Regional governments in Japan generate billions of dollars in local economic stimulus by creating chubby, cute, and utterly bizarre official mascots to promote tourism and local agricultural products.

A closer look

Regional governments in Japan generate billions of dollars in local economic stimulus by creating chubby, cute, and utterly bizarre official mascots to promote tourism and local agricultural products. The most successful of these characters, a rosy-cheeked black bear named Kumamon, represents the relatively rural Kumamoto Prefecture and has single-handedly generated well over ten billion dollars in merchandising revenue since his creation. These mascots, known as yuru-chara, appear on everything from high-speed trains to limited-edition snacks, effectively tricking both children and adults into spending vast amounts of disposable income out of sheer brand loyalty to a fictional entity. It is a wildly effective macroeconomic strategy that completely embarrasses western municipal marketing, proving that a major industrial nation can significantly boost its gross domestic product simply by hiring a guy in a giant plush bear suit to aggressively wave at tourists in a train station