Hasta La Gadget!

Another day, another anime-themed promotional campaign. It still sometimes surprises me how the so-called moe and otaku (geek) “subcultures” have now become so suffused into the Japanese mainstream. I’m not convinced it is a wholly healthy thing for marketing — from the point of view of vibrancy and variety — since the imagery has become so ubiquitous these days, but if it is attracting new customers to troubled services, who am I to argue?

Two ferry companies shuttling passengers between the main island of Honshu and the fourth largest Japanese island, Shikoku, have turned to similar methods for pushing up passenger numbers. Both Kokudo Ferry and Nankai are producing merchandise with female moe cartoon imagery to attract younger customers and, judging at least by the sales of the products, it seems to be working.

The ferries have seen business decline, aggravated by the government’s highly publicized highway toll discounts for encouraging people to get in their cars and drive to regions around the country.

[Images via Asahi]

Kokudo’s slightly racy Utakakarin-chan was created by Akira Yamato; initially available as two stickers from spring last year, she sold out in a month. The company added another girl over the summer as a t-shirt and this also sold out in two months. (Unfortunately, it’s not known how limited the production numbers were.) The latest female character came out in January this year, forming a set of three sisters promoting the ferry service’s fiftieth anniversary.

The Nankai characters were two fictional high school girls brought up locally respectively at the two ports the ferry serves, designed by an illustrator from the region.

Apparently there was also a successful use of similar characters for packaging on rice from northern Akita Prefecture in late 2008, with the result that in sales of rice in three months equalled that usually sold over three years, according to J-Cast. The organizers then followed that up with using the moe motifs on bottle labels for shochu from the region.

[Image via Gigazine]

With the government highway toll nationwide discount scheme set to kick in again from April, the real battle between the re-animeated ferries and the roads is about to begin…