No Labubus please, we're Japanese

Why a toy craze isn't finding traction in a toy-crazed country

The year is 2008. A globally popular product finally reaches Japanese shores – only to crash and burn because customers didn’t find it cute enough. That product was the iPhone, and it initially failed here for a reason that surprised Apple: it didn’t include support for emoji. The little glyphs were, at the time, peculiar to Japan — unknown abroad but indispensable for local mobile phone users.

The year is 2025. A globally popular product finally reaches Japanese shores – only to crash and burn because customers didn’t find it cute enough. That product is the Labubu doll, and its inability to gain traction in the planet’s capital of cuteness tells us a lot about China, Japan, and the state of the world in general.

Labubus are plush dolls of furry little elves with mischievous toothy grins. They represent one of the biggest fads in global pop culture of the moment. The figures debuted in China in 2015, but remained a local curiosity. Then a K-pop star flashed one in 2024, and they went viral, becoming must-have accessories for celebs, sports stars, and influencers around the globe. That in turn makes them them must-haves for anyone who aspires to be anyone. The Chinese firm Pop Mart has sold so many of the things that they’ve made more than 1.9 billion USD in just the first half of this year alone.

It isn’t particularly surprising that something like Labubus spawned a fad. In a world gone mad, humanity has developed an insatiable appetite for ubercute characters with the power to delight and soothe. But the vast majority of them have traditionally come from Japan, led by the indefatigable Hello Kitty. Thanks to her and her cohorts, Japan’s cute factor has so thoroughly permeated the global imagination that kawaii, the Japanese word for things adorable, is now firmly entrenched in the global lexicon. (The Oxford English Dictionary added it way back in 2011.)

Does the appearance of a Chinese contender represent a sea change in global tastes? The New York Times has wondered as much, asking if “This Not-Particularly-Cute Elf Can Make China Cool?” Other pundits are more enthusiastic: The Diplomat has declared Labubus “a brand new frontier in Chinese soft power,” while the People’s Daily, mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, has proclaimed Labubus “a benchmark for China’s pop culture making inroads overseas.”

With just one exception, it seems.

“Character-crazed Japan has little appetite for Labubu,” declared The Japan Times in a feature exploring one of the few markets the little goblins have failed to penetrate. Yuko Tamura portrays Japan as a kind of cuddly Kumite from Bloodsport, filled with world-class mascots who defend the nation from outsiders, no matter how big their followings abroad. Every fad is a delicate balance of the familiar and novel; Tamura theorizes that Labubu is a little too familiar to spark joy among Japanese audiences. There are already plenty of deviously cute characters running around the islands of Japan.

To this I’d add another observation. My sense, after twenty-plus years here, is that Japanese are not really plugged into global trends, not really citizens of the world. Young people aren’t travelling abroad in the numbers they once did; they don’t follow foreign news (or any news) as closely as previous generations. Much of Japan’s cool factor is built on the fact that creators and consumers don’t really care about the outside world. Labubus are out-competed in Japan, while Japanese audiences’ inward forcus strips away the dolls’ questionable “utility” as signifiers and status symbols.

This one-two punch of being a nation is so steeped in kawaii and so oblivious to global trends has resulted in a sort of pop-cultural immune response — a Labubu vaccine. This resistance isn’t borne of hostility or protectionism; there’s a PopMart store in Harajuku, and Uniqlo is about to launch a Labubu T-shirt collab. Rather, it’s a combo of having been exposed to a far greater number of cute characters than anywhere else, and not really caring about what’s going on in the outside world. Thus Labubus don’t hit here in the way they do in the West. Or, apparently, Kyrgyzstan. In Japan, it’s Chiikawa time, all the time.

Japan may well represent an edge case. Labubus really are popular around the globe. But do they really represent a surge of soft power? That’s a lot harder to quantify. The late Joseph Nye, who coined the term, described soft power as “the ability to get what one wants by attraction and persuasion rather than coercion or payment.” It’s about making others want the same things you do because they like you. But those who toss around the term casually often forget that a nation’s cultural exports are interpreted through the lenses of its politics and foreign policies.

In other words, it is extremely difficult to achieve or maintain soft power if you’re constantly associated with scary, controversial, or rage-inducing things. This is, in fact, one secret to Japan’s rise as a cultural superpower. I call it the “dark matter” of Japan’s fantasy-industrial complex: Japan is beloved by everybody precisely because its political stances are clear to nobody.

Consider that much of what the world loves about Japan today – anime, manga, video games, “city pop” – was already well established in the Eighties. Yet Japan enjoyed little soft power then, because its trade policies made it the adversary of the Western industrial world. Only after Japan’s economy collapsed and it disappeared from the headlines did it slowly but steadily emerge as the soft superpower it is known as today.

China plays the role of that adversary now. Unlike Japan, it is in the headlines all the time. And many of those headlines are not positive. The New York Times and Nikkei Asia are reporting that the top films playing in Chinese theaters are stirring hatred for Japan; foreign papers are filled with imagery of Xi Jinping welcoming Vladmir Putin to a summit; Chinese warships are colliding as they attempt to drive Filipino fishermen out of contested waters. It’s tough to square this kind of thing with the cuddly image Labubus project.

In the end, that might not even matter, because it is questionable as to how many consumers of Labubus connect them to China. Labubus are made there. But they don’t really transmit Chinese values. They are the creation of a Hong Kong artist who was raised in the Netherlands and based his designs on Nordic folklore. They came to the attention of the world through a Thai singer in a Korean pop group. And they are most often spotted dangling from European luxury bags. Their globalized origin is entirely of the moment, but it doesn’t leave much of a thread to trace back to China, save, perhaps, the steady stream of revenues.

The New Yorker columnist Kyle Chayka has described Labubu as “IRL brainrot,” in that memes and AI slop have reshaped the tastes of Millennials and Zillenials into a defensive, ironic embrace of ugliness. W. David Marx pegs them to dynamic in which popularity isn’t driven by how liked something is, but also by how many people dislike it enough to comment on it. “There are engaged, paying consumers of Labubus,” as he puts it, “and there are sour, reluctant consumers of the Labubu narrative.” (I feel seen.) It’s a yin-yang of controversy that fuels viral buzz of plushies and political culture-wars everywhere. Everywhere but Japan, that is.

Back in 2008, Softbank quickly realized Apple’s mistake and lobbied to have a makeshift emoji palette installed on Japanese iPhones. This had the twin effects of making the iPhone a hit, and putting emoji on the radar of Silicon Valley, which brought them to the world. Could the reverse happen? Could PopMart engineer a work-around for Japan’s Labubu vaccine, making the little gremlins as popular here as they are in the outside world? Maybe. But they’ll have to get through Chiikawa, and a whole lot of societal ennui, first.