This Is Japan
Explore everyday life in Japan
As you walk into many restaurants, shopping centers, public athletic facilities, game centers, and other places in Japan, you will find these toy dispensers lying in wait for you and your children. If you don’t have any children, then you will find these toy dispensers tempting the children around you, turning a handful of them into glossy eyed and covetous beings squatting in front of the toy dispensers and pawing at them, sometimes turning to their parents or grandparents and begging, Please, Mommy, please. Daddy, I want this one. Buy it now! Grandma, Grandpa, give me money!
These toy dispensers are called Gatcha Gatcha in Japanese, and they are almost as prevalent in Japan as their infamous and well-documented counterpart, the vending machine. While it is tempting to think that Gatcha Gatcha is actually a misunderstood version of the English phrase Gotcha! because of the way that it seems like the toy dispensers and their owners, knowing the power they have over your children and the situation they are putting you in as you try to smoothly enter a busy restaurant, wait for a table to open, eat dinner without any arguments or temper tantrums, and return to your car peacefully, are laughing at you and saying, Ha, ha, ha. Gotcha! The term is actually one of the many, many onomatopoeic phrasings that the Japanese language has. It represents the sound of the plastic capsules moving around and bumping into each other as a person turns the dial on the toy dispenser—gatcha, gatcha, gatcha, gatcha.
One kaiten sushi chain (conveyor belt sushi restaurant), Kura Sushi, has even gone so far as to incorporate the power of the Gatcha Gatcha toy dispenser into their dining experience. The table of each booth in the restaurant is connected to a wall that not only has a conveyor belt of constantly moving sushi built into it, but also has a slot for you or your children to slide your empty plates into. Each time a plate is passed through the slot, the plate is counted. After you have eaten ten plates of sushi, a slot machine-like video appears on the booth’s touchscreen menu, which is mounted to the wall of the conveyor belt, and you have a chance to win a toy from the Gatcha Gatcha machine that sits above it. As you can imagine, this has quite an effect on sales. If you and your family have eaten forty-eight plates of sushi and feel quite full, but your children haven’t won a toy from the Gatcha Gatcha machine yet, or if you have two children and only one of them has won a toy, it is quite easy to give in and buy two more plates of sushi for 100 yen a piece and see if you can’t win another Gatcha Gatcha prize.
If Steemit were to employ a similar award chance for commenting (a Steempower or Steem Dollar slot machine that was offered to you on every tenth comment that you made, or every time you got ten up-voted comments), imagine the effect this would have on commenting.
This is an ongoing series that will explore various aspects of daily life in Japan. My hope is that this series will not only reveal to its followers, image by image, what Japan looks like, but that it will also inform its followers about unique Japanese items and various cultural and societal practices. If you are interested in getting regular updates about life in Japan, please consider following me at @boxcarblue. If you have any questions about life in Japan, please don’t hesitate to ask. I will do my best to answer all of your questions.
hell, so much comment spam :D
You're probably right. Things would get hectic.
I can imagine: bots. bots everywhere...
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