Another post in the “guide to” series.

Disclaimer: This is an affiliate post. If you happen to pay for something through a link I’ve provided, I may receive a commission.

Tune of the post: Better Days by NEIKED x Mae Muller x Polo G (Spotify, YouTube). As the buzz of Eurovision dissipates while I’m writing this post in mid-May, this is another song which Eurovision contestant Mae Muller appeared in. It seems rather suitable, considering summer is approaching in the northern hemisphere at this point.

What are mochikororins?

Mochikororins, or “mochis” for short in fandom parlance, are tiny polyester plushes from Chugai Mining (中外鉱業), so named for their squishiness, which is supposed to be like mochi. The standard size is about 8 cm (a bit over 3 inches for you non-metric people) big, although you can get a larger “cushion” size and a slightly smaller “bean” size known as the “mamekororin” (mame meaning “bean”). They’re so popular, they even inspired the petarins (mochis with magnet arms, peta being the sound effect of a magnet sticking to something).

How do I spot one “out in the wild”?

Mochis tend to appear for different fandoms, although fandoms with a sizeable female-skewed fanbase like Hypnosis Mic seem to be how you can find them most easily. From personal experience, they’re harder to chase up than Nendoroids and finding any at a brick and mortar merch store is hit or miss, although there are always some floating around Japanese online arbitrage sites like Mercari which you can obtain using a shopping proxy. If you don’t want to risk using a proxy and you’re searching in English, eBay is a fairly safe bet. Mochis can either come in gachapon machines or in individual (blind) boxes.

Series which I know have mochikororins include, but are not limited to:

• Genshin Impact
• Kimetsu no Yaiba/Demon Slayer
• Jujutsu Kaisen
• Spy x Family
• …and Hypnosis Mic, of course.

What’s the appeal?

Well, like other plush toys, they’re uber cute and uber collectible. Collaboration mochis (such as Sweets Paradise mochis, where Sweets Paradise is a Japanese dessert chain which does collaborations with anime properties) and different varieties of mochis exist…although this may be purely from the Hypnosis Mic fan’s perspective, as there are several outfits known as “Extra Wardrobes” which that series’s mochikororins can be found in.

Why buy them?

• Some are designed as keychains, so you can use them to decorate things.
• Like most anime merch, there is a level of exclusivity involved in purchasing one and a level of social capital (in layman’s terms, the amount of power to flex) to show one off.
• Like a normal plush toy, you can coordinate your itabag and/or outfit to match your mochi, plus you can consider your mochi a friend when you don’t have one (say, when lost at a con).
• They’re extremely portable, even at the cushion size, and tradable (as mentioned below).

What’s the downsides to buying one?

• If the mochis don’t have the keychain ring on them or if the loop which holds the keychain is broken, you can easily lose them if you’re not careful.
• They have as much practical value as a standard plush toy/key chain…which is to say, they’re as useful as you can make them.
• Mochis are much more common when you’re open to online shopping, proxies and not being limited by the language barrier (or alternatively, using machine translation to get around it). Thus, proxies and other shipping problems can affect the price of mochis.
• There’s always the element of luck to getting the mochi you want if you only like one character and you’re faced with a blind box/gachapon machine – you know who’s in the set because the lineup is advertised, but the exact character won’t be known until you bust open that capsule/cardboard. This can mean, despite their price (at the time I bought mine, they were about $17 in USD), they can be addicting if you’re 1) willing to shell out for them from the get-go and you don’t know what pattern they come in or 2) you don’t see any patterns in the items you’ve already obtained. (More on analysing patterns later.)

The fan creator Yoichi I mention in several posts (such as this one) is passionate about Jakurai mochis, to the point they’ve created an entire mini-universe around Jakurai mochis being living beings that coexist alongside the characters that inspired them – a manga explaining their backstory is here. Today’s Crunch, a series of one-page comics I also mention in relation to Yoichi a lot, is about a Jakurai mochi (and occasionally other Hypnosis Mic mochis) eating various foods…it’s a lot more educational than you’d expect, since the mochi Jakurai eats seasonal foods (like Valentine’s chocolates) and foods featured on request, plus there’s a bit of Pokemon influence to it all which also needs matching (“Wild [food] appeared!”). Yoichi has also made papercrafts and fabric crafts which are designed specifically for mochis, similar to how people make clothes and toys for their pets(!)

I’ve hinted above and otherwise mentioned I have a Rosho mochi (from Hypnosis Mic, he’s wearing black instead of his usual grey argyle because this is Extra Wardrobe 02), which I bought at a brick and mortar anime goods store while meeting with a fandom friend in my city. I bought Rei first (from a blind box, I might add) and swapped for their Rosho, which is why I don’t want to part with him even though he’s not Jakurai.

The Extra Wardrobe 02 set is advertised as being Dotsuitare Honpo and Bad Ass Temple in that order, so assuming the packers packaged the mochis in that order, Rosho and Rei would have been the 2nd and 3rd items of 6, because the order is Sasara -> Rosho -> Rei, then the others. Alternatively, the previous buyers were either 1) picky or 2) lucky that they managed to snap up Bad Ass Temple and Sasara first…(Incidentally, since I’ve been to that store a few times, I know Bad Ass Temple merch sells out rather quickly there. Whether this is a fandom-wide phenomenon is unknown, since I am merely one fan in a sea of many.)

(Imgur’s Twitter integration is currently down as I write this post due to Elon’s Shenanigans, so please excuse that I had to fish this image out of the depths of Discord.) Also note the chain dangling off a loop on the back of his head, which I mentioned earlier – I brought him to Crunchyroll Expo on a bag this way.

Sidebar: I know I never mentioned Rosho and Rei in my HypMic introduction post because they don’t appear in season 1 but they have been, as of the time of writing, confirmed to be in season 2. One of these days, I’ll have to fix that…in fact, ahead of season 2, maybe an entire post is in order…

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I just want to address something, while I’m still in the early stages of monetisation and still interested in transparency regarding affiliate blogging – I started with no intentions to monetise these “guide to” posts (like you might have seen with the Nendoroid post) and simply wanted to talk about a product which others might be interested in buying, but they happened to be cash lying on the metaphorical table once I started pursuing monetisation as a strategy. They’re well-designed for SEO, they answer questions people might have had about merch I’ve personally bought and loved and they might lead to sales! It’s wins all around!

So do you own any mochis? What are your favourite mochi-related memories?

Keep seeking the magic,

MagicConan14.