Ben Dooley and Hisako Ueno

CNA/New York Times-Yoshiaki Yamanishi set out to create the most boring toy imaginable.

In the booming world of Japanese capsule vending machines, competition is fierce.

In recent months, anyone with change can get a miniature toy gas meter that doubles as a pedometer, a bar code scanner that emits realistic beeps, or a doll-sized plastic petrol canister with a functional nozzle.

However, when Shanxi thought of making a series of ultra-realistic split air conditioners at the end of last year, he was convinced that he had succeeded.

Enthusiasts all over Japan are scrambling to snatch these tiny machines with ducts and rotating fans, just like colorless rectangular installations installed outside buildings around the world.

Among the unlikely winners of this pandemic are hundreds of thousands of capsule vending machines in Japan.

Onomatopoeias called gachapon capture the sound of small plastic bubbles tumbling in the work of the machine and falling to the ground with the pop of comic books-they randomly assign toys by turning the dial.

A new store in Tokyo has more than 3,000 gachapon vending machines that can distribute toys in plastic capsules. This store is the largest of its kind in the world. Photos: The New York Times above and below: micromachines that produce real shaved ice; ultra-realistic split air conditioners; Fuchiko toys made by Kitan Club; and Keita Nishimura, CEO of Toys Spirits

Hundreds of new products are launched every month, and the video of the gachapon shopping spree has received millions of views.

These toys, also called gapons, are traditionally aimed at children (think cartoon and video game characters).

But their explosive popularity is accompanied by, or may be driven by, what the industry calls a proliferation of "original" products for adults-including cat wearable hats and replicas of everyday items, the more ordinary the better.

These tiny replicas are isolated in plastic spheres and feel like a metaphor for life in the COVID era.

On social media, users—just like gachapon designers insist on calling their customers—arrange their purchases in life outside the bubble, the 21st Century Zen Rock Garden.

Some faithfully rebuilt monotonous offices, equipped with whiteboards and paper shredders, and other business hotel rooms were equipped with trouser presses.

For Yamanishi, his company Toys Cabin is located in Shizuoka, not far from Tokyo, and its success "does not lie in whether it can be sold."

"You want people to ask themselves,'Who in the world will buy this?'" he said.

This is a rhetorical question, but in recent years, the answer has been young women. Katsuhiko Onoo, head of the Japan Gacha Association, said that they account for more than 70% of the market and are particularly active in promoting these toys on social media. (Gachagacha is another term for toys.)

In the past ten years, this enthusiasm has helped the toy market double, and by 2019 (the most recent year for which data is available), annual sales will reach nearly 360 million U.S. dollars and more than 600,000 gashapon machines. Industry observers say that people's interest continues to soar during the pandemic.

These products are not particularly profitable for most manufacturers, but they provide designers with a creative channel and found a ready-made customer base in a country that always likes whimsical ideas, Hiroaki Omatsu said , He wrote a weekly column about toys for the website, which is run by the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun.

"To create a gashapon for adults is to devote yourself to making worthless things," he said.

"'This is ridiculous' is the highest compliment."

The gashapon machine originated in the United States at the turn of the 20th century, when these devices distributed candies, peanuts and trinkets.

Japan provides many cheap toys to fill them, but it wasn't until the 1960s that these devices reached the country's coast.

In the late 1970s, when Bandai (now one of the largest toy companies in the world) launched a series of collectible erasers, these machines ushered in a breakthrough moment. These erasers were based on Gini Kuman. This is a popular comic book about professional wrestlers.

Gacha has since become a part of Japanese pop culture, symbolizing the fun-filled side of this country dreaming of Hello Kitty and Pokemon.

Ikebukuro-the bustling center of Japanese metropolis and pop culture in central Tokyo-has become the unofficial center of gashapon culture, and machines seem to overflow from every store.

Sunshine City is a shopping mall and a theme park, with two gashapon "department stores".

The second one was opened by Bandai in February and has been certified by the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest in the world, with more than 3,000 machines.

Selling gachapon is not much different from buying them: it is a lottery. It is almost impossible to predict what people will like.

This allows designers to make any toys they like.

Novelty is a key competitive indicator in this industry.

The fun of gashapon is not in the toys themselves—their half-life is very short—but in the fun of buying them: the fun of encountering unexpected new products every month, and the pleasure of slot machines that don’t know what they are.

In order to keep customers coming back, even the smallest company will launch as many as 12 new toys every month, sending piles of paper to distributors, describing new products as their growing network of gashapon machines.

Kenelephant, a Tokyo toy company, has created a niche market for itself, replicating in detail products taken from the middle tier of Japanese consumer brands, which are more familiar than people but ideal.

On the walls of the white gallery shelves surrounding the company office, tiny replicas of Yoshinoya beef bowls and Ziploc plastic containers are positioned as a kind of pop art.

Its store is located in a busy train station in Tokyo and is decorated in brushed steel, concrete and monochromatic industrial tones, just like high-end cafes.

A director of Kenelephant Company Yuji Aoyama said that the products initially selected were aimed at professionals and amateurs, but they soon switched to products with wider appeal.

Nearly ten years later, the company receives daily emails from companies eager to miniaturize its products.

The seeds of the current gashapon craze were sown in 2012, when the toy manufacturer Kitan Club set off a frenzy with Fuchiko. Fuchiko is a Japanese female office worker (known as an OL or office lady) simple and retro Little lady in uniform. Who can perch on the edge of the glass.

Mondo Furuya, CEO of Kitan Club, said that the success of this toy has prompted more than 20 small manufacturers to enter the market dominated by two large manufacturers, Bandai and Takara Tomy.

Most new entrants have created products that are attractive to adults.

Popular toys used to sell more than one million pieces. Now, the competition is so fierce that anything over 100,000 is a real success.

In an interview at the company's headquarters in central Tokyo, Furuya said that the new producer "seems to always mistakenly believe that we make a lot of money" and that employees will brainstorm here every month.

The office is a sacred place for fancy ideas, designed like a Japanese school building, filled with toys and handicrafts that seem to be looted from pirate caves.

The entrance hall is filled with the company's gashapon series, including a pile of lumpy, discolored allergens-mainly different kinds of pollen.

A spokeswoman said that the line had failed.

The company’s perfectionism means that it is losing money on early products — Fuchiko’s elbow sockets are hand-painted, which is a detail that most people will never notice — but over the years, it has learned to not sacrifice quality The situation drops and the cost is low.

Nonetheless, these toys are still a labor of love — high-end licensed toys for adult collectors — to subsidize their capsule business.

Keita Nishimura, CEO of another gashapon maker Toys Spirits, described the process of designing toys as a semi-art and semi-engineering challenge.

This is a three-dimensional haiku defined by price (cheaper enough to sell for a few coins) and size (capsules are usually about two inches wide).

In Toys Spirits, the focus is on available items. Recent hot products include water coolers that dispense ant-sized droplets and ice shaver machines that make real shaved ice-syrup is not included.

In order to seek the greatest degree of authenticity, both of Nishimura’s toys have obtained kitchen safety certification from the Japanese Food Safety Regulatory Agency.

He said that doing big things is easy, but doing small things is difficult.

Three years ago, he quit his job in a leading company producing high-end toys to meet the challenge.

Although Nishimura dresses like a Japanese salaryman, when he describes his job, he sounds like Willie Wonka-every empty capsule is a purely imagined world.

"I spent a lot of energy to make each one," he said. "I just keep trying to squeeze some wonderful things in it, something that makes you dream."