The “Seal Kindergarten” boom, with “over 5 million yen thrown away per day,” has not cooled off… Why seals are loved so much

Last summer’s “Miracle of the Seal Kindergarten” continues to this day.

Seals are now enjoying a boom.

Seals have all the elements of cuteness. Their eyes are round and round, their muzzle is round and round, and their head is smooth and round, without even earlobes.

And their body shape is very round. They are very agile in the water, but on land, they are like a character with low fighting strength. They have all of these elements that make them beloved, so it was only natural that they would become a boom animal.

Yuko Kobayashi, the editor in charge of the “Seal Marugoto Book” (supervised by Tadaaki Imaizumi, edited by Shunsuke Minamiwidth, Tatsumi Shuppan), says so.

On August 1 last year, the word “seal kindergarten” started trending on X. The term was coined to refer to the Pieterburen Seal Center, a seal protection facility in the Netherlands. The facility takes care of injured or weakened individuals and releases them back into the wild. The facility’s live-streaming program became a sensation after a Japanese user posted on X. The seals were floating in a pool, and the user’s name was “Pieterbueren.

The videos of the seals floating and playing with each other in the pool became so popular that Japanese viewers came to watch the 24-hour live streaming any day of the week. When the ban on super chat was lifted, the amount of money thrown at it exceeded 5 million yen a day, making it the world’s largest.

Within the community, unique “terms” were born one after another. One person described a seal swimming standing up as a “tea pillar,” which led to the creation of words such as “new tea” for new seals, “icha-icha” and “wacha-wacha” for the way they play with each other, and “tea ceremony club members” for the fans. Seal Kindergarten” was even nominated for the Ryukugo Award.

Seal Marugoto Book,” published in December, was ranked No. 1 overall on Amazon and Rakuten Books when it was announced that it would be released, and the book was sold out before it was even available for pre-order. At the time of its release, it was also trending on X. Kobayashi himself, who has worked on books about cats and various other animals, was one of the people who fell in love with “Seal Kindergarten,” but until then he had not paid particular attention to seals.