In these years, many of Japanese companies and even municipalities have some mascots like baseball teams and they help these companies by giving friendly feeling to people. What's more, actually these mascots can cause a situation that they get people's attention and make the company or municipality popular. Since Japanese people love mascots and it happens often, so companies and municipalities are nowadays very serious about having a cute or characteristic mascots.
Of course, train companies are not exception. Today, most companies have some characters for their train lines and they also sell many products featuring their mascots, such as pens, notes, and sweets. A good example of it would be "Suica Penguin" which is a mascot of JR East (East Japan Railroad Company).
You might have seen it already, since the mascot design is on their prepaid e-money card called "Suica". The penguin character was originally created for the Suica card because prepaid e-money card was a completely new way to pay train fees at that time. the company tried to get people's attention to push the big change from paying by cash to using prepaid e-money cards.
The penguin character became really popular quickly, probably more than the company expected. Some people got "Suica card", not to try the new system but to get a card with the cute penguin character. Today, the Suica penguin became the image character of JR East company and we can find many Suica Penguin goods at shops inside or beside stations of JR East company.
I guess to get a popular mascot brought a very strong advantage for the train company because the population of train lovers consists of mainly men and boys since old times, but with the character the company got many women and girls fans anew. Now you can see how important these mascots are, right?
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