A film about a small, anxious creature who pulls weeds for a living has taken 8.07 billion yen in twenty days. Part of what keeps pulling people back is what the cinema hands you at the door: first a random figurine, then a sticker.

Twenty days, 8.07 billion yen, 5.63 million tickets

Chiikawa the Movie: The Secret of Mermaid Island opened across Japan on July 24 on 447 screens, 65 of them IMAX. It took 990 million yen on its first day and 2,240,333,500 yen over its opening three days, selling 1,508,538 tickets. It opened at number one on the weekend chart.

The climb since then has been steady rather than front-loaded. Seven days in, the total was 3.33 billion yen and 2.28 million admissions. By day 17 it stood at 6.77 billion yen and 4.69 million. Three days later, through August 12, the film had reached 8.07 billion yen, about 50.8 million dollars at the August 14 rate of 159 yen to the dollar, on 5.63 million admissions. That is 1.3 billion yen added over three midweek days, one of which, August 11, was Mountain Day, a public holiday.

Day one was a Friday, and it out-grossed the daily average of the Saturday and Sunday that followed. By All About's arithmetic those two days ran to around 625 million yen each against Friday's 990 million, which inverts the normal pattern for a Japanese opening. All About credits fans moving fast, and the giveaway that started that same morning.

Why the freebie at the door works

Japanese cinemas run a system called nyujosha tokuten, roughly "admission-holder bonus": a physical gift handed to every ticket buyer while stocks last. It is never sold separately, and each wave runs on a published schedule until the stock is gone.

Chiikawa's first wave was a charm mini-figure. Eight designs, assigned at random, no choosing. Toho kept it running from opening day until August 7 at theatres that still had stock.

The randomness is the engine. If you want Hachiware and the staff hand you Momonga, the only route the campaign offers is another ticket.

Writing in Toyo Keizai, the columnist Oshiire no Hito argues that the category of item matters as much as the lottery mechanic. Charm figures are normally capsule-toy fare, and Japan's capsule-toy boom has made them genuinely hard to obtain. Putting one behind a cinema ticket is a strong trade.

The system is neither new nor universally admired. It leans on the same impulse that drives gacha spending, and finite freebies feed a resale market. Oshiire no Hito, a self-described Doraemon obsessive, points out that the Doraemon films moved the other way: pull-back toys from 2006 to 2019, then a manga booklet from The New Dinosaur in 2020, and eventually a single booklet with no colour variants at all. Stripping out randomness is a defensible anti-scalping measure. It also strips out the reason to come twice.

A sticker craze big enough to move a box office

Wave two landed on August 8, and it was a Bonbon Drop sticker with the full cast printed on it.

Bonbon Drop is a line from Q-LiA, an Osaka stationery maker, on sale since March 2024. The stickers are domed in clear resin up to six millimetres thick, with two layers of printing underneath to build depth. The trade paper Senken Shimbun reported that the scale of the hit surprised the manufacturer itself, and that adults have been buying them alongside the primary-school children who started the boom.

By 2026 the stickers had generated their own vocabulary. Toyo Keizai notes the coinage shiru-katsu, roughly "sticker activity", and describes Bonbon Drop as sitting at the top of a crowded sticker market with enough brand pull that people want one regardless of which character is printed on it.

So the film handed out free what children had been struggling to buy at retail. The weekend the sticker arrived, it went back to number one: the box office tracker Kogyo Tsushinsha put August 7 to 9 at 1.699 billion yen and 1,147,000 admissions, comfortably ahead of both the previous weekend and Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which had led the chart until then. As of August 14 no third wave had been announced.

The other half of the audience

Toyo Keizai's second argument is that the giveaway is not mainly a loyalty play. Chiikawa lives on X. Nagano has posted the strip there since 2020, and new instalments still appear there first, which is a wall for anyone who does not use the platform, children below the sign-up age included. The television version runs in short segments inside Fuji TV's morning programme Mezamashi TV on Tuesdays and Fridays, easy to miss unless you make a habit of the catch-up streams.

The film asks none of that. Toyo Keizai notes that its opening stretch is built so the main cast comes across on its own, without assuming the audience arrives knowing them.

What it does not do is stay cute, and that has become its own marketing. Japan's ratings board classified the film G, suitable for all ages. Taiwan's regulator placed it in the "protected" category, which carries a guidance warning for younger viewers, and Taiwanese outlets described audiences leaving screenings in collective silence and calling the film a horror picture. Oshiire no Hito's own summary is that it is a survival suspense film wearing a cute costume.

Where the film is playing outside Japan

Taiwan went first, opening on July 31 after preview screenings on the 25th and 26th, distributed by Medialink. The distributor reported more than 40 million Taiwan dollars, roughly 1.2 million US dollars, in the opening week to August 4, with a Mandarin dub following on August 7. Taiwan imported the giveaway calendar too: the same charm figure Japan handed out in week one, then a limited A3 teaser poster from August 7 to 13.

Hong Kong opened on August 6, running the Japanese-language version and a Cantonese dub from the same day. A Chiikawa-liveried Star Ferry has been crossing Victoria Harbour since July 28 and is scheduled to run until September 27.

Malaysia follows on August 20 through Medialink. Korea is set for September, handled by Daewon Media, which announced the release on July 22.

As of August 15, 2026, there is no announced streaming date and no announced wide theatrical release for North America or Europe. For now this is an Asia-first rollout, and in Japan the object driving a chunk of it is a sticker that comes with a ticket and nothing else. Does your local cinema hand you anything at the door, and would a sticker be enough to get you back for a second showing?

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