It began in June, when an unknown teen-age girl strolled down Tokyo's bustling Ginza with what appeared to be a 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 but for a low-numbered ticket.
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 have hair bows.
At 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 Negroes, who have a long record of oppression and misunderstanding, and we feel akin to them." The Softies. Toymaker Suda, who would like to know how to do it again, has also tried to get at the reason behind the fad by tape-recording interviews with hundreds of customers waiting to buy dakkochans. The replies are sociologically disappointing. Some teen-agers say they are buying a dakkochan because their friends have bought dakkochans. The vast majority, however, reply with one or another variant of "It's so cute and lovable that I just have to have one." Says Suda: "Japanese have always been soft on children, and standing all night in line to buy a toy is just another proof of that. I feel guilty about the situation."