Watch out, YO-Kai is Japan's new Pokemon

Japan gets its latest toy obsession, aided by a heavy dose of folklore

Move over Pokémon, a legion of new cutesy monsters is haunting Japan and set to break out all over the world after trampling the competition at home. YO-Kai Watch is a nexus of manga comics, anime cartoons and computer games that revolve around the life of a school boy and the monsters — Yokai — that he summons with his wrist strap. While the name is unfamiliar in the West, it’s already very big business in Japan. “We bought a lot — about 20 items — as we can rarely buy them,” Shoji Takayama said as he came out of a store with his wife, two children and a big plastic bag full of toys. The family spent about 30,000 yen (Dh1,024) at YO-Kai Watch Town, a temporary shop on “First Avenue Tokyo Station”, a street inside the Japanese capital’s main train station.

“It’s fun to catch Yokai and become friends,” nine-year-old Naoya said of the video games. “The characters are cute,” added his sister, Sae, 11. Such is the demand that tickets to get into the store were distributed in online lotteries, allowing up to 432 people to visit every day.

The first group of customers included an eight-year-old boy who got an early Shinkansen bullet train with his mother from neighbouring Shizuoka prefecture and a middle-aged man with a handheld console in his back pocket. Yuuichi Ishii, who runs the Toy Cats toy store in Tokyo, said the demographic of fans is indicative of how popular the monster-collecting phenomenon has become. The secret to its succ-ess, he says, is its cute characters and the non-violent way the main character interacts with monsters. “It’s becoming like a second Pokemon,” he said.

Folklore Monsters

Matt Alt, a pop culture commentator who co-authored Yokai Attack!, a book detailing the monsters and spooks of Japanese popular culture, says the series draws heavily on folklore archetypes. “These have been around for hundreds of years as folktales. And now this series has woven them together to make a new sort of content out of them,” Alt told AFP.

Protagonist Keita Amano is an “average” fifth-grader who happens to get a watch that can summon monsters. With the assistance of a “butler” monster and friends, he fights beings that trouble humans, beats them and befriends them.

YO-Kai Watch shares with its predecessor Pokemon “a very similar sort of collecting mechanism” said Alt, where the main character battles monsters and then owns them. “The big difference between YO-Kai Watch and Pokemon, however, is that Pokemon is set in a pure fantasy world... whereas YO-Kai Watch is definitely set in at least a version of Japan,” he said. “I think that’s one of the reasons it’s so popular with kids here, because it makes you feel like these monsters could be just around the corner,” he said.

• UAE