do so many Japanese cities and town create their own mascots? Mascots help boost a town’s profile, and create a brand that a town can market. Not to mention that mascots can be just so darn cute that they’re hard to ignore!

And in fact, mascots are hugely popular in Japan, having their own fan clubs, websites, and even conventions.

Sometimes though, a mascot can be more confusing or strange than appealing; and that, to me, is a lot more interesting. Let’s check out some of my favorite weird mascots:

Manbe-kun

Moments later, this local Japanese politician was devoured by Manbe-kun.

If you asked me what Manbe-kun is supposed to be, I don’t think I would be able to tell you. He’s something like a mix of a crab, clam, starfish, and soulless, unblinking eyes.

Manbe-kun is the mascot of a town called Oshamanbe in Hokkaido. Manbe-kun is surprisingly popular, and even has his own website and Twitter account.

Earlier this year, Manbe-kun got in trouble for making some political comments on his Twitter. You’d expect a town mascot to say things like “Our town looks very lovely this time of year” or “Be sure to visit during our seasonal festival!” Instead, Manbe-kun (or rather, the PR firm that runs his Twitter) posted tweets talking about Japanese imperialism during World War 2. Not exactly the kind of thing that brings tourists running to Oshamanbe.

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Since then, the mayor of Ohsamanbe has suspended Manbe-kun’s Twitter account, leaving Manbe-kun to pursue his first love of terrifying people. You can check out Manbe-kun’s official YouTube channel, full of videos of him standing alone in complete silence, here.

Sasebo Burger Boy

“Big Kahuna Burger! I hear they have some tasty burgers.”

Once again, America’s greatest contribution to the world is hamburgers. The Japanese city of Sasebo is home to a major naval port and during the US Occupation of Japan after World War 2, the US Navy established a base there. Tons of restaurants opened up around town to serve hamburgers to the American troops stationed at the base and even today, the city has a huge number of burger joints. The Sasebo government even produces a “Burger Map” of the city to help tourists find the tastiest burgers around town.

Sento-kun

“Ladies.”

Longtime Tofugu readers will remember when Koichi wrote about Sento-kun, but here’s a recap for those who don’t: Sento-kun was the mascot for the city of Nara’s 1300 anniversary. Unlike Manbe-kun, Sento-kun is easy to describe: a half-naked chubby man-baby with antlers. (He’s actually supposed to be a Buddha to represent the Buddhist ties that Nara has with deer antlers as a nod to the tame deer that roam Nara.)

Sento-kun’s equally strange-looking grandfather, Rokuji.

People understandably really didn’t like Sento-kun when he was first created, so eventually Nara chose another mascot, Manto-kun. Even though Sento-kun was replaced by a cuter, less bizarre mascot, Sento-kun’s legacy didn’t end there. Sento-kun gained a cult following, spawning tributes, parodies, and homages to the former mascot.

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Hikonyan

I know I said I’d talk about the strangest yuru kyara in this post, but it’s hard to talk about mascots in Japan without talking about one of the most popular of all time: Hikonyan.

Hikonyan is the official mascot of Hikone Castle and his name is a combination of Hikone and nyan, the Japanese onomatopoeia for a cat’s meow. His costume is a maneki neko wearing a samurai’s helmet.

But most importantly? People go crazy for Hikonyan. He is, understandably, very adorable, and the mascot of a popular tourist attraction, but Hikonyan’s popularity goes way beyond that. He has a giant fan following, appears at public events, and becoming somewhat of a national sensation.

In fact, Hikonyan is a big reason why all of these other mascots exist. Once people caught wind of how much press Hikonyan was drumming up, they decided that they too needed a yuru kyara for their town/park/host club. So is Hikonyan a hero and a villain for kickstarting the yuru kyara craze? History will tell but in the meantime, I think we can all agree he’s too cute for his own good.

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Which mascot is your favorite? Let us know in the comments.

Header Image Photo Credit: Edward Harrison

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