Y’know, if I’ve made one thing abundantly clear on
this YouTube and especially on my Twitch channel over the past couple months, it’s that my
feelings about the movie Detective Pikachu are complicated. It’s now been almost a month since I saw
the movie, and I’m still sorting out my exact thoughts on it - but there's one thing I
DON’T feel complicated about at all, and that iss “shiwa-gao pikachu.” Now, if you don’t know the term “shiwa-gao pikachu," there’s a really good chance you might know the face attached to it - “Shiwa-gao pikachu" is the japanese term for “wrinkly face Pikachu”, which became a minor internet sensation when the first Detective Pikachu
trailer dropped. As best I can tell, here’s what went down:
basically, Japanese Twitter users noticed that if you paused the Detective Pikachu trailer
at exactly the right time in a couple spots, you could catch Detective Pikachu making some particularly odd,
seemingly anguished facial expressions, which, of course, led to a tidal wave of fan art,
pixel art, latte art, salad art - just every type of art that a person can make, people have made. Now let's break the term down really quick: The Japanese word “gao” means “face” - you maybe have heard the word before in terms like “hengao”or “doyagao” or “ahegao” - - but in this specific case, “shiwa-gao” means “wrinkly face,” hence “shiwa-gao pikachu," sometimes called “shiwa-shiwa pikachu” or just “shiwa-chu” for short, which I really like. Depending on how you looked at it, the emergence
of this wrinkly pikachu meme was not, strictly speaking, a positive thing for Detective Pikachu. I mean, in essense, this meme really did just consist of a lot of people making fun of some particularly uncanny-looking frames in an already very uncanny-looking movie. Now, the real explosion of this meme happened back in March and even got a good deal of attention from the English-speaking internet at the time. But the reason I’m talking about it now
is because a couple of weeks ago, something else happened that I don’t think many people in the West
are aware of. In the middle of May, just a few days after Detective Pikachu came out internationally, the official japanese Detective Pikachu posted a Tweet announcing a brand-new promotion. Beginning on May 24th, if
you took your Detective Pikachu ticket stub and showed up at any of the 11 Pokemon Center
locations in Japan, you would be rewarded with an exclusive, official, limited edition
wrinkly face pikachu sticker. Now, this entire promotion immediately fascinated me - the tweet in question from the Japanese Detective Pikachu twitter account began with “Shiwashiwa-gao ga ninkidato?” Meaning: "Hmm, the wrinkly face is popular?" Thinking face emoji. Essentially, what they’re doing with this
campaign is taking an aspect of their movie that was lovingly mocked on a global scale by fans, and they deployed a plan to spin it it into an actual part of their promotional
plan for the movie. It’s an uncharacteristically shrewd and clever move
from The Pokemon Company - or whoever’s idea this was, and really well-executed, too. 99 times out of 100, watching a movie studio trying to take
an accidental meme from their movie’s trailer and turn it into merch would be cringey and painful thing to watch, but for some reason this feels different to me. Like, I think the crappy version of this would've been if they tried to make their own quasi-official fanart of wrinkly Pikachu and give out stickers
of that exaggerated face, just to show how ‘in on the joke’ they were, that would feel kind of tryhard-y to me. But for some reason - and maybe this is more nuance than this subject matter deserves - but to me, the fact that they just took the
actual screengrabs from the movie that kicked whole thing this off and cropped THOSE into stickers…
i dunno, it feels perfect to me. I unabashedly love this promotion. The obvious bad news here is that this promotion was exclusive to Japan. Somewhat irritatingly, the official American Twitter account for for Detective Pikachu - which I think it’s fair to say I’ve had a somewhat combative relationship with - has not acknowledged shiwagao pikachu a single time, and what’s worse, there are
North American Pokemon Centers just straight up don't exist, so this promotion has no parallel in the West. Now, this meant that if I wanted a shiwagao pikachu sticker, I really only had one option... So I booked a plane ticket and got on a flight to Tokyo in search of answers. So I'm outside of Toho Cinemas in Shibuya, and I'm going to attempt to just get a ticket stub for Detective Pikachu, and we'll see where it goes from there. Now, step 1 of this plan was to get myself a Detective Pikachu ticket stub, which in theory would be easy, except I already saw the movie in America and I did not want to see it again. Toho Cinemas was showing the movie multiple
times a day, both dubbed and subbed, but I tried to figure out if there was some way I could do this without just buying a ticket. So my initial idea was to just post up outside
the theater and ask people leaving their Detective Pikachu screening if I could have - or even
buy! - their ticket stubs off them, but a Japanese friend assured me that that wouldn’t
be a great idea, or a particularly effective one. Idea number 2 - and I’m not super proud
of it - was a little bit trashier. It was a lot trashier. Idea number 2 was to go through the trash. Now, this might seem insane - the odds of
finding a ticket stub for this specific movie in in a theater trashcan does, on paper, seem
pretty low - but once you understand the layout of Toho Cinemas, it’s starts to seem a lot
more reasonable. See, because it’s located in downtown Shibuya,
Toho Cinemas is an incredibly skinny and vertical theater - and its 6 screens are each divided
across 4 separate floors, with two movies alternating on most of the screens. For this reason, I believed that if I were
to head to the specific floor Detective Pikachu was showing on that day and dig through the
trash at precisely the right time, I would stumble upon a veritable treasure trove of
Detective Pikachu ticket stubs. So I walked into the theater, figured out exactly what floor Detective Pikachu was showing on (it was the 7th floor), and then made my way up the elevator and began my hunt. The elevator doors open to a totally empty
consession area, manned by one employee, put there to give his full undivided attention
to the only two screens on this floor. The employee politely ignores me as I put
on my best “confused foreigner” scowl, stumbling around like I’m trying to find
the ticket purchasing counter, and then, when his back is turned, rifling through the garbage
like some sort of gamer raccoon. I peek my head over the lid of the trash can,
and… nothing. An empty bucket, a cup of boba, a receipt
for another movie entirely, and exactly five kernels of popcorn await me. Devastating. Trash can number 2 yielded slightly more but
this time, it was 100% food packaging - not a single shred of ticket stub paper to be
found. Out of desperation, I headed into the bathroom
trash - nothing but paper towels. Anyways, I wash my hands and I head back downstairs. By the way - super quick sidebar here - in
Tokyo you can get a soda and popcorn at a Japanese movie theater for 500 yen. That’s like 4 and a half bucks. For POPCORN and a COKE. And this isn’t like rural Japan or anything,
this is in Shibuya, seconds from the scramble in the absolute downtowniest downtown part
of downtown Tokyo. When I saw Detective Pikachu back home in
California, you know what my popcorn and soda cost me? it was $14.59. Anyways, I wash my hands and head back downstairs. My freebooting plan had failed, and I was
left with only one option: to just buy a ticket. I walk up to the ticket thing, and begin the
process of selecting my seat. With no actual plans to see this movie a second
time, I select a seat in the back of the theater, right next to a pair of already-taken seats
- my thinking being, by purchasing this ticket and then not using it, I’m providing this
pair of filmgoers a 1-seat buffer between them and anyone else who might sit too close
and ruin their theatergoing experience. The ticket comes to a grand total of 1,900
yen, or about 18 bucks, and I begin to question whether this price - coupled with the price
of the plane ticket - was actually worth it for a 1 inch sticker. My ticket prints out, and I walk right out
of the theater - and into the attached Krispy Kreme to compose myself. And - Real quickly, because I don’t know
where else to put this - here’s my 15 second review of the fancy Ginger Lemon Bran donut
I bought at Japanese Krispy Kreme. It's good. It's like a strong ginger taste, which I'm excited about. Not that sweet. That's MY review. It's a little smile. I got my ticket stub. Now I just have to go to the Pokemon Center. And hope they're not out. Cuz this promotion is from like last month, so. I searched Twitter, and I saw some people posting the stickers like 12 hours ago in Japan - I was looking at the Japanese hashtag for "wrinkled Pikachu" and I saw people posting it, so... I'm optimistic, but we'll see. Now, well in advance of executing this plan,
I’d set my sights on a specific Pokemon store - Pokemon Center Tokyo DX, a brand-new
Pokemon Center that opened its doors in 2018 and immediately stole the title of “largest
Pokemon Center in the world.” - a fact that I hoped would translate into
a higher allotment of shiwachu stickers, heightening my odds of actually getting one. Coincidentally, it also happened to be a short
7 minute drive from my personal Mecca, the Domino’s Pizza Japanese HQ - a fact that
turned out to be somewhat relevant to a video I uploaded on Tuesday - - here's a link if you want to check that out. See? I’m getting a little more efficient on my Japan trips. Multiple birds with one stone here. With my completely unused Detective
Pikachu ticket stub in hand, I met up with a Japanese friend and we ventured into the
gigantic Nihombashi Takayashimaya Shopping Center, hoping and praying that they might still have
some of these precious wrinkly faced stickers left. As we wove a path through countless boutique
fashion shops, riding escalator after escalator through this enormous 10-story minimall, it began to
dawn on me that I had no guarantee that any of this was going to pay off in the end. Again, the wrinkly pikachu promotion kicked
off back in May, and interest in Detective Pikachu was at its highest point then and had begun to wane now. I had no evidence that either the stickers hadn't all been snapped up initially - it was sort of a limited-time, while supplies last offer - or if they even still had the promotion going. There was no end date listed in that tweet, so I began to begrudgingly grapple with the possibility that I had wasted thousands of yen on a movie
ticket - and tens of thousands on a plane ticket - for absolutely no reason whatsoever. We arrived at the Pokemon Center, and immediately,
any anxiety I had about the sticker situation was washed away an d replaced with awe. The place was this spotless and sparkling
white zone, looking almost as if someone had polished it with Diaper Pure every morning, noon and
night. It looked almost like what you would imagine a Pokemon Center to look like in real life - white ceilings, white walls, and Just beyond the entrance, an massive life-sized
Snorlax statue - which, I noticed while circling it, had actually been autographed on the back
corner by original Pokemon illustrator and designer Ken Sugimori. Right away, it was clear what the DX in the
title was for: this was a truly deluxe Pokemon shopping experience. Behind it - a wall with the silhouette of
every single Pokemon embossed into it - and, like any childhood Pokemon fan, I couldn’t
resist the temptation to hunt down my personal favorite. But I think the main thing that drew our attention
in was this - a huge wall detailing the entire history of the Pokemon series. Captivated, we kept reading the wall, strafing
alongside of it, not entirely aware of our surroundings - and that’s when we heard
this voice: I told her no, neither of us have June birthdays - but I reached into my bag to pull out my ticket stub... and here's what went down. "Wow... thank you so much! This is why I came here." The mission was a success, and I was overjoyed. We did a little bit more shopping, of course
- we walked around and looked at a lot of the new stuff: There's also a relatively new line of merch called Pokemon Fit, where they had actual
plushes for every single one of the original 151. Tragically, they were somehow sold out of
my favorite, Dugtrio, so I settled on 3 weird Pokemon that I was happy to see realized in
plush form: Magikarp, Weepinbell and Exeggcute. I think I just enjoyed the idea that someone
had to figure out how to turn a Pokemon that is literally just 6 eggs into a stuffed animal. I just admire the craftsmanship that went into solving that problem. I also really enjoyed my friend reminding
me of Magmar’s excellent Japanese name. I dunno, the Pokemon Center rules, man. I could’ve shopped there for hours without
getting bored. But at the end of the day, all the Pokemon
merchandise on earth couldn’t hold a candle to my most prized possession: my tiny, rare, perfect, hideous shiwagao Pikachu sticker.
