There’s a McDonald’s near Akihabara station that I often have breakfast at while I’m here. Almost every day around 6 am it fills up with businessmen and women, just sitting quietly with their coffees. It was suggested to me they come here before work to mentally prepare and destress from the rush hour travel. It’s a surreal experience joining them because virtually everyone is alone and the dining room (which has 96 seats) is almost entirely quiet.
I’m sitting here now, and it’s a good time for an extra blog post! I’ll be showcasing a few topics I wanted to go into a bit more detail into and today we’ll start with gacha machines.
As usual these continue to multiply, as does the diversity of prizes. I read recently that the number of drink vending machines in Japan has been declining every year and I wonder if that has been offset by the proliferation of gacha machines.
The prizes these days can be anything, although ‘small’, ‘cute’, ‘accessory’ and ‘useful’ descriptors usually apply. Above we see a panda hair accessory, small flocked cats dressed as Kamen Riders, a strange flocked eel and Sesame Street grocery bags. Guess which two I bought?
Or here we have an ‘EM wave prevention seal’ (don’t ask), miniature OxiClean products, a very mysterious UFO that claims to create sound when clipped onto a power cable, and a can badge making kit that unfortunately doesn’t come with most of the required parts! I bought none of these, but I think I should have got that UFO.
The average price seems have settled now around ¥300 or ¥400 (about $2-3). The number of ‘premium’ machines (¥500 or more) seems to have dropped, and machines ¥200 or less now are very rare and usually give dubious prizes.
Some vinyl cyclops toys, large stuffed… things, miniature cassette tape keychains and a keychain of a… drag queen pirate (I assume a Japanese comedian)? I bought none of these, but I should have gotten Bernard a pirate.
The sticker craze here right now may be the strongest craze I’ve seen in 24 years of visiting this country! Even the gacha machines are not immune, and I find it intriguing that as these two weeks have continued the amount of stickers I’ve seen in machines is increasing as if the craze is still ramping up.
A soft flexible ‘W’, a coin that helps you make decisions (eight different types!), a small acrylic stand of some dude and miniature Karcher pressure washers. Of all these, I regret not getting the W. What is it and what is it used for? No man knows, which is part of the allure of these machines 🙂
Which machines did I invest in the most this trip? The ‘punk girl’ ID photo ones I found in Osaka! I found six different ones and rolled ten times (¥300 a pop) and still hope to find more of these, which appeal to me in an indescribable way. They’re objectively worthless but they’re so much fun. As you’ll see when you get yours on a postcard…
There are also the so-call ‘flat gacha’ machines, that distribute things like clear files, coasters, art prints and even (rarely) postcards. In an extraordinarily rare and fortuitous event, I received two Kamen Rider ‘art boards’ from a single pull of one of the machines at Hirakata Park!
I’ll end this with a few photos of drink machines getting into the gacha game with the sticker cans that KLS and I first spied a couple of years ago. These seem to have multipled as well, and they’re not cheap at ¥900. It’s a drink machine so you still get a drink, but the cans have a large vinyl sticker wrapped around them. The stickers are random and as you can see there are quite a few, so if you’re after a particular character it would be very pricey. I got a couple of these, but the stickers are very large and it’s a challenge to find somewhere to put them when you’re traveling!
Even the Ultraman exhibit got in on this racket, with their sticker-wrapped drink vending machine in the gift shop. Yes I got one. No it wasn’t Zoffy 🙂