There are endless promotional “campaigns” to sign up for new services or payment platforms, raffles and contests constantly running with you being begged to enter on every other app or website or vehicle or even physical receipts, and so on.
What exactly has contributed or made Japan like this – and to an extent that’s way more prevalent (or at least visible) than anywhere else, in my experience – in the past ~30 years since the advent of widespread personal technology?
Edit: Deleted part of my first paragraph because people stopped reading halfway into the first sentence and are focusing on one specific minor example that wasn’t the best/only example of what I’m talking about.
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It’s not only Japan, it’s an Asia thing.
Gacha is fast dopamine and in Japan most people just don’t have time to grind.
I think Japanese have really packed schedules and don’t seek out entertainment like foreigners do. It’s more word of mouth or like you said, advertisements that land right on their lap. The games that are easy and can play in short bursts become very popular. An example is the スイカゲーム or ツムツム. Another reason is that smartphones have generally made people’s attention span shorter. People just want easy and fast. Times are changing. Not to mention, the way they design those games are like crack and make companies a lot of money. The “Freemium model.”
in Asia people likes to gamble thats a fact, and because gambling in casinos is ilegal in Japan the only way for gambling is through gacha and raffles (or pachinkos – slots). With more access to technology more ways to introduce soft gambling that is allowed by the law.
What else to do on your commute if not to play a mindless game? Sometimes you need to detach from the shit. I’ve enjoyed the Disney TsumTsum game before, it’s basically bejeweled.
money
The same reason Candy Crush took off in the west 15 years ago: people enjoy mindless entertainment.
Add in the long train commutes, and you have a recipe for endless tapping and swiping.
Those quick dopamine hits are also addictive.
You spend an 1+ hour on the train. You spend 12+ hours at the office, probably eating at your desk. You spend another 1+ hour on the train. Supposedly the human body needs to sleep as well.
You need a mental break but you live in an apartment the size of a bathroom that you can’t have a 70 inch TV or full gaming rig in it. Why wouldn’t you turn to the electronic device that is literally with you all day?
Companies go where the eyes and money are. If the above is correct, why wouldn’t you dump cash into the latest Anime JPEG Collector?
Why do people think all these social ills are restricted to Japan? People in the West gamble, lie, play shitty gatcha on they phones and eat hot chip too.
Historically, Japanese people have been attracted to gambling, as seen with games like Cho-Han (丁半) in the past and Pachinko today. Gacha, combining gambling with anime/games, has further heightened this addiction. Additionally, there is a prevalent issue of super chat addiction among us, Japanese people.
Vtubers accumulate substantial earnings through this phenomenon. It is essential to address and potentially prohibit these practices, as many people find themselves wasting significant amounts of money.
They are plenty of western games out there with gambling mechanics such as “loot boxes.” This is not unique to Japan and Asia.
OP, feel free to drop me a PM and happy to answer. Wrote several research papers and my thesis on the mobile gacha phenomenon a couple of years ago and also interviewed Japanese players including “whales”(heavy spenders) for that.
Capitalism. Every quarter must have bigger profits, new ideas, new products manufactured in the millions, louder commercials to drown out the competition, cuts to services and salaries to boost that bottom line, tarento sales people looking younger and more beautiful… Always faster and bigger and brighter. It’s happening everywhere, but Asian countries are more predisposed to ‘information-dense’ messaging so it feels more overwhelming here. Is there a breaking point?
I’d also blame the LDP, especially Abe gov., for subduing the media though restricting press freedom, making the mainstream extra-sanitised.
You haven’t really shown this is unique to Asia.
Fortnite got huge when it stopped being about building forts and became centered around Gacha mechanics. Almost any game that is popular with the youth these days has virtual gacha mechanics. Before that, all the collectable card games. Before that, baseball cards. This is not an Asia thing – the differences you’re noticing are only superficial.
Hell, we just finally got done with a bunch of mostly western voices trying to promote NFTs, which were often employed with gacha mechanics, to everyone else in the world.
The old shopping mall in my American home town installed banks of gacha machines. It’s a world-wide phenomenon. It always has been. Before the word gacha entered our vocabulary, it was blind-box. Before that, it was the prize at the bottom of the Cracker Jack box.
Likewise, “campaign” is just the Japanese idiom for a sale or promotion. Which obviously happens all over the world. Hell, as a kid, I used to only go to McDonald’s when they were doing their Monopoly promotion so I could blindly peel properties off my coke cups and fry packets and see what I’d get.
You can play anywhere, the games are free, don’t need a console or dlc to play, there are many events/updates to keep the gamers engaged, gambling addicting hard to quit aspect.
It’s perfect for Japanese lifestyle where many students or adults commute by train or bus. And it’s a good escape from the busy life and the dreary social culture aspect of Japan.
It’s not a new thing, and it’s not a Japan-only thing either. Your impression of the situation might be short-sighted.
> I see dozens of people playing on their phones every day
Not everyone on the phone is grinding some gacha game tho?
Sure, you’ll see “dozens” of people playing on a commute (relatively). But think about it: you see hundreds (or even a thousand or so, depending on what route and where you go) of people on the commute. Even if you just narrow it down to those who’d use a free hand (or both) to hold a phone, a majority of them aren’t playing a gacha (and not all all games are gacha games). My without-researching-a-thing guess is that a greater majority would be on some video/social media platform or news.
> endless promotional “campaigns”
That’s how targeted advertising works: the demographic of your location likely indicates a high prevalence of the target audience. Also, gacha ads tend to be very eye-catching, which is effective for the product it is selling. Other products will not bid higher for those ad spaces since their products or services will not benefit as much from the exposure, so now you see a prevalence of that kind of ad.
This isn’t a “unique to Japan” thing, it’s a unique to your specific location thing. Every public commercial high-traffic area with ad spaces in any city in any country will have its fill of dominant ad types which will be reflective of the local demographic. You can’t use that as a gauge of measuring the social/industry trends of an entire country, though of the local population, you could use that as part of useful data.
Another consideration is that the volume of Japan-only gacha games and the fact that its majority of users are geographically isolated in a couple of cities – so promotions are higher in volume in those areas.
Also, the English versions of these games (usually with different servers for SEA, EU, and the NA), will have completely different markets (as the Japanese players will likely only play the Japanese version of it), so you’ve got an isolated market of users that are susceptible to ads (being hardcore gacha players) that is easy to target with ads. Of course I’m generalizing by a large margin, there are players who would not care a bit about the ads and promotions. That aside, this explains why the marketing in Japan is a little different as compared to other countries where the users are more spread out, thus ad spaces not optimum for gacha ads (and other industries benefit higher for renting the space).
> What exactly has contributed or made Japan like this
Profit.
Not just Japan, but the entire world: monetization. Every form of progress in technology: be it in medicine, agriculture, communication, military, etc is monetized. The simple rule is that if it can be monetized, and will be monetized.
That’s the reason why almost every digital service is trying to steal your data, study your preferences, or just outright make you buy something: because it is profitable. Gacha games are digital games coated on top of a gambling system -and it is effective since the gambling portion is often made optional, creating a false sense of security for users.
All that said, I don’t really see the problem if there’s some prevalence. The promotions aren’t bad (from an objective standpoint, they are aesthetically interesting and are effective in what they are for). The people playing games just mind their own thing.
And that final aspect: the end users of the games -isn’t unique to Japan at all. Gacha is prevalent in other countries too. Sure, Tokyo might have the highest volume of users per sqm, but that’s a by-product of a congested city and not a measure of a genre’s country-wide popularity. And just because they don’t use the word gacha, other games from other regions of the world do use similar or even worse gambling systems (one could even argue that the systems in other games victimize players in ways that gacha won’t — *cough* Diablo Immortal *cough*).
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I’m sure there’s more nuanced things that should be considered and would likely apply to the discussion. Gashapon and lucky bags do exist. But I don’t need to we need to dig that deep.
It makes commuting by train a lot more interesting.
Gatcha? Been here a long time and I’ve not ever heard of this. How am I so out of touch
gacha make monkey brain happy
Basically gambling but culturally allowed for all ages. Since it feeds into depression I don’t spend money on them but see why people do it. Genshin can shove it I’m not paying a single yenny for characters.
I am going to venture another partial explanation:
*Vertical integration historically practiced/pushed by Japanese firms.* Consider Sony, for example: it long has made things that don’t integrate with any other company’s products: there are/were special connectors only for Sony products, software designed to only work with other Sony products, and ominous warnings or hints that buying non-Sony replacement parts or accessories can harm the product are printed any every product manual.
Sony, however, is only an example. Most firms do it; the situation is essentially like that with Apple writ small and multiplied. The goal is to keep customers from even wondering if other products can do the same things or other companies can offer the same services. It’s one reason, I think, the klunky Yahoo! and Rakuten survive and more or less thrive here. People are used to dealing with one firm only.
I would rather see ads for 5x Rakuten points than ads for antidepressants.
I’m by no means an expert, but I reckon it has to do with Japanese gambling laws, or rather the exceptions to said laws when it comes to lotteries, as well as the rise of capitalist society and industry competition. I also wonder why Japan has so many campaigns, so allow me to write my thoughts.
**Gambling**
Officially, gambling is illegal in Japan. However, Pachinko, lotteries (especially 宝くじ) etc get around the law in various ways.
Pachinko gets around it by having you play with balls instead of money directly and having you “cash out” at ‘totally unrelated’ establishments next door to pachinko parlours. It also contributes about 5% of Japan’s GDP, so is for all intents and purposes supported by the government (if not outright endorsed by it).
Lotteries have a special exception to gambling laws as they have, since the 1600s, been used as fundraisers for shrines and temples and (more commonly nowadays) for local councils. **Winnings are also not taxed**, which has led to them being widely viewed as a positive thing – you’re not ‘gambling’, you’re donating to your city with a chance of a kickback.
These two things I think have contributed to Japanese society having a relatively pro-luck mentality, which allows things like campaigns and lotteries to prosper.
**Society**
In Japanese working society, traditionally time spent on the grind has been rewarded more than hard work. Many businesses still choose to promote their elderly employees over the young that have ideas, partly as in the 80s and 90s doing what you’ve always done was generally a safer driver of profit than taking risks. This way of thinking and running business is definitely on the decline, but even the more progressive companies often still have 会長 pulling strings and taking a salary in their 80s.
In any case, in a society where hard work doesn’t necessarily lead to success, it is the lucky that are rewarded. This mentality has trickled down into the everyday psyche and has been compounded by capitalist marketing methods, resulting in an emphasis on seeking rewards through luck in everyday life, as well as naturally doing whatever you can to maximise your rewards.
Stores therefore offer huge varieties of promotions, for which the average person can feel successful through having found some sort of deal or having won some sort of campaign. Even tiny wins, like an extra 1% points back on your purchases, can make you feel like you’re ‘winning’ and therefore are successful, even when your life might not reflect this.
Ultimately these promotions exist to benefit the store more than the customer, either by imbuing brand loyalty or by passively conducting market research, but the positive reinforcement they offer keeps people coming back for that taste of success – something further incentivised by encouraging people to maximise their reward potential (like with Rakuten’s SPU). It’s an addictive cycle and something that Japanese society obviously puts a lot of emphasis on.
**Competition**
Other countries also have campaigns, lotteries etc via their shops and services. Next time you go to a western supermarket, check the receipt – it probably has a barcode you can scan for a chance to win something or other. However, other (1st world) countries have more of less consolidated their markets around a small few giant brands, which has reduced the need for such strong competition.
In the UK, for example, we have the Tesco Clubcard and the Nectar card, either of which would cover all your supermarket, fuel and travel needs. Most people shop online on Amazon and most people pay for goods online with Paypal. All stores will accept contactless credit cards and most people just use whichever card that came with their bank.
In Japanese society, however, there are a million different types of rewards points, payment methods, credit cards, communication vectors and even varieties of mundane groceries like milk. Each competing ecosystem must attempt to attract as many customers as possible, or die off. There is no one payment method as widespread as either Paypal or contactless in the UK – instead we have PayPay, LINE Pay, Yucho Pay, Rakuten Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay etc.
Also, based on which shop you go to, you can get T points, D points, R points, Matsukiyo points, Sundrug points, AEON points… the list goes on.
Some stores accept one but not another and some still accept cash only (discount drugstore Cosmos even proudly promotes that “doing away with cards and points allows it sell goods at lower prices”).
The point is there’s not one default centralised ecosystem that everyone uses like Tesco Clubcard or paying with contactless, so there’re loads of competing ones instead. And what’s the best way of getting someone to use your ecosystem instead of your competitors’? **Make them feel like they’re saving more money with yours: campaigns, lotteries and bonuses.** Because people *love* feeling like they’re saving money.
**tl:dr**
Overall I think it comes down to this: Japan looks upon campaigns and lotteries more favourably than other countries for cultural reasons. Japanese society traditionally grants success to the lucky and minimises rewards for hard work. Japan lacks a centralised payment and point system, leading to fierce competition. These factors combine lead Japanese companies to give a high emphasis to said campaigns and lotteries, with which the public enthusiastically engage.
Why in the world would you think this is unique to Japan?
You need to get out more…
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