#gotouchichara

As of today, Funassyi's Twitter follower count has gone over 1.3 million (1,300,608 as of this writing). This is by far the most followers any gotouchi chara has. The account has been gaining roughly 50,000 followers a month or so since February, when I started to keep an eye on the numbers. The overseas media often states that Funassyi gained fame via funny YouTube accounts, but he's actually used Twitter a lot more, both to communicate with fans and to spread the Word of Funassyi. There's no doubt either that Funassyi tweets all his tweets himself.

For what it's worth, here are the top 5 gotouchi chara Twitter accounts ranked by the number of followers they have:

Funassyi (1.3 million followers)

Kumamon (366K followers)

Barysan (178K followers)

Chi-ba kun (111K followers)

Chicchai Ossan (105K followers)

Kumamon and Barysan at no.2 and no.3 may not be surprising, since they are very popular yuru-chara who have been around for several years. But both Twitter accounts are actually entertaining to read. The Kumamon account posts lots of fun photos, and the Kumamoto-dialect tweets, which usually end with '-mon', are often very funny. The ratio of PR tweets vs. just fun tweets is pretty good. Barysan's Twitter account is a bit more official and proper perhaps, but still fun to read.

Chi-ba kun, the official gotouchi chara of Chiba prefecture, at no. 4 is a bit surprising. But this again is a Twitter account that a lot of thought and effort is put into. Chi-ba kun's tweets are packed with interesting trivia and other information about Chiba.

Chicchai Ossan (Small Middle Aged Man) is one of the few talking characters besides Funassyi. He is also an unofficial character, although there is a management and production company behind him. However I did notice that his account seems to have lost some followers recently, unlike the others in the top 5.

Other well known yuru/gotouchi chara Twitter accounts with more than 20K followers are Shimanekko (56.4K followers), Nishiko kun (54.3K followers), Fukka chan (45.1K followers) and Okazaemon (27.2K followers).

One account to possibly keep an eye on in the yuru chara arena is that of actor Seiichi Tanabe, who has 558K followers. He's recently launched a yuru chara based on one of his very "yurui" (loose) drawings called Mocchii. Mocchii is supposed to be a "cool looking dog", who looks lke a square piece of mochi (a pounded sticky rice cake); it too is a talking character, and ends its sentences with "mochii-". While Tanabe already had lots of followers before the introduction of Mocchii, that many Twitter followers is a big base to market the character to.

Although Funassyi made his debut in a real professional wrestling ring in Okinawa on Saturday, he has wrestled before. There was the brief sumo match on the Sukkiri! program of course. And there was the event in the video above, held on May 13, 2014 at the Funabashi Regional Wholesale Market, to commemorate the market's 45th anniversary. 70 gotouchi chara gathered to wrestle (well, sort of wrestle in many cases...some matches were decided by jump-offs or rock paper scissors), dance, and so on. Funassyi acted as the host-mascot as well as a ringside commentator. He also entered the wrestling tournament in a tag-team with Funaemon and pinned Melon Kuma to the ground to win.

The final of the wrestling tournament was a jump-off between Funassyi and Inappy, the official gotouchi chara of Inazawa, Aichi prefecture. Funassyi jumped up 62cm and won handily.

Incidentally, Melon Kuma's tag-team partner, the blue bear that looks in pretty bad shape, is Zombear, an unofficial character from Otaru, Hokkaido. (Melon Kuma is from Yubari, Hokkaido.) Zombear is a zombie teddy bear who has been looking for the boy who used to own him for 70 years, gradually falling apart in the process. It seems Hokkaido has a penchant for rather scary looking gotouchi chara.

Funassyi made 3 live appearances on April 12, 2015 at Fukushima Race Course with fellow gotouchi chara Melon Kuma from Yubari, Hokkaido. In the first session they had a contest predicting the winner of the Oka Sho, one of the biggest races on the Japanese horseracing calendar (which is held at the Hanshin Race Course in Takarazuka, Hyogo prefecture).

Melon Kuma attempted to take a bite out of Funassyi, as usual (Melon Kuma's schtick is attacking and biting people.) They often make appearances together at similar events. Funassyi was sporting small anime-Funassyi and Guressyi dolls on his leaf today.

This was Funassyi's first live event since returning from Antarctica.

(I'm not certain why they didn't have any local Fukushima mascots, but these two popular out-of-town characters are probably much bigger draws than any local ones.)

The evolution of Funassyi, part 18: A trend leader?

Nikkei Trendy is a monthly magazine published by Nikkei BP, who publishes Nihon Keizai Shimbun, the leading business newspaper in Japan. Nikkei Trendy is a lifestyle and consumer product trends type of magazine. In May 2013 as part of their June issue, they had a long article about the "Yuruchara Warring States Period". In it they speculate that unofficial characters like Funassyi and Chicchai Ossan have an advantage over official, managed-by-government-entity characters like Kumamon and Nishikokun, since the former have more freedom to accept various jobs (say, being "store manager for a day" or being in a TV commercial) than the latter, who have various bureaucratic restrictions placed on them. (It seems at the time the article was written that Barysan was officially unofficial, although I believe that he has since become an official character for the city of Imabara.) The article features 3 unofficial yuruchara that they see as having the most potential: Funassyi, Chicchai Ossan and Nishikokun, although they seem to give the biggest chances of success to Chicchai Ossan. One interesting piece of information in the article is Funassyi's plans to "split into multiple bodies", and his revelation (one of the early mentions) that he is one of 274 pear siblings. More than a year later Funagoro, the 56th sibling, was introduced...

In retrospect, I'm not sure if yuruchara/gotouchichara have become a much bigger phenomenon than they were in the first half of 2013 Although there are certainly a lot more of them around (around 3,000 by some estimates, maybe even more) most toil in obscurity, and there have been some complaints raised in the last year or so about how some official yuruchara are simply a waste of government resources.

I'm also not certain if their predictions about unofficial vs. official characters has been prophetic. Besides the wildly successful unofficial character Funassyi, who has gone way beyond any predefined description of what a "yuruchara" is supposed to be, and the perennial official characters Kumamon, Hikonyan and Barysan, there have been both successful official characters who have gained some renown since the article was written like Gumnachan and Shimanekko, as well as successful unofficial ones like Nebaarukun. But some other characters that were talked about a lot at the time like Nishikokun and Okazaemon, have not managed to grow in popularity.

In the end, it comes down to how individual characters are managed, how much they can capture the imaginations of people, and so on.

In any case, the article is a great insight in the state of the yuruchara industry, so to speak, 2 years ago. Plus, it had the awesome illustration (above) of Funassyi dressed as a Sengoku (Warring States) period warload, proudly carrying a banner that says Hikounin - unofficial.

Article in Nikkei Trendy, "Are 'Unofficial' Characters Going to Win and Survive the 'Yuruchara Warring States Period'"?

You may see all three terms used to refer to various mascots and characters in Japan such as Funassyi. So what's the difference?

A chara (pronounced kyara), a truncated version of character or mascot character, means any kind of mascot-type creation. It is usually used to refer to mascots and the like that have been created mainly for the purpose of marketing licensed merchandise, or as a symbolic representative of a group or corporation. Regular chara are usually professionally designed and managed. Internationally known chara include Hello Kitty, Rilakkuma, and Mameshiba. (Mameshiba is a quintessential professional commercial chara; it was created by Dentsu, the largest ad agency in Japan, expressly for the purpose of licensing.) Something like Domokun, the official chara for the national broadcaster NHK, is also a chara. Chara abound in Japan - every entity from corporations to universities to and more seem to have their own chara.

There are also chara with successful licensed merchandise and so forth that originate from manga or anime. Pokemon, Doraemon, Snoopy, Miffy, Gundam, the One Piece crew etc. belong to this category.

The term yuru-chara （ゆるチャラ） is most often translated as "loose character", but "loose" does not mean it is morally ambiguous or that its costume is loose-fitting. The "yuru" part can mean loosely defined or amateurish, easy-going, relaxed and so forth.

Although local mascots have existed since the 1980s or so, the specific term yuru chara was created by manga artist, illustrator and essayist Jun Miura in 2000. Miura later set out the 3 requirements for a yuru chara as follows:

It must convey a strong message of love for its local region.

its appearance and demeanor must be rather unstable/amateurish (not very professional) and unique.

It has a lovable looseness/easy-going/unfinished (i.e. "yuru") quality.

The term gotouchi chara （ご当地キャラ）simply means local/regional character or mascot. In principle it is synonymous with yuru chara. However, since Jun Miura registered the term yuru chara as a registered trademark and established a licensing company called Yuru Chara K.K., some local characters and their representatives, especially commercially successful ones, have been careful to use gotouchi chara instead, possibly to avoid any legal problems. The national association of local mascots is called the Gotouchi Kyoukai. (In an interview that aired on NHK in November 2014, Funassyi carefully corrected the interviewer when she called him a yuru chara and said "Funassyi is a gotouchi chara nasshii". )

Whether you call them gotouchi or yuru, there are thousands of local chara roaming around Japan these days. You have probably never heard of most of them - and neither have most Japanese people. In a survey taken in mid-2014, Kumamon and Funassyi were recognized by more than 80 percent of the people surveyed, with a big drop thereafter in recognition for everybody else.

Most local chara are official - that is, they are sponsored and supported by a local government/municipal group, or in some cased a corporation with strong regional ties. Examples of well known official local chara besides Kumamon include Hikonyan (Hikone Castle in Hikone City, Shiga prefecture), Sento-kun (the ancent capital city of Nara, Nara prefecture), Gunma-chan (Gunma prefecture), and Barysan (Imaji City in Ehime prefecture).

From the Wall Street Journal:

A little more than two years ago, Japan Real Time reported that Kumamon, a popular bear character representing a southern region of Japan, was “the face of a movement” and captured better than anyone else the craze surrounding Japan’s mascot boom. Now he has competition. Meet Funassyi, a genderless “pear fairy” who unofficially represents the city of Funabashi outside of Tokyo and has made it big on television.

While on the surface Kumamon, the official gotouchi chara or regional mascot of Kumamoto prefecture, and Funassyi may look like they belong to the same category of "loosely defined local character/mascot", they are in a sense fundamentally different. Kumamon is an official government entity, conceived for the purpose of promoting Kumamoto tourism and products by Kumamoto prefecture. The original and main reason for creating Kumamon was to promote tourism in the prefecture, to coincide with the opening of the Kyushu Shinkansen. Kumamon is also actively used to promote Kumamoto products. This type of officially sanctioned, and usually officially created, mascot is quite different from the increasing number of unofficial and unsanctioned mascots that are popping up around Japan. Simply put, unofficial individual mascots like Funassyi can be characterized as individual entertainers and small business owners. (Note that there are exceptions, which I may address later.)