Not for children travelling with them. For the stuffed animals themselves.
There are also cafés where they get their own seat at the table, and a service that functions as a nursery — you leave your plush toy there for the day and collect it later.
The customers are adults.
I have taught at Japanese universities for a long time and worked as a counsellor for around forty years, and I want to explain what I think is actually happening here. It is not what it looks like.
What the numbers say
The word is nui-katsu — roughly, “plush activity.” It means carrying a stuffed toy around with you, photographing it, taking it places, treating it as a companion rather than an ornament.
It was nominated for Japan’s buzzword of the year in 2025. The domestic stuffed-toy market grew to 115.3% of the previous year in fiscal 2024 and is estimated at around ¥45 billion — roughly $300 million.
One survey found that about 80% of young people had done it.
That much is a youth trend and would not be very interesting.
Here is the part that is.
It is moving upward through the age brackets.
People in their thirties, forties and older are doing it now. Analysts point to two characters as the entry point for people who had never taken part in fan culture before: Labubu, which you have probably seen, and Myaku-Myaku, the mascot of the Osaka Expo.
Those two got the habit of wearing a character into hands that had never done it.
What I see, and what I assumed
I notice what students carry. It is a side effect of the job.
Over the last few years one thing has changed unmistakably.
Students hang small plush toys from their phones. They clip them to their bags. Not only the women.
For a long time I filed this under fashion and thought no more about it. That was lazy of me, and I want to explain why I changed my mind.
The term you may already know
If you have read any developmental psychology in English, you have met this idea.
The paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott described what he called the transitional object.
The particular blanket. The one bear. The thing a small child will not let you wash.
Winnicott’s point was that this is not immaturity.
An infant starts without a clear line between itself and its mother. That line has to be built. The transitional object sits exactly on the seam of it — not the self, not fully another person either.
It obeys you, and yet it is undeniably there, with a texture and a weight.
The child holds it while learning to be alone.
So it is not the opposite of independence. It is what independence is made of, partway through.
Which raises the question this article is actually about.
When an adult does the same thing, what are they partway through?
Why it has to be an object
Something about nui-katsu does not make sense at first.
If the point were affection for a character, a screen would do.
There are endless images. There is video. Instead people buy an object made of cloth and stuffing, attach it to a bag, accept the weight of it, and carry it around all day.
Why does it have to be in your hand?
There is Japanese research that speaks to this directly.
In 2013 a team including Hidenobu Sumioka published a study in Scientific Reports.
Participants held a soft, human-shaped cushion device while talking on the phone to someone they had never met. A control group held nothing.
Saliva and blood were sampled, and cortisol — the stress hormone — was measured.
The people holding the object had lower cortisol. This held even when the conversation partner was an unfamiliar person of the opposite sex.
But the finding I keep thinking about is a different one.
Their self-reported mood showed no significant difference.
The people holding the cushion did not report feeling calmer. Their bodies were calmer anyway.
That is, I think, the answer to why the screen will not do.
This is not something you look at. It is something you touch, and the effect arrives underneath your awareness of it.
The authors are careful about the limits of their own work — the participants were all women, and they note that the specific texture and shape of the device may have contributed.
It needs replicating under other conditions. I would rather report that than overstate it.
About the oxytocin claim
You will find a lot of writing online explaining that hugging something soft releases oxytocin, and that this is why it feels good.
I looked into this, because I wanted to use it.
Most of the sources making that claim are companies that sell plush toys.
There is real research showing that affectionate touch between people is associated with higher oxytocin.
What I could not find was a study that measured oxytocin directly in someone hugging a stuffed animal. If it exists, I have not located it.
What has actually been measured, carefully, is the cortisol.
So the accurate version is this.
Holding something soft has been shown to lower a stress hormone. Which chemical pathway is doing the work is not settled.
I prefer this version anyway. “A hormone makes you happy” is a smaller claim than “your body quietened down and you did not notice.”
Nothing is being asked of you
Forty years of this work has taught me one thing more reliably than anything else.
When someone is struggling, what helps is rarely good advice. It is the presence of something.
And it is better if that something wants nothing. A person who worries about you has to be managed.
A person who encourages you has to be answered. Both cost energy that the struggling person does not have.
The plush toy says nothing. It does not tell you to try harder. It does not ask how you are. It hangs off the outside of the bag and moves when you walk.
I used to look at a student with a toy on their phone and see a fashion.
Now I see something being held.
Winnicott was describing a child learning to be alone.
If adults across an entire country have reached for the same equipment, the honest question is what we are all partway through — and I do not have an answer to that.
What I have stopped doing is calling it childish.
I have written elsewhere about Chiikawa, a character whose merchandise you may have seen abroad without knowing what the story is about. The two subjects turn out to be related.
