Word: dakkochans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Postwar Tokyo has had a passion for fads. For many years, it was pachinko, or playing the pinball machines. Then came the chubby plastic dakkochan dolls (TIME, Aug. 29, 1960) that clung to girls' arms and shoulders. The latest craze is angling parlors, where patrons can drop a line into a pool and, be mused by background music, fish for carp. The fad caught on last year when the angling parlors mushroomed from a few score to a present-day 539 in the heart of the city. One parlor was installed in a former bar with the pool behind...
...baby Martian clinging to her arm. Almost overnight the boom was on. By last week, in the hottest craze to hit Japan since the Hula Hoop, Tokyo department stores were filled with scrambling, stumbling, shoving teen-agers fighting to spend 180 yen (50?) for a squeaking, winking, black-skinned dakkochan ("embraceable") doll...
With over 300,000 dakkochans sold in the past two months, the odd little doll intended for toddlers now embraces Japanese teenagers' arms and handbags, housewives' broomhandles, children's strollers. It wriggles on the bodies of strip-teasers in burlesque houses, clings nonchalantly to girls clinging to their boyfriends on speeding motorcycles. So far has demand outrun production (7,000 a day) that many stores are forced to issue tickets entitling customers to buy a dakkochan when stocks are replenished. All night queues wind around entire blocks, and scalpers charge 500 yen ($1.39) not for a doll...
Just Crazy. The dakkochan is the brainchild of Yoshihiro Suda, 27, planning chief for Japan's toymaking Tsukudaya Co. Last February Suda began experimenting with a U.S. made plastic-and-cardboard eye that appears to wink whenever the angle at which light hits it is changed. Suda placed the come-hither eye in a 12-in. doll made of black sheet plastic inflated with air. Besides its stubby, clinging arms, the dakkochan boasts ring-shaped ears, a red doughnut mouth and a plastic grass skirt. Girl dakkochans can be told from boy dakkochans by the fact that the girls...
...first Suda was not too optimistic about the sales of his doll. Today, with a raging boom on his hands, he says: "The whole thing is crazy." But Japanese intellectuals, who can be pretty crazy themselves, have been quick to discover social significance in the dakkochan's black skin. Citing the growing popularity of Negro jazz. Artist Setsu Nagasawa argues that "a Negro culture wave seems to be sweeping Japanese youth." Novelist Tensei Kawano, who has featured Negroes in four books, asserts: "We of the younger generation are outcasts from politics and society. In a way we are like...
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