Weekly Oshikatsu News (Oct 10, 2025): Blue Lock in Shibuya, Houshou Marine Cup Noodles & Ohtani’s Ito En Ad

Here is our roundup of notable corporate oshikatsu (fan-driven support activities) marketing and fan business news from the week of October 3 to October 9, 2025.

This Week’s Highlights

This was a week in which companies built fan touchpoints directly into repeatable systems.

Tokyo Game Show 2025, held from September 25 to 28, brought together 1,136 exhibiting companies and organizations. Booths from non-gaming companies entering the game industry for the first time—including JR Tokai Agency, PARCO, and Shochiku—stood out on the show floor. Meanwhile, Ito En announced the release of a new commercial starring Shohei Ohtani, noting that its green tea beverage “mindshare” had grown by 8 percentage points year-over-year to 35%. And in a joint survey by Macromill and Mitsubishi UFJ Research and Consulting, baseball defended its #1 spot as Japan’s “favorite sport” for the 22nd consecutive year.

At the same time, new mechanisms for connecting directly with fans rolled out one after another. Instant cup noodles supervised by hololive’s Houshou Marine in collaboration with ramen maker Sugakiya were announced for release in late November at Ito-Yokado and York stores. The VTuber unit Peaky Hikers released a 7th-anniversary collaboration beer with Gunma Prefecture’s Tsumagoi Highland Brewery. In addition, FAVii Meet, a one-on-one communication app connecting fans and talent, launched for the Japanese market.

DIAGRAMKey Fandom and Sports Marketing Numbers Reported This Week

1,136: Exhibiting companies and organizations at Tokyo Game Show 2025
22 years: Baseball’s consecutive streak as Japan’s
35%: Ito En’s green tea mindshare, up 8 points year-over-year
1.7151T yen: Total annual spending on sports activities in the 2025 survey

Source: The Oshi Lab’s summary of reports published Oct 3–9, 2025

Tokyo Game Show Became a Fan Touchpoint for Non-Gaming Industries

JR Tokai Agency, PARCO, and Shochiku — The Strategies Behind Three First-Time Tokyo Game Show Exhibitors

Tokyo Game Show 2025, held at Makuhari Messe from September 25 to 28, featured 1,136 exhibiting companies and organizations. Among them, JR Tokai Agency set up a booth proposing the use of railway intellectual property (IP)—led by the Tokaido Shinkansen bullet train—to game development studios. Yuya Sugiyama of the company’s IP Content Business Division remarked, “Because railways have so many passionate fans, there is still plenty of room to make use of our IP.” PARCO exhibited for the first time under “PARCO GAMES,” an in-house game label it established in August 2025, introducing three upcoming indie game titles it plans to publish. Film and theater company Shochiku also showcased eight self-published titles under the banner “Shochiku Games,” aiming to build awareness for its Game Business Office, which launched in June 2024 (AdverTimes. (in Japanese)).

All three companies sought to connect their existing customer bases and IP assets with a new audience of game fans.

Lab Note: What these three companies share is that they created touchpoints with a new customer segment without altering their core businesses. JR Tokai Agency brought in Shinkansen railway IP, while PARCO and Shochiku adapted their retail distribution and theatrical promotion know-how to game publishing. For companies with established businesses, the shortest path into fandom lies in re-proposing their own existing assets.

Baseball’s Popularity and Ambassador Impact Were Backed by Hard Numbers

2025 Basic Survey on Sports Marketing — Baseball Ranks #1 for 22nd Straight Year as Attendance Frequency Rises

On October 9, Macromill and Mitsubishi UFJ Research and Consulting released preliminary figures from their joint project, the “2025 Basic Survey on Sports Marketing.” Conducted from September 2 to 4 among 2,000 men and women aged 15 to 69 nationwide, the study marked its 22nd installment since launching in 2004. Total spending on sports activities remained largely flat at 1,715.1 billion yen (1.7151 trillion yen). While the percentage of respondents who had attended a live stadium game dipped slightly to 19.6%, the average number of games attended per spectator rose to 4.2 times (up 0.2 from the previous year). Baseball maintained its #1 ranking as the “most favored sport” for the 22nd consecutive year and was the only top-ranked sport to increase in popularity (AdverTimes. (in Japanese)).

Lab Note: The key takeaway here is that while the overall share of stadium-goers declined slightly, attendance frequency per fan increased. Even when the broad base doesn’t expand, existing fans are engaging more deeply. Designing initiatives that deepen the involvement of current fans fits today’s sports market better than focusing solely on new customer acquisition.

Ito En × Shohei Ohtani — “American Comic-Style” Commercial Released Alongside Green Tea Brand Awareness Results

On October 6, Ito En unveiled a new commercial with an “American comic book” aesthetic starring Major League Baseball’s Los Angeles Dodgers player Shohei Ohtani. It marks his first appearance specifically for the Oi Ocha Catechin Ryokucha (Catechin Green Tea) Food for Specified Health Uses (FOSHU) series. In the commercial, when Ohtani hits a home run, the visual style switches into comic-book art depicting illustrated characters enjoying the beverage. Ito En has featured Ohtani as its Global Ambassador since April 2024. According to Tatsuya Yoshida of the company’s Green Tea Brand Group, its “mindshare”—indicating the first brand that comes to mind for green tea beverages—reached 35%, an 8-point increase over the previous year. Overseas sales of Oi Ocha have also continued to post double-digit growth (AdverTimes. (in Japanese)).

Lab Note: Yoshida revealed that the team places great importance on conveying Ohtani’s “natural self” as someone who genuinely drinks the tea in everyday life. There is more to learn from that statement than from the creative leap of an “American comic” visual style. Countless commercials simply hand a product to a celebrity, but starting from a talent’s real-life habits and expanding the creative angle from there offers a practical blueprint for making ambassador campaigns more reproducible.

Long-Established Technology and Characters Were Newly Polished Through Anniversaries

FuRyu, which holds a 90% share of Japan’s photo sticker booth (purikura) market, launched a special collaboration on October 6 celebrating the 15th anniversary of Instagram. The company equipped its “EVERFILM” photo booth model with Instagram-inspired designs. According to President Masahito Enomoto, who spoke at a media roundtable on October 7, FuRyu ranked around fourth in the industry roughly 20 years ago. By conducting exhaustive group interviews with high school girls—its core user base—the company captured its current dominant market share. Around 2015, Instagram began coming up in those user interviews. FuRyu first built social-media-conscious features into its “UP” machine in 2016 and followed up in 2018 with “SUU.,” which introduced translucent stickers. In this way, the company has continuously translated shifts in social media behavior into hardware and software development (AdverTimes. (in Japanese)).

Lab Note: What matters here is the sequence: not “chasing trends after they blow up,” but “catching the earliest signals through user interviews.” FuRyu noticed Instagram’s spread in 2015 and had features built into machines by 2016. If you want your product to spread on social media, reacting after posts go viral is already too late—you need a system that anticipates the next move directly from the words of heavy users.

Sanrio’s Kuromi × Tobu Department Store — A 650,000-Yen Painting Headlines a 20th Anniversary Fair

Tobu Department Store’s Ikebukuro flagship held the “Happy 20th Anniversary Kuromi Fair” from October 9 to November 5, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the popular Sanrio character Kuromi. The store rolled out Kuromi merchandise across multiple floors, selling Tobu-exclusive handkerchiefs (2,750 yen each) and lunch tote bags (2,200 yen each), among other items. The centerpiece of the event was a tie-in with the “Tobu Autumn Painting Market 2025”: a size-4 collaborative painting titled Kuromi by fine artist Yuki Koyano, exhibited and sold on the 8th-floor event hall for 657,800 yen (tax included) (Anime! Anime! (in Japanese)).

Lab Note: Placing merchandise costing a few hundred yen alongside a 650,000-yen painting within the same fair is a clever mechanism to avoid limiting visitors to a single motivation. Both casual shoppers looking for an accessible souvenir and serious collectors looking to invest are drawn to the same venue. When a department store works with a character IP, rather than stopping at standard merchandise, there is real value in preparing at least one flagship item that dramatically raises the price ceiling.

Apparel Brands Translated Characters into Everyday Wear

gelato pique × Dragon Quest — First Collaboration Features Monsters’ “Sleeping Faces”

Loungewear brand gelato pique released its first-ever collaboration with the Dragon Quest series on October 8 under the collection title “GELATO PIQUE encounters DRAGON QUEST.” Featuring designs of monsters such as Slime and Dracky with sleeping expressions, the wide-ranging lineup included hoodie and shorts sets (15,950 yen each), knitwear, cushions, and room shoes. Exclusive HOMME (men’s) items included pullover and long pants sets patterned with Golem and Liquid Metal Slime (17,050 yen each), as well as a tissue box cover modeled after the game’s iconic “Adventure Log” (Boken no Sho) (Anime! Anime! (in Japanese)).

Lab Note: Choosing “bedtime” rather than “battle” as the creative angle is remarkably deft. Instead of importing the action elements of the game as-is, gelato pique changed only the monsters’ facial expressions to match the loungewear category. Rethinking how an IP is presented to fit the partner’s business format is a great reference for companies looking to broaden where game IPs can be applied.

Zoff × PUPPET SUNSUN — Limited-Edition Eyewear with Food Motifs

Eyewear brand Zoff opened made-to-order pre-orders for “Zoff | PUPPET SUNSUN,” its first collaborative eyewear line with the puppet video project PUPPET SUNSUN. Pre-orders ran from October 8 to October 26, with shipping scheduled for around June 2026. The eight-model lineup included prescription-ready glasses inspired by Sunsun’s favorite foods—bread and donuts—for 12,200 yen (including standard set lenses) as well as sunglasses models for 9,900 yen. Every pair came with an exclusive cleaning cloth and case (Inside (in Japanese)).

Lab Note: Zoff is using made-to-order production with an eight-month lead time until delivery. When selling higher-ticket items like eyeglasses to a fanbase, locking in demand upfront avoids the inventory risk of speculative mass production. For character collaborations in everyday lifestyle categories, how you structure inventory risk is an integral part of product design.

Hello Kitty × SNIDEL and Minnie Mouse × MARY QUANT — Joining Autumn/Winter Fashion Collections

Sanrio’s Hello Kitty and women’s fashion brand SNIDEL began selling collaborative items on October 8, following early releases at select stores on October 4. Built around a ribbon theme, the wide assortment included boa hoodies, knit cardigans, and a premium hoodie priced at 23,980 yen (Anime! Anime! (in Japanese)). Meanwhile, Disney Store rolled out an autumn/winter Minnie Mouse collection co-planned with fashion brand MARY QUANT, blending houndstooth patterns with a vintage aesthetic. Items such as a 2-way Boston bag (7,900 yen) and a plush toy (3,800 yen) launched via early release on October 7, with nationwide availability announced for October 10 (Anime! Anime! (in Japanese)).

Lab Note: Both collaborations combine character elements with each brand’s patterns and silhouettes; some items also feature the characters’ faces. Striking a balance that general shoppers outside the core fandom can also wear is the prerequisite for long-running apparel collaborations like these.

DIAGRAMHow Companies Structured Repeatable Fan Touchpoints This Week

Core Asset Re-ProposalJR Tokai Agency, PARCO, and Shochiku brought railway IP and publishing know-how to Tokyo Game Show
Everyday Retail and Lifestyle IntegrationHoushou Marine’s 365-yen cup noodles and loungewear/fashion collaborations fit into daily shopping
Multi-Venue Foot Traffic DesignBlue Lock in Shibuya and Dragon Quest at 10 Premium Outlets use stamp rallies to guide visitors across venues
Dedicated 1-on-1 and Avatar PlatformsFAVii Meet and Appland’s wearverse turn fan engagement into ongoing service infrastructure

Source: The Oshi Lab’s analysis of the week’s corporate announcements

Commercial Facilities and Retailers Used Characters to Build Store Foot-Traffic Routes

Blue Lock × Tokyu Land — A Shibuya Takeover Event Spanning Three Commercial Complexes and a Hotel

A collaboration was announced between the TV anime Blue Lock and multiple Shibuya properties operated by Tokyu Land Corporation. Titled “BLUE LOCK SCRAMBLE -Shibuya Conquest-,” the event was scheduled to run from October 17 to November 16. Plans included a stamp rally spanning three facilities—Shibuya BEAM, Shibuya Sakura Stage, and Tokyu Plaza Shibuya—alongside collaborative food menus and original merchandise. In addition, Tokyu Stay Shibuya Shin-Minamiguchi announced a themed accommodation plan featuring collaboration rooms, limited to two rooms per day (Cho! Animedia (in Japanese)).

Lab Note: What sets this apart from a single-store pop-up is its multi-venue, circulation-oriented design. By using a stamp rally to move fans between buildings and incorporating hotel stays, the organizers turn the entire neighborhood of Shibuya into a single “work experience.” The more a company can involve surrounding hotels and sister properties rather than confining a campaign to a single building, the more it can increase both average spend and time spent on site.

Dragon Quest × Premium Outlets — Stamp Rallies Across 10 Locations Nationwide

Mitsubishi Estate・Simon announced that it would host “Premium Outlets × Dragon Quest ‘JOIN THE QUEST!’” from November 7, 2025, through February 23, 2026, across 10 Premium Outlets locations nationwide. According to the announcement, monster display panels and photo spots would be installed throughout the properties, accompanied by a digital stamp rally where visitors who track down monsters at five spots can download an original wallpaper. Pop-up stores featuring newly illustrated merchandise were also planned, while tenant brands such as Champion, Gap, and Under Armour announced exclusive collaborative items (Inside (in Japanese)).

Lab Note: From the outlet operator’s perspective, the goal is to guide visitors who come specifically for Dragon Quest into shopping at existing tenant stores as well. Anyone participating in the digital stamp rally ends up walking through the entire shopping complex, ensuring the experience doesn’t begin and end inside a single storefront. For commercial facilities, the true value of inviting an IP isn’t just drawing a crowd at the entrance—it’s acquiring a mechanism that gets visitors circulating throughout the property.

Houshou Marine × Sugakiya — VTuber-Supervised Instant Cup Noodles Launch at Ito-Yokado and York

Ito-Yokado decided to release instant cup noodles in collaboration with hololive VTuber Houshou Marine. Supervised by Marine in partnership with Sugakiya—a ramen brand she has long been fond of—the lineup consists of two varieties: “Seafood Tonkotsu Ramen” and “Rich & Spicy (Umakara) Ramen,” priced at 365 yen each. The noodles were scheduled to launch in late November at Ito-Yokado and York stores nationwide. In addition, an online-exclusive special bundle including an acrylic stand and clear file folder (6,372 yen) was announced for lottery sale starting October 10 at 10:00 a.m. (Inside (in Japanese)).

Lab Note: The 365-yen price point sits right in the standard range for convenience stores and supermarkets. While VTuber collaborations tend to gravitate toward collector’s merchandise or limited-time events, placing a food item on everyday grocery shelves brings it naturally into view for regular shoppers outside the fanbase too. It’s a smart design that keeps oshikatsu products from being confined solely to high-priced, special-occasion splurges.

VTubers Expanded Touchpoints into Regional Specialties and Experiential Venues

Peaky Hikers × Tsumagoi Highland Brewery — Celebrating a 7th Anniversary with Gunma Craft Beer

The VTuber unit Peaky Hikers announced a collaboration with Tsumagoi Highland Brewery, a craft beer maker in Gunma Prefecture. Pre-orders opened on October 9 at 9:00 p.m. for a three-bottle set (3,000 yen plus shipping) featuring the brewery’s flagship “Tsumabru IPA” dressed in a special 7th-anniversary label. Both members of the unit visited the brewery in person to experience the brewing process firsthand, including crushing malt, adding hops, and cleaning tanks, with footage of their visit slated for release on YouTube. Pre-orders were scheduled to run through November 13, closing early if the limited quantity sold out (Mogura VR (in Japanese)).

Lab Note: Because the members experienced the brewing steps themselves and turned that process into video content, this goes far beyond simply slapping a character label on a bottle—the manufacturing story itself becomes entertainment for fans. When regional food and beverage makers team up with VTubers, whether you can let them film “how it’s made” rather than just presenting the finished product makes a huge difference in the richness of the project.

Suo Sango × Immersive Fort Tokyo — The Venue’s First-Ever Full Private Buyout

NIJISANJI VTuber Suo Sango experienced the interactive entertainment facility Immersive Fort Tokyo through a full private buyout sponsored by the venue. Suo participated in the Sherlock Holmes and Tokyo Revengers productions and reported on the experience on her YouTube channel. According to the rates cited in the October 2025 report, a private buyout at the facility cost 1.2 million yen (tax included) for The Sherlock and 800,000 yen (tax included) for Tokyo Revengers Immersive Escape, underscoring the extraordinary scale of the collaboration (Mogura VR (in Japanese)).

Lab Note: What’s fascinating here is that the venue makes its private rental pricing publicly available as a benchmark. When viewers can grasp a concrete figure like “800,000 to 1.2 million yen per private show,” they can vividly picture the scale of the VTuber campaign. When experiential venues work with influencers, being able to express the value of the experience in clear monetary terms adds real persuasive weight to the promotion.

Tech Companies Turned One-on-One Fan Touchpoints into Scalable Services

FAVii Meet — A 1-on-1 Platform Connecting Talent and Fans Arrives in Japan

On October 7, D1-Lab Inc. released FAVii Meet, a one-on-one communication platform, for the Japanese market following an earlier launch in Thailand. Through the app, talent can handle everything from event creation and ticket sales to live one-on-one talks and post-event reporting in one place. The platform includes a memo feature for recording conversation notes and a schedule management tool, with language support for Japanese, English, and Thai. It also comes equipped with multi-account management for agencies handling multiple talent, alongside safety tools such as call monitoring and a BAN feature capable of muting or forcibly ending a session if trouble occurs (PR TIMES (in Japanese)).

Lab Note: Putting talent-protection mechanisms like call monitoring and instant BAN controls front and center is a defining feature here. The closer a service brings fans to talent, the more operational safety becomes the foundation of trust. When commercializing one-on-one access, building mechanisms for immediate intervention during trouble is every bit as essential as the monetization system itself.

Appland’s “wearverse” — Avatar Fashion Brand for VRChat Launches

Appland Inc., which operates a VTuber production agency, officially opened a new digital fashion brand called “wearverse” on October 3. Sold via the online marketplace BOOTH, the brand offers 3D avatar fashion items compatible with the social VR platform VRChat. The initial lineup featured two styles—an “Urban Classical” dress and a “Magical” witch-inspired outfit—priced between 3,000 yen and 6,000 yen. Appland also announced plans to expand into full avatars and virtual worlds in the future, including collaborative projects with its own affiliated VTuber talent (Mogura VR (in Japanese)).

Lab Note: What’s new here is that a VTuber agency launched a general-purpose avatar fashion brand separate from merchandise tied to its own talent. Rather than being limited to fans of specific performers, this allows the company to address the entire VRChat user base as potential customers. When IP holders look to expand their business, launching a standalone, platform-oriented brand is a viable option alongside monetizing individual characters.

This Week’s Takeaway

This week stood out for companies that refused to let fan touchpoints end as one-off spectacles, embedding them instead into repeatable mechanisms.

At Tokyo Game Show, JR Tokai Agency, PARCO, and Shochiku proposed their core business assets directly to game fans. At commercial facilities, collaborations with Dragon Quest and Blue Lock built foot-traffic circulation through stamp rallies. In the VTuber space, Houshou Marine’s cup noodles were slated to line everyday supermarket shelves starting in late November, while FAVii Meet used an app format to turn fan interactions from isolated events into an ongoing, reusable service. Whether a company can channel fan enthusiasm into a format that can be used again and again—rather than letting it end as a one-time experience—has become the dividing line in sustaining long-term relationships with fans.

At the same time, companies like Ito En and FuRyu have spent years consistently tracking ambassadors and listening closely to user voices. Those are the very companies now able to speak about their results in hard numbers: an 8-point jump in mindshare, or a market-share turnaround from fourth place in the industry to a 90% share. Neither figure happens overnight.

Are your company’s fan touchpoints ending as one-off campaigns? We encourage you to revisit this week’s developments alongside our guides to Oshikatsu Marketing Design Principles and Oshikatsu Market Size.

Weekly Oshikatsu News brings you a weekly roundup of the intersection between oshikatsu and business. Browse past issues in our Oshikatsu × News category.