Otaku tourism saves small town
A news report from Asahi TV about the small town of Ugo in Akita Prefecture, which has undergone a tourism boom after giving its local products a Moe makeover:
Like many rural towns in Japan, Ugo’s population is in decline. There are few career opportunities in Ugo, so most young people leave the area in search of work when they reach adulthood. In the past ten years, Ugo’s population has dropped by ten percent, leaving the town with just 18,000 residents.
Things looked bad for Ugo, but the situation seems to be getting better thanks to a clever idea hatched by a local otaku named Takaori Yamauchi. Manga illustrators were hired to design labels that gave Ugo’s agricultural products a unique moe image. Local farmers had previously struggled to sale their rice crop, but after placing their rice in bags with bishojo illustrations, sales increased astronomically (36 tons were sold in just the first month, compared to the usual annual sale of 18 tons). Ujo has also started selling packs of moe curry, moe strawberries, and even “moe shochu. The sale of such products over the internet has drawn male otaku visitors from across the country, and local shops have started selling moe-themed Ugo posters and t-shirts.
At the end of the report, Asahi TV checks on the tourist who was shown buying a bag of rice earlier in the segment. It seems the man isn’t yet planning to eat the rice, and prefers to put it on display alongside his many anime figurines. He says the lovely bag of rice is like a wife to him.
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I`m like laughing reading this article…
looks like Moe sells
Looks like its useful for bake sales too
“He says the lovely bag of rice is like a wife to him.”
Japan is doomed.
like a wife? Get a life!
like a life? Get a … er … dammit:(
Like a life? get a knife!
Those are actually 2 2ch memes:
_____はオレのヨメ and 日本オワタ
i’m still laughing xDDD
small town with not many people,
many youngsters have left the town,
it reminds me many dramas, movies, even animes.
lol
nice story indeed
Japan is not doomed but Japan is too centralized. I would take the country side over Tokyo any day if I was in Japan but it is difficult to find jobs in the country side. The government could start plans of decentralizing the country more. A good place to start would be to move the capital city out of Tokyo.
Anyhow. Ganbare Ugo!
There’s got to be a “pounding the mochi” joke there somewhere…
Anyway, I wonder how much of this is real and how much is PR agency fluff. The sales figures seem a bit too high (what happened before with the left-over rice? Can a small town produce that much, etc, etc) for my liking.
Anyway, moe fans are all closet kiddy-fiddlers, and if I were prime minister I’d lock them all up.
I’m by no means an expert, but I believe the extra rice is bought by the government as emergency food stocks. There’s a whole separate issue about the imbalance of the huge overproduction of rice and rice farmer subsidies amidst other domestically grown foods being inadequate to feed Japan alone…but I won’t elaborate on that here.
There’s a certain Miami attorney who was dibarred recently on the line … it’s for you.
I have no idea, how about that rice, but shōchū (like Hanayome-Dōchu, that “moe shochu” made in Ugo) was always popular there.
And yes it has similar moe label by Nishimata Aoi so maybe became more popular becasue a bunch of drunker-otaku?
I wonder whether having a bag of rice as a wife is better than having one of those life-sized plastic dolls? It’s certainly cheaper, and — if guests drop by — less embarrassing. But yes, how sad.
Hmmm. Might be fun to come up with a list of ways in which a bag of rice is better than a wife….
Everything was fine and dandy until that last sentence.
muhahah i would love to see the guys face when his rice-bag-wife is starting to rot and smell xD
Rice keeps pretty long, eh. I have a big bag of rice that I’ve had since at least 2005 and it’s still fine to eat.