Ask John: Why Are Plushies So Rare?

Question:
While watching numerous items on eBay over the last three years, I have seen many anime and game related products sell for ruthless amounts of money. Two perfect examples include Inuyasha UFO plushies and Final Fantasy VII plushies. A sesshoumaru plush goes for well over $50 frequently while a Sephiroth plush can easily sell for over $100 or even $150. Why do companies that produce anime and game related plushies (like Banpresto) not increase the supply if demand exceeds the supply? By not doing so, these companies allow outsiders to basically “steal” the profits deserved by the companies themselves.

Answer:
The sort of plush dolls you’re referring to are not typical stuffed toys. Their Japanese name is “meigurumi” but they’re most commonly known among fans as “UFO catcher” dolls because they’re designed to be “won” from the crane games found in Japanese video game arcades. (The crane arm on many of these games is shaped like a UFO, hence the nick name “UFO catcher”). These toys aren’t sold in normal Japanese retail stores. Typically the only way to get them is to either win them from arcade machines or buy them used from second hand anime shops like Mandarake and K-Books. The difficultly in acquiring them contributes to their unusual collectable value. Furthermore, just like “gachapon” (gumball machine toys) and “shokugan” (candy premium toys), meigurumi are seasonal. A limited number of meigurumi dolls will be produced in a given series, and will only be available in arcade crane games for a few months until they’re replaced by a new series of dolls or replaced by plush dolls from the latest hot franchise. Toy manufacturers like Sega and Banpresto frequently rotate their lines and take older plushies out of production in order to keep the attraction of arcade crane games fresh.

Japanese manufacturers don’t usually keep these small and cheap plush dolls in production for extended time periods because they have no reason to. They’re designed to be impulse, novelty attractions that convince arcade gamers to drop 200 yen into an arcade machine. They’re also timely, often produced to coincide with current popular trends and disappear just as quickly. For example, you won’t see Final Fantasy VII meigurumi in Japanese arcades now because Final Fantasy VII is old. Presumably there’s not enough consistent market in Japan for these types of stuffed toys to manufacture them for normal retail stores. There are higher quality, more expensive plush dolls available in normal Japanese retail stores for consumers who want them.

Vintage UFO catcher dolls may fetch a premium among non-Japanese fans in part because of their relative rarity, but presumably these dolls are worth nearly $100 in Japan or companies like Sega would capitalize on that demand by mass producing them for normal retail outlet sale. Companies like Sega and Banpresto can’t be overly concerned with after market foreign sales, as such increases in demand are a natural force of the market. Even mass marketed action figures, comic books, and trading cards frequently turn up in hobby shops and comic stores years later with inflated prices, yet the original manufacturer will see none of that profit.

But ultimately, the decision not to mass market UFO catcher dolls may be attributable to differences in the native Japanese and international markets, and just native Japanese business practices versus domestic ideas of commercial enterprise. To illustrate, American manufacturers have begun producing continuing availability lines of domestic meigurumi such as the Trigun Vash the Stampede plushie and Cowboy Bebop Ed & Ein plushie available at AnimeNation and other anime retailers.