Gashapon

Gashapon, also referred to as "Candy toy" or "trading toy", is the phonetic word for the sound "Gasha-Pon!" that Japanese toy vending machines make when a packaged item drops down.

Gashapon machines are similar to United States coin-op toy vending machines seen outside of grocery stores and other retailers. While coin op vending toys are usually cheap low quality products sold for a quarter or 50 cents, Japanese Gashapon toys can cost anywhere from 100 – 300 yen (Equal to $1 – $3 US) and are normally a much higher quality product. Often constructed from high-grade PVC plastic, these toys contain more molding detail and more carefully painted features.

Gashapon toys are often based on popular character licenses from Japanese manga, video games, anime and popular icons. Gashapon toys by nature are a "blind purchase"; a person inserts his or her money and hopes he or she gets the desired toy or figure. Often there are sets of matching gashapon toys and many people like to try to get all of a collection. At $1 – $3 a pop, it is frustrating for many people to get the same figure or toy over and over while trying to get that elusive last piece. Gashapon sets can also be purchased for a higher price. this allows one to obtain the entire series of a gashapon set without the game of chance. These highly detailed toys based on popular culture icons have found a large following among adults in Japan and the trend is filtering to the West with other popular culture influences such as anime and manga.

Trivia

Gashapon machines and their random payouts have inspirated trinket-collection mini-games in many videogames, most notably the Legend of Zelda series' similarly-named "Gasha Trees" in Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons, and, to a much lesser extent, the random figurine payout in The Minish Cap.Gashapon have also appeared in Mario games including Mario Party 5.