Japan’s Obsessive Capsule ‘Gachapon’ Figures Culture

I didn’t plan to come home from Tokyo with a suitcase full of tiny plastic figures. Nobody does. But that’s the thing about gachapon, Japan’s iconic capsule toy machines, they pull you in before you even realise what’s happening.

It starts innocently enough. You spot a row of colourful machines outside a convenience store, each one promising some bizarre miniature treasure for a few hundred yen. You think, “I’ll just try one.” Three hours later, you’re on the fifth floor of a dedicated capsule store, surrounded by hundreds of machines, desperately hunting for a tiny cat dressed as a shark to complete your collection.

The range is absolutely mental. Creepy Winnie the Pooh figures (some of which I must admit were looking rather unsettlingly). Furbys. Godzilla in every possible pose. Pokémon, obviously. But it goes far beyond the expected. There are capsules containing miniature VHS players, vintage cameras, and old tech that millennials will weep over. Food replicas spanning everything from detailed sushi rolls to random squid and oysters. Hello Kitty in approximately seven thousand variations. Superheroes, anime characters, and things you genuinely cannot identify but absolutely need to own.

And then there’s the totally weird stuff. Hot dogs with faces. Ketchup bottles with little expressions. Mayo with emotions. Condiments with personality, basically. It’s the kind of thing that makes you question everything, who designed this? Who asked for this? Why do I now desperately need a sad-looking mustard bottle for my desk? Japan doesn’t answer these questions. It just keeps making them.

You can find a capsule toy of basically anything that has ever existed, and probably a few things that shouldn’t.

The dedicated stores are something else entirely, multi-storey buildings packed floor to ceiling with nothing but these machines, hundreds lined up in neat rows like some sort of gambling den for people who peaked during their Kinder Egg phase. Families crowd around them, kids trade duplicates with strangers, and grown adults stand there genuinely stressed about whether they’ll pull the rare variant.

There’s even a solution for when you inevitably end up with duplicates you don’t want: recycling machines where you can trade in your unwanted capsules for another spin, another chance at glory.

So if you’re heading to Japan, keep your eyes peeled for the gachapon machines. Actually, scratch that, you won’t miss them. They’re everywhere, lurking on street corners and in train stations, waiting to separate you from your spare change and your luggage space.

Consider yourself warned.