From the Vault: Yuru-chara: Japanese Mascots, Part 1

In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss Japan’s beloved yuru-chara, corporate and governmental mascots that are undeniably cute but with deeper connections to other aspects of Japanese culture. (originally published 7/9/2024)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hello, and welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Joe McCormick and it's Saturday, so we are
heading into the vault for an older episode of the show.
This is the first part of the series that Rob
and I did last year on the Urukiara Japanese mascots.
This originally published July ninth, twenty twenty four. Enjoy Welcome

(00:32):
to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:42):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and.

Speaker 1 (00:46):
I am Joe McCormick. And today on Stuff to Blow
Your Mind, we're going to be starting a series, probably
a couple of episodes on a cultural phenomenon, the wobbly
mascots of Japan known as Urukiara. Rob, what got you
interested in Urukiara?

Speaker 2 (01:03):
Well, my family we recently visited Japan and it was
an amazing experience, highly recommended, you know, full of culinary, historic, natural, cultural,
and pop culture discoveries. We tried to cover just about
everything during our time there, from you know, Shinto shrines
and historic landmarks to Ghibli Park, the Tokyo Pokemon Center,

(01:26):
and you know, as with any visit to another country
and another culture. There's so much fun and wondered to
be had in the little things. And I think one
of our favorite pastimes, especially as we traveled around in
the country and especially as we use public transportation, was
the endless parade of these curious mascots, these uru kiyara,

(01:46):
and it was just, you know, every time we would
encounter another one, we were like, oh, look look at
this little one. We've got to and we have to
research it, you know, bust out our phones. Once we
were able to find ourselves seated or stationary on the train,
figure out who this individual is, what they represent, it
was a great deal of additional fun.

Speaker 1 (02:05):
Now we'll go into a lot more detail about what
urukyara are in the forms they take in these episodes,
but generally they are characters that can appear in the
form of two D representations like drawings or also in
costumed embodied form. Were you mostly just seeing them like
on signs and in media and stuff, or did you

(02:26):
actually come across physically costumed erukiyara.

Speaker 2 (02:30):
Sadly, we never encountered any physically costumed mascot character as kiara. Mostly,
I mean exclusively, we're encountering them on informational signs sometimes
you know, promotional material and so forth, and very rarely
on merchandise. I didn't encounter a lot of them that

(02:52):
were heavily merged, though some of them are as we'll discuss.
But yeah, it was like oftentimes would be like in
the midst of going from point A to point BE
and momentarily being distracted, but also momentarily being you know,
getting an emotional boost from seeing one of these little
cute characters and you know, and figuring out what they're

(03:13):
trying to say to you.

Speaker 1 (03:14):
Yeah. So, oh, it's a pair of bipedal sentient Japanese
leaks who are talking about the agricultural products of this prefecture.

Speaker 2 (03:23):
Exactly. Yeah, so yu Kyara have garnered a fair amount
of attention internationally already. I imagine many of you are
more than aware of them. I believe John Oliver did
a piece on them many years ago, and it has
continued to revisit the topic over the years. But for
those of you who are new to the concept, you
can basically start with the Western concept of a mascot character,

(03:46):
say a Ronald McDonald, you know, like there's an example
Ronald McDonald and his team of McDonald's mascots. They're sometimes
physical and costume or makeup form. They're oftentimes illustrative, sometime downplayed,
sometimes you know, exaggerated, but they're there and they represent
the brand. Then you have things like what the Starbucks

(04:08):
siren with with the double tail. You know, I don't
you know, I have never seen anyone dressed up as
that an official capacity for Starbucks, but it's very much
a part of the brand and you recognize it, like, Okay,
there it is. It's a creature, but it doesn't have
much personality, but you could say it's sort of a mascot.

Speaker 1 (04:26):
Yes, I think the Starbucks Mermaid and Ronald McDonald are
a good comparison, except a couple of differences with most Eurokura.
I think they tend to be more shaped like pillows
than either of those characters, where Ronald McDonald and the
Starbucks Mermaid are more kind of humanoid like leaner more
humanoid representations most Erucuara, though there's some variation between them,

(04:50):
most of them are more like a large, walking plushy.

Speaker 2 (04:54):
Yeah, like Grimace of the McDonald's crew would be a
better example. He would fit the mold more of the
euro Kiara, as would I would say the Michelin Man.

Speaker 1 (05:03):
Yes, yeah, or the stay Puffed marshmallow Man exactly yes.
But another thing is that both of those are corporate mascots,
and so we're familiar with like corporate mascots in America,
like sports team mascots. But imagine if a broader range
of cultural institutions and objects could have mascots. So you
can have a mascot for a town, a mascot for

(05:25):
a region, a mascot for a piece of public infrastructure,
a mascot for an agricultural product.

Speaker 2 (05:32):
Yeah, that's that's where it instantly begins to become my
obvious I think to do to guideen and Westerners that
you realize, oh, well, a chemical company that is not
marketing anything towards children will have one of these, as
will like the local sewage treatment plant. So it's it
runs in directions you might not expect. And then you

(05:54):
find or if I have found anyway sort of digging
into it, then there are there are like corporate companies
that you I'd expect to have gotten into it that
seemingly haven't, like, as far as I can tell, Pilot Pins,
the Pilot Corporation based in Japan. They have no uru
kiara that I can tell. Maybe I just couldn't find them.
But then so not every company company is getting in

(06:16):
on this, and it is it seems like it's more
often that you do find them in various city or
prefecture associated organizations. All right, So what does this word
mean euro kiara? It's actually fairly complex to break down
as a translation. One paper I was looking out for
this as a twenty sixteen paper called who is Hikonyan

(06:38):
The Phenomenon of Japanese Eurokiara by Jillian Ray Sutter, this
twenty sixteen publication, and they point out that the term
here is short for the code mixed uru mascot character,
So you already know what mascot character is and that
just becomes kiaru. But the uru here may be translated

(06:59):
as loose, easy, lazy, careless, half hearted, or lenient, according
to Sutter. And I've also seen lax and soft invoked
in translation as well.

Speaker 1 (07:12):
Yeah, so I did a little digging on this word yurui,
which is spelled usually in English why you are you I?
And it seems to have some different clusters of connotations.
So Japanese speakers right in and correct me if I'm
getting anything wrong here, but I'm doing my best to
figure out all the different to untangle all this. It
seems like it literally means loose, slack, or soft, but

(07:37):
when applied to a person or creature, indicates something like relaxed,
chilled out, laid back, or lazy. So I think in
this facet of the words, meaning the dude from The
Big Lebowski would be a type of yurui. But it
would also seem to apply to characters that are more gentle,

(07:57):
light hearted, sweet, and non threatening. So something that is
yurui maybe has some overlap with cuteness, but is also
like no big deal. Also, an academic essay that I'm
going to cite later in this episode translates yurukiara as
wobbly characters, and that brings in another aspect of them.
I don't know if wobbliness is itself at all implied

(08:21):
by yurui, but the author who coined this term originally
specified that an important thing about them is that they
have sort of like awkward or unstable movements. I think
that's a key part of their cuteness appeal. But anyway,
I don't know if we really have a term in
English that connects all these different connotations that I'm seeing

(08:42):
with yurui. But the way I understand it is that
these yurui characters are They're soft, they're easy going, they're
a little bit awkward, they're cute, they're non threatening, and
they are not telling you to hurry up and get
those spreadsheets finished. They're they're just hanging out.

Speaker 2 (08:59):
Yeah, I think that's that's pretty accurate from what I've
read and what i've seen. And the interesting thing is, though,
even though they are very lax and very chill, and
they might be doing nothing more than just being that
representing this company or this you know, public works department,
but also they can and sometimes are invoked in situations

(09:25):
or or in causes that are serious, but they keep
that laxness. So I'll get a specific example of this
in the second episode. We do. But it's like your
particular mascot may be like, Hey, I'm just being chill,
I'm vibing, I'm cute and approachable, but try not to
fall in the train tracks.

Speaker 1 (09:45):
Yes, yeah, let me remind you about public health precautions,
but in a very non threatening, chilled out way.

Speaker 2 (09:53):
Exactly now, they are pretty much without exception cute. I
think if you look around there are so any of them.
As we'll get into there, there's basically an unknown number
of them, and there's not uniform quality. Most of them
are amazing, but some of them there have been occasionally
one or two that I've seen where it's like, I
don't know that this concept is really working. Maybe they

(10:15):
should have workshopped this a little bit more, But they
are pretty much without exception cute, and therefore I think
they're a fine example of the larger Japanese concept of
cuteness kauai and its various subsets.

Speaker 1 (10:28):
Rob, I don't know if you came across the same thing,
but there are a few that I almost understood to
be considered cute in the way that they fail to
be cute, that they're like something that is understood as
an attempt to be cute that is unsuccessful and is
in fact ugly, which itself is cute.

Speaker 2 (10:47):
Yeah, yeah, I know what you're talking about. And this
might actually relate to some of the subsets of kauai
that I find pretty interesting, Like, for instance, there there
is or was I'm not sure if this term is
still relevant, but Kauai noir, which is dark cute, so
it's creepy cute, and therefore sometimes it may feel like
it's like falling short of true cuteness, or the mask

(11:08):
of cuteness is slipping away from horror.

Speaker 1 (11:11):
One of the academic essays I was reading about Urkiara
talked about this concept of gross cute. It's a type
of cuteness in Japanese culture that didn't apply to any
particular URQR, but to other bear characters in cartoons specifically,
I think like a rotting zombie bear.

Speaker 2 (11:28):
Oh okay, yeah, yeah, there was one called angry Bear.
I think I remember this was years and years ago,
that is like an actual bear and he ends up
mauling the cute human characters in his vicinity because he's
an actual bear. But there's yeah, there's this other area
that I believe is referred to as pitiful cute, and
I think there is also some sort of level of

(11:49):
crossover in Japanese language between pitiful and cute that maybe
doesn't like they're too separate in English and maybe they're
more connected in Japanese. It's my loose understanding, but you
have this hit aful cute area that I think arguably
includes such examples as Goodi Tama the Lazy Egg, which
I know a number of you are familiar with now
because he's really blown up and has his own Netflix series.

(12:10):
He's amazing. And then there's this other character that I
only discovered while in Japan, and this is a Panchu Yusagi.
She is like a little pink rabbit in like old
Granny underpants, and I think her name basically means like
Pamper's rabbit. And she goes about trying to do things

(12:31):
that are sweet and cute and have like sweet, cute,
meaningful experiences, generally in like two panel cartoons, and something
goes wrong, and so there is kind of this. She
often looks kind of weird in the second panel because
she's either embarrassed or she's angry expectations have not met
up with reality.

Speaker 1 (12:49):
Yeah, you shared this with with JJ and me, and
I thought this was really funny. It seems like they're
often centered around but like an awkward social misunderstanding. Like
there was one comic US shared with somebody waving and
then this character waving back at them, but then it's
clear that the original character was waving for a cab.

Speaker 2 (13:07):
Yeah, it's that sort of thing and it's really good,
and you don't most of it has no language associated
with it, so you can, you know, look it up
on Instagram and plow through them, which is what I did.
I mean, I also, I want to stress I also
did things like I saw Mount Fuji while I was there,
but I mostly end up talking about things like this.

Speaker 1 (13:25):
Oh but wait, doesn't the Mount Fuji region have its
own mascot?

Speaker 2 (13:29):
Oh? Yes, yeah, and I'll definitely come back to that. Yeah,
anywhere you go there, there's there's some sort of it
basically comes down to like how visible are they going
to be? You know, how many posters and so forth.

(13:49):
But I want to come back to just the concept
of cuteness and kwai and broader detail here, because I
think it is key. It's one of the key sort
of tripod legs or even like table legs to understanding
this whole concept. And I was looking around for a
good source on this, and I found an article on
Ian magazine titled The Great Regression by Tokyo based translator,

(14:12):
writer and speaker Matt Alt, who also co wrote a
trio of very fun books on Yo Kai Yuri and
Ninja's which two of those I've read with my son
and the other one I have on the shelf ready
to go, in addition to other books dealing with Japanese
culture that he's pinned over the years. And so this
article in general is a very good read. It deals

(14:33):
with this idea that there's like this larger trend in
the world of adults taking an interest in things associated
with childhood, arguably when they should not be, which I
want to stress here is a not a concept that
I feel one hundred percent okay with. It's just kind
of like a judgment call of how grown up spend

(14:54):
their lives and make their choices.

Speaker 1 (14:56):
Well, yeah, we could take normative judgments out of it
and just talk about the phenomenon that it does seem
like there's been a clear trend, I think in the
last couple of decades, at least in my knowledge in
the US context of uh more, of a tendency for
adults living adult lives to engage with say media men
for children, I mean, especially like you know, nostalgic media

(15:17):
that they liked when they were kids, and you know,
you can ask an interesting questions about like what drives
that kind of that kind of interest.

Speaker 2 (15:25):
Yeah. Yeah, And I want to stress that that that
the alt article here is very good and is ultimately
not trying to grind an act in that direction. But uh,
but my my sort of gut response to just the
concept of it is like, I end up, you know,
going back to that that old C. S. Lewis quote.
You know, when I became a man, I put away
childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire

(15:45):
to be very grown up. You know, because like ultimately,
like what are adults supposed to be doing? You know,
you get into that whole question, and and and also
like the unreality of the idea that that in the
old days adults didn't do things like play games or
craft you know, fiction for children and so forth.

Speaker 1 (16:05):
I feel like the most childish thing one could actually
say is like, you know, that's for babies. I'm not
a baby. Yeah, yeah, nothing makes you sound more like
a baby.

Speaker 2 (16:15):
Yeah. So, anyway, in this article all lays out this idea,
this concept that many people in the contemporary Western world
have entered into a kind of global second childhood in
response to various social, economic, and global health factors over
the last decade or two, and this is wrapped up
in the whole idea. They're like the Great Regression, And
in this the idea is that has arguably occurred in

(16:39):
Japan during the nineties quote, when the youth and young
adults of a hyper connected post industrial society lose faith
in the future, the Great regression is inevitable. And I
have to admit. And he points out as well that
this sounds grim and again I personally feel a certain
amount of resistance to the idea. But he goes on
in an interesting direction here, arguing that this large scale

(17:02):
cultural interest in the things of childhood can be in
that positive and that this is where it gets into
the mindset that I can connect with alt Wrights. Quote.
Under the right circumstances, regression can nourish. It can be
a form of progression, a form of experimentation and creative play.
It can pave the way for new ways of thinking
and living. It can spawn new trends and identities and lifestyles.

(17:25):
These become essential tools for navigating the strange new frontiers
of modern life, and as we adopt them, they transform
our definition of what it means to lead healthy adult lives.
So the historic underpinning here is that is Alt lays
out Japan's post war economy was extremely ascended from the
nineteen seventies through roughly nineteen ninety one, and was even

(17:48):
expected to overtake the US economy, something that ended up
being echoed and warped in contemporary, certainly American culture at
the time, even in racist and hateful ways, up to
and including acts of physical violence. And it's also in
other ways, like you see it referenced in the sci
fi tapestries of you know, futuristic cyberpunk visions. You know,

(18:12):
this idea that the future there's something about the future
that will be predominantly Japanese, that sort of thing, and
you still see that in sort of like retro futuristic
cyberpunk visions. It like just becomes sort of baked in
to the concept and into the world building. But then
in nineteen ninety one, there's this economic burst. People coped

(18:32):
or didn't as best they could, and there was this
kind of slide away from the capitalist pursuit of the salarymen,
you know, the stereotypical you know, employee worker that's out
there just really busting it. And then you know, at
the end of the day, you know, you have a
few beers, and then you go to sleep, and you
wake up and you do it all again. And there

(18:53):
was a slide away from all of that into interest
that were previously more niche. And this all brings us
to kuai. Quote. Salarymen may have built Japan ink, but
when it crumbled, young people picked up the pieces. The
real trendsetters were young women, ranging from schoolgirls to office ladies,
the female counterparts of the salarymen. They began unabashedly incorporating

(19:13):
symbols of feminine childhood into their adult identities, upending entire
industries through the power of kuai, a Japanese word that
overlaps with cuteness, but which is also a state of
mind that refers to being adorable, playful, just begging for cuddles,
like a kitten or a baby. By nineteen ninety two,
One Woman's magazine anointed kauwai the most widely used, widely

(19:37):
loved habitual word in modern living Japanese.

Speaker 1 (19:40):
So it's a kind of fascination, especially beginning with younger
women in Japan, but sort of taking over the whole
culture in a way and becoming a very economically important concept.

Speaker 2 (19:50):
Yeah, absolutely, and one that even though you know, there's
a load about kuwai that's distinctly Japanese, and you know
we're already talking and we'll continue to talk about that,
but obviously it's also something that anyone can look at
and feel connection to, you know, it's ultimately it has
universal appeal. So anyway, all goes on to argument. While
critics love to see all of this, either in Japan

(20:12):
or elsewhere, as a moral failure, as an inward escape
into fantasy, he stresses that it's much more than that,
and in the example of Japanese pop culture, it didn't
just result in an endlessen we're inward gays, but also
resulted in new modes of social change, adaptation to changing times,
and the advancement of whole industries. So anyway, it's a

(20:32):
great article we're checking out in full. But I think
the key things to keep in mind for our purposes
here are that number one, there was a hyper charging
of kauwhai in Japanese culture during the nineteen nineties. And
again too, it doesn't occur in a bubble, but it
also isn't a bubble, if that makes sense, Like this
doesn't mean that there was nothing cute prior to that.

(20:54):
I mean, to the contrary, there was this strong element
of cuteness appreciation of like small deck or objects and
so forth in Japan, and this was like just a
hyper charging of that. And you can also point to
examples like Hello Kitty, one of the ambassadors of kawai
dates back to seventy five. And you know, as we've
discussed in the show before, you have this long standing

(21:16):
Japanese fascination with house cats, and cats feature very strongly
into various forms of kauwai, and also kawai as manifested
in Japanese handwriting goes back to the seventies and so forth,
and I think you can make similar observations about this.
You know, the ideas of regression over here. You know,
people were pointing out, oh you have you have adults

(21:37):
with no children going to Disney World, adults with no
children buying lego sets. You know, these are things that
pre existed any observations of widespread regression by decades, So
you know, none of this is coming out of nowhere.

Speaker 1 (21:48):
I think it's hard to deny the appeal of legos
to anyone, the way they snap together that's just good.

Speaker 2 (21:54):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. My son and I just built an ornithopter.
It was it was challenging and rewarding. Anyway, coming back
to urukiara again, it's just essential that these are not
just aimed at kids. They're representing a wide range of
regional governments or governmental agencies and all sorts of different businesses,

(22:14):
but not all businesses. For instance, I ran across one
very adorable pig urukiara that is a pink pig, very
cute inside of like bubbles, like he's covered from bubbles,
like he just got out of a bubble bath. His
name is Awabutta, and he is the mascot of Eagle
Star Chemicals. So it's companies, you know like that. I

(22:37):
don't know anything about Egle Star Chemicals, but I'm assuming
that they are not, you know, particularly like child oriented
in their marketing and so forth. But they have this
adorable mascot.

Speaker 1 (22:47):
Why is the pig surrounded in bubbles? Oh no, this
is not a pig that's dissolving in a vat of
Why is it. No, he's happy, he's cute. Okay, it's
a happy pig. It does look happy, does not look
to be dissolving.

Speaker 2 (23:00):
Now, as we've pointed out, these mascots, these zero kiara
often are personified and brought into physical reality via a costume.
And as Eddie y L Chang points out in the
twenty eighteen article, let the euro Kiara do the job,

(23:20):
they essentially have the life of a celebrity spokesperson. They
make public appearances again in suit form. They participate in
charity and outreach initiatives. And I have to read this
passage from Cheng's article. This was published in the Japanese
studies journal Mira, and this is brilliant quote. Urukiara do

(23:40):
not just have a realistic profile and job. Part of
their public relations work involves them having a life. For instance,
and he refers to a picture in the article. In Fig.
Seven we see Rinkachan from Katsuragi City in Nara Prefecture,
quote unquote falling for Sinto Kun and baked a cake

(24:01):
for him for his second birthday in an attempt to
win his heart and become his girlfriend. It is striking
that this was reported in the Nara kise Shimbun business newspaper,
an indication that yurukiara are considered by people as social
members in a world where the line between reality and
fantasy is often unclear. And I need to stress that

(24:24):
Sinto Kun is a young boy with deer antlers because
Nara is known for its it's deer and Rinkachan is
like a cartoon princess. And this is news of this
not even engagement but possible girlfriend boyfriend scenario was published
in what I can only imagine would be like if
there's a Wall Street Journal article about it in the US.
Uh huh.

Speaker 1 (24:45):
Santo Kun, by the way, I should point out, is
one of the mascots that I had read described as
ugly and acute. Way, according to some people, it is
just a bold boy with antlers. Apparently some people find
the antlers off putting, but in a way that actually
comes full circle and makes it cute.

Speaker 2 (25:03):
I would agree with that. I think that was the
roller coaster I went on when I first glimpsed him,
I was like, I don't know, okay, okay, it's cute.
By the way, if you really want to like supercharge
your knowledge of what these various UK area look like,
I highly recommend checking out the Instagram feed for Mondo mascots.
You can get hit by new ones every day. It's

(25:25):
a wonderful experience, especially if you are not in Japan
where you can encounter them in the wild. Now, one
thing that Sutter points out in her article that referenced
earlier is that, yeah, these mascots are not only far
more popular, but they're compared to say, US mascots, but
they're also far more numerous, and indeed their full number

(25:46):
is probably uncountable and potentially out of control, something that
has been a topic of some concern. I don't know
how ultimately how concerned you can get about mascots getting
out of control, but it has been on on everyone's
radar for a bit.

Speaker 1 (26:02):
I'm going to go out on a limb and say
I'm not worried about it.

Speaker 2 (26:06):
Well, they didn't. There are some details that everyone has
to take into account here. But she decides a twenty
fifteen story in The Guardian detailing a move by the
government of Osaka to cut down on the number of
mascots in Osaka government offices because this apparent and ultimately
this ended up resulting in there cutting down from something
like ninety two to sixty nine mascots in twenty fifteen.

(26:29):
I don't know if that held, if they've been able
to hold it at sixty nine or if that has
gone up again. And according to Bloomberg, that same year,
the Japanese government announced a nationwide crackdown on yurokiara from
a cost cutting standpoint. So again, it's not the idea
that people were saying, you know, I don't think that
the Kashiwa City sewerd Apartment needs its own mascot, though

(26:55):
it does or had one named Rinko Chan a lotus
ferry riding on Ali. It's not that they that that,
you know, politicians and government workers were saying, we can't
have things like cute things like this in life. They
were just saying, you know, it's costing too much money. Uh,
you know someone has to design them. If if you
have a suit, someone has to wear that suit. If

(27:16):
you're printing up a bunch of promotional materials with that character,
well then you know that's an added cost. And you know,
some of the estimates that I've read with particular mascots,
it was like it was getting pretty pricey, and I
get it, like, imagine if for stuff to blow your mind.
We decided, okay, not only do we need our own
eurokiarra for the show, but we need separate Eurokiara for

(27:37):
Weird House Cinema for each of our Wednesday short form shows.
Listener Mail needs one. We need a vault centric Eurokiara.
It would be a bit much, and I could understand
our corporate masters being a little resistant to the addition
of an additional four to five mascots.

Speaker 1 (27:55):
Okay, here's what it is, a super Kowhi rendering of
Christoph Limb bear. But the old man version from the
beginning of Pilot er two just make it cute somehow.

Speaker 2 (28:08):
I can imagine it. I can imagine, but I can
also imagine what it was that Lambar Productions being.

Speaker 1 (28:14):
A little week ago.

Speaker 2 (28:16):
Yeah, oh well there. Yeah, is there a way you
could animize it, like by thirty five percent?

Speaker 1 (28:22):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, he would be He would have Lamb characteristics,
little tiny like buds of ram horns.

Speaker 2 (28:28):
Maybe hmmm, okay, and then you have ramires and maybe
he's a bear. Hmmm.

Speaker 1 (28:33):
I don't know we're getting there.

Speaker 2 (28:36):
So anyway, I you know it is. As a guidgen tourist,
for my part, I never got tired of seeing this
endless parade of cute mascots. But I could see where
the prize could get out of hand. But on the
other side of the issue, I can you know, I see,
I realized not only my own enthusiasm, but I've also
seen this reference in various articles dealing with him, talking

(28:57):
about how they've really caught on not only with you
and these residents, but also with tourists, also becoming instrumental
in international relations. So, you know, I wonder if it's
something that while they maybe do the cost cutting, if
it's something they could lean into even more from like
a tourism standpoint, you know, you know, like a kind
of like a bird watcher's guide, but just for Eurookiaga.

Speaker 1 (29:20):
Oh well, the way I understood it, especially some of
the like regional township mascots were specifically, at least in part,
aimed at attracting tourists.

Speaker 2 (29:29):
Oh definitely. Yeah, there are ones that are associated with
directly with tourism. But it's like, I don't want to
just know about the tourism related ones. I want to
know about the sewage departments. You know, they're all so interesting.
I want to catch them all.

Speaker 1 (29:43):
And there have been attempts to reckon with the multitudes
of mascots because I don't know if they're doing it
in the most recent years, but for a while there
they were holding in Japan a Eurokiara Grand Prix.

Speaker 2 (29:57):
That's right. This began in twenty eleven as a way
to specifically to help revitalize various regions in Japan by
highlighting their mascots, and it featured like a really cool
website which is still around. You can look up in
lots of mascot pictures, and participants could vote online for
their favorites in both a regional and a business division.

(30:20):
But by twenty twenty apparently, I think the last one
was in twenty twenty, because it was deemed that this
had just become too competitive with competing regions and or
companies lobbying like super hard to get those online votes,
and it was just decided I'm not sure exactly who
decided this, but it was decided that, you know what,
this is betraying the spirit of what these characters should be,

(30:41):
and we're just not going to do it anymore.

Speaker 1 (30:43):
I feel like if it were taken too seriously, it
would not be yurui.

Speaker 2 (30:48):
That's right. It's supposed to be laid back, it's supposed
to be lax and ultimately, yeah, It's like, if you're
if you're putting all this effort into getting votes, you know,
that's not laid back. If you're spending you know, close
to a million on your lax character, I don't know
how lax they are anymore, you know, So I guess
we have to take that into consideration with these criticisms.

Speaker 1 (31:17):
Now, where does this cultural concept come from? The term urukya?
Most of the sources I was looking at give credit
to a Japanese manga author and I think sort of
social critic and essayist named June Mura, who coined the
term urukyara in I've actually seen different years cited for this.

(31:39):
An essay that I'm going to get into in just
a bit pins it in the year two thousand and four.
But according to Mura, there are three characteristics that define
a urukyura. The one we've already mentioned is the concept
of urui, which has these connotations of like soft, loose, relaxed,
laid back, weak, gentle, non threatening, no big deal. The

(32:03):
second characteristic is a strong sense of love or passion
for the home region that they represent, and then third
is awkward, wobbly, strange, unique or unstable movements and that
seems like a very specific kind of criterion, But maybe
later in this series we'll come back to that and

(32:24):
zero in on the unstable movements, because I think that
is a more psychologically important criterion than one might assume
at first. An interesting thing about these criteria is that
they sort of implied that the character must have an
embodied form. So a lot of times these mascots only
appear as as drawings, as two dimensional representations, but it

(32:46):
implies that they must at some point move right to
have these strange, unstable movements, And so I think this
does connect to the fact that most of these characters
do have an embodied form or at some time in
place a human inside a suit. But anyway, I think
it would be useful to just look at a few
examples of Rukyr that stick out to us.

Speaker 2 (33:08):
Yeah, yeah, And I want to start with one that
that ties into what we were talking about earlier about
tourism and both domestic and international, because the one I
want to highlight first is ultimately a pretty simple one.
This is not a complex or super weird one, but
one that that my family fell in love with rather quickly.
His name is Hako Geo and He is the mascot

(33:30):
of Hakone Geo Park. So Hakone is a beautiful mountain
area with sometimes views of Mount Fuji. It kind of
depends on you on where exactly you are in what
the clouds are doing, because it's it's a shy mountain.
Sometimes well, luckily we got we got a little peak
there at the peak, but you're not guaranteed that with

(33:50):
Mount Fuji. But anyway, it's full of This region is
full of natural hot springs. It has some fun museums.
The ways to get around are amazing because you have,
of course, you know, great trains, but then cable cars, gondolas,
pirate ships are part of the public transportation system there
to get across, criss crossing this lake there, and there's
in so much more. There are restaurants and so forth

(34:12):
is the fourth It's a beautiful area and every step
of the way we saw signage with Hako Geo there
to tell us what we were doing right, where to
go and how much we should be enjoying Halkone And
he does occasionally take physical form in a costume, but
we did not see him in such form. It was

(34:34):
not one of those days. Okay, So the design of
this character is nothing to elaborate. It is just a
cute person. I'm not sure if it's a boy or what.
They're very cartoony, just a bright, glorious face. They're so happy.
And this person is wearing a hat shaped like the
mountains of Halkoni, like three peaks, a bigger one in

(34:55):
the center, and it's just still amazing. I just felt
the looseness every time I looked at him. I was
a little surprised that there wasn't a lot of merch
for this guy, because by the end of our brief
study in Hakone like I wanted more. I was like, yes,
let me have a shot at the Hagajiyo merch, but
it didn't seem to be. There was barely any of it.
But of course this is not the case with every Eurokiara.

(35:18):
Some of them are merchandise superstars.

Speaker 1 (35:22):
That's right. So if you know Rob and I, you
probably know that we're going to be drawn to some
of the weirder and more obscure mascots as we highlight
some more in the next episode or two. But we
should definitely mention the heavy hitters as well, and one
of the most famous Eurokiara in Japan and around the
world is Kumaman, which is a mascot created in the

(35:47):
year two thousand and nine to represent the Kumamoto Prefecture
of western Kshu and to boost local products, spur trade
and attract tourists. This character was debuted after at the
same time that a high speed rail line connecting the
region was completed in the year twenty eleven. I believe

(36:07):
now I will get to a source in just a
minute that disputes the essential nature of what I'm about
to describe, But I have to start just by reporting
my own perception and first impression looking at Kumaman, and
that is that Kumaman looks like an adorable bipedal black bear,
sort of pear shaped in the body, with a white muzzle,

(36:29):
large eyes with curious curved brows, sort of arched eyebrows
over them, and prominent bright red cherry cheeks. Kumaman was
the winner of the eurokiar A Grand Prix in twenty eleven.
I think that was the first year they had the competition,
So he's a big early winner and incredibly popular.

Speaker 2 (36:48):
Yes, absolutely adorable, looking, very huggable, just yeah, phenomenally cute
and reassuring, very soft. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (36:58):
Now, like many Urukiura, momman plays a big role in
marketing and advertising for a particular region. In this case, again,
the Kumamoto Prefecture and Kumaman in particular has been judged
a huge success at this goal. I was reading an
I Triple E paper by Nakasato and Tanaka about using

(37:18):
machine image analysis to predict the popularity of these mascots.
By the way, the results of that was that people
seem to like bright colors, especially on the yellow green spectrum,
so bright yellow greens seem to be the most popular.
But Kumaman, of course, is an exception. Anyway, In the
intro of this article, they just happened to summarize a

(37:39):
Japanese news article which included a figure from the Kumamoto
branch of the Bank of Japan estimating that Kumaman alone
had generated one hundred and twenty four billion Japanese yen
worth of economic activity just in the two year period
from twenty eleven to twenty twelve. I tried to look
up a conversion rate, and that's something like seven hundred

(38:01):
and seventy million US dollars today. Don't know what that
would have been in twenty twelve. But yeah, so this
is a big business, an adorable creature, a beautiful, incredibly
cute design, a cultural phenomenon, but also a big money maker.

Speaker 2 (38:18):
Yeah, you can't argue with those figures. No matter how
much it costs to design it or make the costume,
this guy paid off. Now.

Speaker 1 (38:25):
The likeness of this character is used in all different
kinds of marketing contexts. Seems to he seems to pop
up in you know, photos, like in a costume with
a beautiful natural landscape behind him, like hey, you know,
come visit Kumamoto Prefecture, but also appears on the packaging
of products and so forth. But some uses of this

(38:46):
character go hard, and go hard, almost into bizarre territory.
One example is I found an article from twenty sixteen
about a recent promotion for Kumamoto tourism which involved filling
a hall in Osaka station with dozens and dozens of
kumaman representations of various sorts. Some are three dimensional models,

(39:10):
some are two D cutouts like you know, cardboard stands.
Some are banners that hang from light posts. One is
a giant, just a giant kumaman head that has like
spotlights aimed at it curiously a lot of these representations
have little variations on the character. So one is wearing
a pink scarf, one is holding an apple, one has

(39:33):
its eyes closed, usually they're wide open, So these strange
little variations, and all of these images are of this
same excruciatingly cute bear like organism. But the way they're
lined up in these columns stretching down the hall, it's
almost like you are looking at a bunch of storm
troopers standing at attention on the Death Star. It's a

(39:54):
bit menacing, and from what I can tell, Rob, I
don't know if you picked up on the same thing.
It seems like some cultural uses of yurukiara seem to
embrace this kind of irony.

Speaker 2 (40:06):
Yeah, I know when I look at it, there's certainly
the feeling of like, okay, an army of kumaman's are
here for me. But also it's like, well, kumaman he
represents the way I want to feel. And now they're
all of them here, and they all have different expressions,
different emotional states. And I realized that maybe I'm not
one person either, Maybe I'm multiple people just spread out

(40:27):
across time, and that there's no there's no definite identity
or reality. I don't know that that was their intention.

Speaker 1 (40:36):
Yeah, so another strange, ironic use of Kumaman. I was
not aware of this meme when it popped up, but apparently,
sometime around twenty eleven, this adorable, rosy cheeked bear became
the subject of a minor meme in which he was
depicted in front of something that's on fire, and the
text was always for the glory of Satan.

Speaker 2 (40:57):
Of course, now this was not an official usage.

Speaker 1 (41:01):
Memes on the Internet, and in fact, I want to
turn into an essay that in one part does address
perplexity of people over why Kumaman is used in this meme.
So I was trying to learn more about Kumaman and
I came across a fascinating essay on this character and
on the broader Rokyr phenomenon. It was called Kumaman Japan's

(41:24):
surprisingly Cheeky Mascot by Debor j Ochi in a book
called Introducing Japanese Popular Culture published twenty twenty three by Rutledge.
This book is edited by a professor of Japanese literature
at the University of Oregon named Elisa Friedman. But again
the essay is by Debor j Ochi. So I'm not
going to have time to get into everything the author

(41:46):
brings up in this article, but I'll go through and
hit some highlights that I thought were interesting. One is
about the literal origin of this character. So Kumaman began
as part of a regional advertising and pr campaign called
Uoto's Surprise, the goal of which was to give Kumamoto
residents a new sense of local pride and to sort

(42:07):
of delight tourists and visitors with what Kumamoto had to
offer in terms of natural landscapes and local cuisine. And
the story goes that originally, a Kumamoto born designer named
Koyama Kundo set out to design a logo just on
the theme of Kumamoto Surprise, but his art director, who
was named Mizuno Manabu, included as a surprise this new character, Kumaman,

(42:33):
which allegedly went through three thousand draft variations before he
reached his final form. That's how the story goes. I
don't know, three thousand drafts, what do you think I mean?

Speaker 2 (42:43):
That's it's lots of evolution right there.

Speaker 1 (42:44):
Right, yeah, oh yeah, all the generations. But what I've
already described him looks like a black bear with a
very cute face, a wide eyes, kind of curious expression,
the red rosy circles on the cheeks. But what were
the visual influences on Kumaman? According to this essay, the

(43:05):
creators have cited Santa Claus and a New York Yankees
baseball player named Matsui Hideki. I initially found this somewhat perplexing,
but it makes more sense the more I thought about it.
So I will say that Santa sort of has the
Kumaman build. And what all three sharing common is prominent cheeks.

(43:31):
So Santa Claus is often depicted with rosy red cheeks.
I don't know anything about baseball, so I was not
familiar with this player. But I looked up pictures of
Matsui Hideki, and the essay doesn't make this connection, but
I noticed he has in some pictures where he's got
a leaner physique, he has very prominent cheek bones, and
in other pictures where he's older, he has just a

(43:52):
very very like cute, you know, cute prominent cheeks.

Speaker 2 (43:58):
Yeah. I mean I look at him and I'm like, okay, yeah,
hands on baseball player, prominent cheek bones. But it's hard
for me to imagine the transition from this plus Santa
Claus to equal Kumuman. But I believe it. I'll accept it.

Speaker 1 (44:14):
Should we take a moment to say anything about the
role of Santa in Japanese culture, Like, despite the mostly
non Christian context, a number of people in Japan do
observe Christmas in some way, not as a religious holiday,
but just as a kind of a fun cultural holiday.
And there is some role for Santa Claus in Japanese
culture or Santa San.

Speaker 2 (44:33):
Yeah, yes, Santa has proved to be an export in
some ways. I mean Japanese Christmas traditions also include Kentucky
Fried Chicken, which is its own whole story. But I
haven't researched Japanese Santa cultural a lot. I've looked into
Chinese embrace of Santa in the past, where he ended
up like basically entering the Chinese popular mindset during the

(44:59):
ninety and ended up playing a saxophone due to associations
with Bill Clinton playing a saxophone. Probably, Uh, these are
things that often happen like without you know, they just happen,
and you don't know how an idea is going to
move from one culture to the next. What it's going
to drag with it, and then when it gets over there,
you know where what kind of form it's going to
take up and take on, either temporarily or permanently. You know,

(45:22):
as as you know, something comes over from another culture
and whatever's novel about it may be accepted, you know.
And then there's also how does it fit into pre
existing values and ideas, you know, where does it sort
of like naturally fit and and so forth and so forth.
So I imagine there's a fair amount of that going
on with Santa being brought in. We've talked in the

(45:44):
past two about how in like in Chinese traditions, there
are these ideas of Chinese and mortals, you know that
in some ways like remind me of Santa Claus. You know,
the idea that it's an old man with a beard
that lives at the North Pole, and some you know,
translations of and understanding of the story, and so you're like, wow,
this kind of sounds like Santa Claus to me. So

(46:07):
I don't know all sorts of things like this I
think end up occurring when one cultural motif is brought
over into another.

Speaker 1 (46:14):
I think you can also think about some cross cultural
similarities and characters like that, not necessarily as even having
influenced one another editing point, but there are just some
character types that are kind of easy for the mind
to get to. Yeah, and a lot of cultures will
come up with characters with some similar characteristics.

Speaker 2 (46:32):
I think it gets to the appeal in general of Eurokiara, though,
because these are all individuals that you can look at
one and you don't need to know like how their
design came together. You don't need to know what they represent,
if anything. You don't have to know like what corporation
or prefecture they're associated with, but you just instantly get

(46:52):
why they're appealing. There's something about them that transcends all
language and cultural understanding, and you're like, yes, yes, come
into my life. You know. There's so many characters like
that in pop culture general.

Speaker 1 (47:16):
Ochi in this essay mentions another possible influence on the
design of Kumaman, which is that he is thought in
some ways to resemble a sort of local stereotype of
the Qshu man, who is described as stocky, tough, and
subject to turbulent emotions. So I'm not sure I understand
this sort of intra Japanese stereotype perfectly, but I'm interpreting

(47:40):
it in the same way that we have regional stereotype
characters in America, like you know, the forget about It
New York man or the you know, the barbecue Texas man,
that kind of thing.

Speaker 2 (47:50):
Okay, And so if you like, took this stereotype and
then made it cute, and then he used it to
represent the region, which you know that it sounds more
appealing the more I think about it, because you take
that which on some level and I don't know to
what degree they were doing this on any level with
this particular Japanese scenario, but you could imagine part of
it being, well, let's take this thing that might be
a little intimidating and we make it cute, you know,

(48:12):
we pull the fangs from it, and we turn it
around and make it something that ultimatelyions up attracting people.

Speaker 1 (48:19):
Yes, but you know, there's another way that the cuteness
of these characters can be deceiving, because it seems to
me that certainly with Kumaman, and I think with many
of these other mascots that we'll get to in the
next episode. The more you dig, the more layers of
intended symbolic meaning and cultural reference seem to emerge. For example,

(48:41):
according to this essay, the the red rosy circles on
Kubaman's cheeks. Ochi says that the red circles symbolize that
Kumamoto is also known as the land of Fire, and
they are also supposed to be a reference to the
mark of a particular feudal lord of Kumamoto during the
token Goa Shogunate. And then also they are reminiscent of

(49:04):
the he Knu maru or the sun circle the rising Sun,
which is used on the Japanese flag. And the essay
points out that these red circle cheeks appear on other
Japanese characters, such as Pokemon's Pikachu.

Speaker 2 (49:18):
That's right, yeah, now that you mention it, Pikachu has
those notable red spots. And then you've mentioned another one here, Opp'nman,
who I was not familiar with, but I looked up
pictures of this superhero ish character, and he has like
a big rosy red nose and then two big red
rosy cheeks, so his face is highlighted by three big

(49:38):
rosy red circles.

Speaker 1 (49:39):
So anyway, I mentioned earlier that Kumaman is a big business,
and this is true. Kumaman not only exists as a
mascot promoting Kumamoto and its products, but also as a
motif in a type of consumer item known as fun chiguzu,
which is a term derived in part from English meaning
fancy go woods. And in the essays words these are

(50:02):
quote small cute decorative personal items often marketed to young women,
and an example given is Hello Kiddy merchandise. So some
of these characters, especially Kumaman, have been popular not just
in promotions, but as imagery in themselves, sought after for
their own value in the form of like cute decorative nickknacks. Now, Rob,

(50:25):
you brought this up earlier that your kiara are not
just visual images or likenesses, but characters, and their creators
give them narratives, backgrounds, and personalities. You brought up the
I think the romance between two different mascots, so they
have like histories and hobbies and preferences. I came across
references to at least one mascot that was said to

(50:45):
be a fan of heavy metal music, and maybe we'll
get back to that in a subsequent part here. But
the author of the essay mentions several things about Kumaman's bio.
In particular, so they say his birthday is March twelfth,
and he is five years old. I don't know if
he ages or if he is perpetually five years old.

(51:08):
I mentioned his arched eyebrows, which I initially interpreted as curious,
but another way of raading them is surprised, and in
this way he connects to the theme of Kumamoto surprise.
The creators do say that he is male, though this
is specified quote in the human not animal sense.

Speaker 2 (51:27):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (51:28):
They say he is curious and loves playful mischief, and
so an example of the playful mischief is that sometimes
at public events, when he's in costume form, he will
show off strange behavior that seems to baffle his human handlers.
One example given is that he will sit down on
the ground when it's time to dance.

Speaker 2 (51:49):
Well, and that makes sense too when you get into
the fact that ultimately these mascots are going to be
portrayed by a person in a costume, and then it
becomes a performance hard then it becomes a basic like
silent clowning routine, and therefore, like some of the basics
of entertaining costume work. Are you going to be in
play now?

Speaker 1 (52:09):
One thing that I thought was interesting that this essay
gets into is that often urukiara do speak, but from
what Ochi says, at least in the context of Kumaman,
they don't speak in person in the embodied form, so
the person in the costume is never going to make
a statement out loud, but the character may have their

(52:30):
words appear in print or be spoken for by an
attendant spokesperson. And I thought that was kind of interesting
because it reminded me of other characters. Specifically, I was
thinking of silent protagonists in video games, and examples of
this would be characters like Mario or Link from Legend

(52:52):
of Zelda, or Gordon Freeman in the Half Life games,
the protagonist of the Portal games. These are characters that
we never hear speak, at least not in sentences. We
might hear little exclamations or noises or single words, you know,
Mario might say yahoo or a little thing, but will

(53:12):
not like make a full statement. And these characters are
usually not understood to actually be mute within the storylines
of the games in which they appear. The way I've
always understood it is that within the story they can speak,
and the other characters have heard them speak and sometimes
react to them as if they are speaking in the moment,

(53:35):
but we do not hear them speak out loud ourselves.
And this seems to have some kind of magical relationship
to the fact that when we're playing the game we
are them. Some kind of magic would be broken if
we heard their voice speaking full coherent sentences, And so
that seemed in some ways parallel to the idea of

(53:55):
that like with Kumaman, you're not going to hear the
person in the suit speaking as Kumaman, but Kumaman is
understand understood to be able to speak. It's just that,
like words will only appear in print or something.

Speaker 2 (54:09):
And I think that is that is a key difference
from some of the Western counterparts that you might compare
them to, like Grimace talks, Ronald McDonald talks. You know,
the Starbucks Mermaid doesn't talk, but the Starbucks Mermaid doesn't
do anything.

Speaker 1 (54:22):
Yeah, And I wonder if a difference here is that
these mascots often represent localities or polities of some kind,
and so there are lots of people who are passively
being represented by them in some ways. So you know,
you sort of like are Kumaman if you are a
Kumamoto resident as sort of the avatar of your region.

(54:45):
So I wonder if there's a similar logic at work
that kind of prevents them from speaking in person, even
if they can be understood to have personalities in the
power of speech, just only being able to give quotes
in print.

Speaker 2 (54:57):
I think that's a great point because some of these
images you included in our notes of Kuman in his
natural habitat like he looks like I want to feel
if I go there, you know, And I think that's intended.
So there's that aspect to it for sure, like he
represents that it would and it would destroy the magic

(55:18):
if he spoke. And I guess also you could add
maybe two that the various physical suit performances. I have
seen footage of of these various mascots. There's a kind
of shyness to them that is part of the cute factor.
You know. Sometimes they're peeking from behind doorways or you know,
around corners at you. They're being a little shy, and
that's part of their cuddliness. You know, like if they

(55:40):
were chasing you down, it would not be the same vibe.

Speaker 1 (55:43):
Yeah. Now, there's a bunch of stuff about Kumaman that
I would like to get into, but I might save
some of it for part two, especially if we start
talking about connections between these characters and Yokai. But one
last thing I wanted to get to talking about Kumaman
right now is one of my favorite parts of this essay.

(56:05):
It is the insistence that, despite appearances, Kumaman is not
a bear. What Okay, he looks like a bear to me,
So what is he? Is he some kind some other
kind of animal that just looks like a bear. And
here I just have to simply read from Ochi's essay.
The answer makes reference to the concept of kigarumi, which

(56:26):
means costumed character. So a kigarumi is a person in
a costume, Ochi writes, quote, Another misconception about Kumaman is
that he is a bear, the animal he most resembles.
When I contacted Kumamoto Prefecture to use his image in
my chapter, I was told that any such statements must
be removed. Most Japanese people, along with foreign and domestic media,

(56:48):
say Kumaman is a bear and are surprised to learn otherwise.
Perhaps this reminds readers of the wildly popular news story
of August twenty fourteen, in which Sanrio insisted that Hello,
Kitty is not a cat.

Speaker 2 (57:02):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (57:03):
I remember that The paragraph goes on, not only is
Kumaman not a bear, he is not a human in
a fuzzy suit. As I was told by the Kumamoto
brand promotion office quote, the Kumaman you see in the
real world is not a kigaroomy. The thing you see
is his flesh and blood.

Speaker 2 (57:22):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (57:23):
So I this really got the gears going. So they're
not denying that the Kumaman costume looks like a bear.
They are denying that it is a costume, but it
is also not a real bear.

Speaker 2 (57:40):
Hmmm. Yeah. And this I guess they're kind of like
leaning into this kind of like on reality. This this
this third case. You know, it's like it's it's it's
almost like it's a supernatural being. Like you would say
that like getting into the world of Yokai, which we'll
get into more in the next episode. It's like saying, well,
a kappa is not a turtle and it's not a man.

(58:01):
It is and it would be wrong to say it's
a hybrid of the two, either it is its own thing, yeah,
and and yeah, oh boy, this is Yeah, it gets
into I wonder if part of this, too, is like
a Western impulse to need to strictly classify everything, like
we need to know, you know, what species this particular
mythological creature is without stopping to remind yourselves that it

(58:24):
exists in myth and therefore it has special classification.

Speaker 1 (58:28):
Well, I was thinking about it in another way, which
is that if you ask the question is Kumaman a bear?
You could mean sort of two different things by that question.
One is is a bear what it is supposed to resemble?
And the other is a sort of literal or reductive question,
like are you currently playing along with the game? So

(58:51):
we have you know, normally, if a person in a
costume or a cartoon representation of an animal, if I'm
thinking about that, there are two possible ways to think
about it. Either I'm playing along, which involves accepting the
thing as the thing it resembles or represents, So a
cartoon cat is a cat if I'm playing along, Or

(59:14):
there's being reductive, which would be taking a literal, objective
perspective and saying no, it's pixels. On a screen that
are intended to look like a cat, or in the
case of a person in a suit, it is a
human being inside a suit that is supposed to look
like a bear, and this is neither one. It's like
they are still asking you to play along. They're saying no, no, no,

(59:37):
we're not being literal and reductive that it's a human
inside a suit. What it actually objectively is we're still
playing the game, but we're not asking you to see
the character as the thing. It looks like it is
only what it is on the outside. No questions about
what's underneath.

Speaker 2 (59:54):
Okay. It's kind of like the concept of KFE and
pro wrestling. Then I guess it's like if you were
to ask about, I don't know, the Undertaker and you
were to say, well, was the Undertaker a zombie? No,
he's not a zombie. Is the Undertaker like a guy
from Texas pretending to be a zombie? No, he's not
that either, He's this other thing. He's got to like
approach it. You got to play the game, like you say,

(01:00:16):
he is what he is, Yeah, he is as presented.

Speaker 1 (01:00:21):
So I thought that was like worthy of a symbiotics
lecture or something. Interesting. I'm going to keep thinking on that.

Speaker 2 (01:00:28):
Oh.

Speaker 1 (01:00:28):
One very last thing I want to get to before
we wrap up for today is there is a section
of this essay where people are just trying to make
sense of why kumaman is being used in the for
the Glory of Satan memes. Now, I don't really know.
I wasn't familiar with these memes back in the day.
I didn't make them, obviously, but I if I had

(01:00:50):
to guess, I would just think it's the irony. It's
just like, he's cute, and thus it's funny to make
a cute thing say something that is, you know, menacing
or sin.

Speaker 2 (01:01:00):
Yeah. The juxposition is just like the Elmo you know,
hell fire thing.

Speaker 1 (01:01:04):
Yeah, exactly. One thing mentioned here is a Japanese news
report that's trying to make sense of the meme and
says and they speculate that it may have dimmed from
the similarity between the word kumaman and the word in
English demon or the names of specific demons in Christianity

(01:01:26):
mammon or ammon uh, and that I don't know. That
just seemed like, I don't think that's what it is,
but it's funny because that's the same kind of logic
we sometimes employed, and we're like trying to figure out
why something, why a cultural connection is made. It's like,
maybe it has to do with these sound alike words,
but like it, I really don't think that's it.

Speaker 2 (01:01:46):
Yeah, the Mammon thing came to my mind when we
were talking about the hell fire thing earlier. But then
I like, it's like it can't be it on a
mainstream level, Like that's that's more of a like a
deeper demonology cut that surely wasn't part of the decision
making process. And it is me.

Speaker 1 (01:02:04):
But then apparently this same news report speculated in the
other half that the answer is what is in my opinion,
almost certainly correct. It's just the juxtaposition of like the
cuteness and the evilness of Satan.

Speaker 2 (01:02:16):
Yeah. I mean, it's the same reason that the stay
Puff marshmallow Man runs a muck. It's the reason that
we have so many different stories horror tales that involve
like a murderous Santa or monstrous Santa. It's the juxtaposition.
It's the twisting, the flipping of the concept.

Speaker 1 (01:02:32):
Okay, do we need to break part one there?

Speaker 2 (01:02:34):
I think so. I think that's a good place to
break it off, but we will be back in our
next core episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind with
additional explorations of the world of Eurokiara, some more examples
of note that we thought were pretty interesting. We'll also
get into some of these connections that you know that
get into you know, religion and folklore, so make sure

(01:02:55):
you tune in for that, and in the meantime, certainly
right in and share your favorites with us. We'd love
to discuss that in future episodes of the Listener Mail
episodes that we run on Mondays. Also, if you reside
in Japan, have visited Japan, our Japanese and so forth,
and have additional thoughts on all of this, yes, write in.
We'd love to hear from you on all of that
as well. Please remind you of the Stuff to Blow

(01:03:17):
Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with
core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays Monday's Lister Mail Wednesdays
we have short form episodes, and on Fridays we set
aside most series concerns to just talk about a weird
film on Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 1 (01:03:30):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer jj Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is

(01:03:52):
production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (01:03:54):
For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite show
house to talk about