Flock of cranes folded by flashy women comes with a side of philosophy.
Finally!
There’s something that’s been on our ace reporter Mr. Sato’s shopping list for months now. Ever since he heard that there was going to be a line of gyaru origami, paper cranes folded by women from the flashy gyaru subset of the Japanese fashion world, he’s wanted to buy them. With the capsule toys going on sale a few weeks ago, Mr. Sato has been keeping his eyes peeled whenever he walks past a bank of gacha machines, and he finally found Origami Cranes Folded by Gyaru being offered in front of the branch of discount retailer Don Quijote in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Kabukicho neighborhood.
▼ Once again proving that Don Quijote sells just about everything.
Though each capsule contains a crane, there are actually five different versions to collect, each with a different color and a respective gyaru who folded it.
Completionist that he is, Mr. Sato was determined to go home with the full set. Since each capsule costs 300 yen (US$2.40), Mr. Sato did some quick math and reasoned that the complete set should cost him 1,500 yen.
▼ Some of you may already be pointing out the errors in Mr. Sato’s overly simplistic simulation, but gacha probability computation really isn’t our strong suit.
So Mr. Sato dropped three 100-yen coins into the slot, turned the crank, and, out dropped a capsule containing the blue crane.
His next turns got him the yellow and green cranes.
Wow, maybe he really is going to get the whole set in just five tr-
Oh, maybe not.
Still, the red and pink cranes showed up on his sixth and seventh tries, and all in all, five unique gacha drops for 2,100 yen isn’t bad luck at all.
Now that he’d formed his flock of origami birds, it was back to SoraNews24 to take a closer look, starting with a blue crane.
According to the product description, the blue cranes are all folded by a gyaru named Mocchi. While it’s still recognizable as a crane, more or less, this doesn’t have the crisp, clean creases of an origami expert. Instead, it looks like a lot of mashing and additional-fold adjustments were needed to get this into semi-bird shape. That rough-around-the-too-many-edges look, though, does give it a unique sort of personal charm, since it definitely doesn’t look like it was folded by a machine.
Things get rougher still with the pink crane, which looks like folder gyaru Sa-tan might have accidentally stepped on it before it was placed inside its protective capsule.
For the green crane, folder Okkina seems to have forgotten to make the perpendicular fold in the neck that gives the bird its head, resulting in what looks like a decapitated crane.
Kanappe’s red crane…sort of looks more like a sunfish.
But the most startling of all is Rinachosu’s yellow crane…
…whose head is also a drill of some sort.
▼ It’s less crane and more Evangelion monster.
Oh, wait, it turns out the drill part is supposed to be the feet. The head is the part Mr. Sato is holding here.
But again, all this weirdness is sort of the point, since it hammers home the fact that an actual person folded these cranes (and maybe hit them with a hammer while they were at it). As further evidence…
…the “duplicate” Mocchi blue cranes aren’t actually duplicates at all, since all of them have ended up with different shapes.
This makes it impossible to put together a complete set of Origami Cranes Folded by Gyaru, since it looks like there’s an endless number of variations. That might be kind of annoying for collectors, but it also means that this is pretty much the one and only capsule toy where you can throw as many coins as you want into the machine without fear of getting the exact same thing you got on your previous turn.
They even come with a bit of philosophy.
This paper, found inside the Mocchi capsules, reads
“Whether what you did was a mistake or not is, always, for you to decide yourself.”
So maybe the way these gyaru cranes are folded isn’t bad at all, just different.
Photos ©SoraNews24
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