'Gachapon' gumballs gone wild

[Taro Toporific]

FOREVER YOUNG/Mini-Splurge: Toy land
Jan 5 / The Asahi Shimbun
...Businessman Masao Suzuki has a fetish his wife would rather he didn't.
It consumes a large portion of his free time-and his pocket money. He's even been known to dart out of his office during lunch hours to indulge himself... Suzuki stands fixated at one of 350 gachapon-gum-ball machines that vend toys such as figurines of popular cartoon characters and video-game heroes.
A thumb-size Godzilla figure worth 200 yen is Suzuki's intended target...Two trips to the money-changer, eight tries and 15 minutes later, Suzuki gets what he came for.
...the market for gum-ball-machine toys will grow to 31 billion yen by the end of this fiscal year, up from 26 billion yen in 2002 and nearly triple the 12 billion yen it was worth in 1994.

See also
... Geeks, freaks gettin' down to Gachapon.
MDN: maniAkiba / February 4, 2004
In a dingy side street tucked away from the blaring ...

[Taro Toporific]

Here's an update sort of....

Collectible toys leave a sour taste with candymakers
JAPANESE KITSCH: Confectioners had visions of profits ballooning when they hit on the toy-and-snack boxes idea but consumers have now grown disaffected REUTERS , TOKYO
Saturday, Jun 12, 2004,Page 12
... Go one better than bubble-gum cards and buried cereal treasures and offer high-quality collectible action figures, toy-model kits and other toys to sell snacks....
Naoko Takayama was among the enthusiastic collectors lured by the gimmick. The 34-year-old part-time worker has spent around US$9,000 in the past three years to collect 2,200 parakeets -- a thumb-sized plastic prize packed in Choco-Egg, an egg-shaped hollow chocolate made by unlisted confectioner Furuta Seika.
"Now my room is full of parakeets, just like [Alfred] Hitchcock's movie The Birds," Takayama said.
....But the initial boom that created an adult snack market has taken an unforeseen turn, forcing confectioners like Ezaki Glico Co, among the industry's leaders, to rethink their strategies.
"The market, unpredictably, became only for avid adult collectors and we are finding it difficult to attract general shoppers," said Glico spokesman Tsuyoshi Kiriishi....
The idea for the toy-and-snack boxes, called shokugan in Japanese, came from Fererro Japan Ltd, the Japanese unit of Italy's Fererro Group, which put a chocolate variation of the boxes on Japan's store shelves in 1998.