Originally published at: A visit to the world's biggest capsule toy store in Tokyo | Boing Boing
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So (the organizing principle is that) they’re toys but initially constrained to prolate ellipsoids?
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(I have been teaching myself Blender to make virtual gashapon . I call the series Plastic Punks.)
Gachas are also big business in Second Life (link), where they are virtual objects sold in gacha machines, but when unpacked, can range from small trinkets to big house-sized objects. And the No Copy/Trans/Mod permission system allows them to be resold/traded. The rare ones are resold for dozens of US$ (this - allegedly - rare carousel for a cool 800 $). Many of these gachas are also made in Blender.
Like this boinsai tree out of a set of 16 that I made for a gacha sales event called The Arcade, many many years ago.
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That’s where I got my puking bear three years ago, as seen on BoingBoing.
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Maybe I just don’t understand the capsule, but it seems like excessive packaging that is destined for a landfill.
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I’m fascinated by the Japanese delight in small plastic replicas of things - e.g., in this case toilets and doorbells. I wonder what people do with these things - what do you do with your collection of small plastic toilets, etc. - especially given the limited amount of living space urban Japanese have?
In the video they show what happens to the capsules - they’re simply dropped in a machine at the store (that seems to make their return into some sort of game/activity) and reused.
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The machine with the human organs look like they’re straight out of Blade Runner. Collect them all and maybe you can build a miniature Nexus-6.
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I know some of them show up on social media; there is a huge community of people who post pictures/scenes of 1/12 - 1/3 scale dolls, action figures, and models that use gashapon toys as “slice of life” props.
Apparently many of the toys themselves are sold in boxed sets to be unpacked and placed in the capsules manually (the toys can also cost upwards of $25 depending on the specific toy)? If you know where to look, you can buy a boxed set direct from Japan, though you’d have to buy bulk (at $80 for a pack of 10, so YMMV), and there’s no guarantee of what you’ll get.
As a maybe interesting aside, gashapon is onomatopoeia for the sound of the machine dispensing the toy.
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… so I was standing there in my pyjamas and it began to dawn on me that I had messed up the translation.
In the picture you can see a collection bin. Just like drink machines have a recycle bin for empty containers, gachapon tend to have a little box for empty capsules. A lot of people drag them home, but the ones in the bin get reused. I have a similar set-up for my vending machine to minimize the number of capsules I have to buy.
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Cool!
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So Archie McPhee has set up shop in Japan?
Not just the packaging. Sure, some people will keep the real cool stuff for a few years but all of this is pointless waste.
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So, the company markets to people who want to buy something without knowing what they are buying. They have monetized surprise.
If you had a store that just sold the items themselves (no capsules) and they could actually choose exactly what they wanted (and presumably save money from not purchasing undesirable items)… they’d choose to not buy anything at all.
Keep the toy and the capsule until you die and then your heirs will have the joy of throwing it in the garbage. So it does serve a purpose.
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