Many Japanese cannot cope with the affair of Pocket Monsters yet.
You know those who had seen the 38th story of Animation-type "Pocket Monsters" broadcast by TV-Tokyo on 12/16/97 in Japan for 18 minutes lost their consciousness.
It was reported that on-and-off red-light as a kind of photo-stimulus had caused the affair. On the other hand, broadcasting stations in UK prohibit themselves from broadcasting TV programs including such on-and-off light.
What is POKEMON? Pocket Monsters is a software for Nintendo "Game-Boy." It was developed by Nintendo itself in February 1996. "Game-Boy" is a small-size videogame hardware using a monochrome liquid crystal display.
Nintendo sold out 8 million sets of POKEMON. POKEMON consists of 3 kinds of software sets. Players must collect 151 kinds of monsters. However if a player has only one kind of the software set, one cannot collect all kinds of monsters. Thus most of children began to exchange their monsters by connecting their hardware sets using cable. Thereafter it became a kind of means of increasing friends.
After it was popular, a famous publisher Shogakukan began comic-type POKEMON on its "Monthly Korokoro Comic" and since April 1997, Shogakukan Production and TV-Tokyo began to release animation-type POKEMON.
Especially the theme-song has been very popular for six months. Ms Rika Matsumoto who plays the leading role in the anime sings the song. She has an official homepage and played the role of Futaba Aoi in "You're Under Arrest" formerly.
By the way, toy manufacturers release related goods. "Tenohira Pikachu" is the most popular among the goods. They are rather cheap than Eva-good or Tamagotch. Moreover toy sellers was not indisposed to sell them. Therefore Pikachu has spread throughout Japan.
Thus the POKEMON media-mix business got run on a 400,000 million yen scale.(3070 million dollar)
Capitalists cannot ostracize POKEMON because Japanese business is greatly depressed.
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