This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

One of the cool parts about moving to a new city or a new state or a new country is that you

notice all these fascinating things about a place that are just normal for people who have been

there a long time. When Chris Carlier moved from England to Japan in 2002, there was one thing

that really stood out to him. I think a lot of Japanese people go about their day and they don't

really pay any attention to the the mascots that are everywhere. The mascots. Real-world,

life-size character costumes with sweaty actors inside. Most people ignore them but I always found

them really fascinating. Here in the US, mascots are used to pump up crowds at sporting events or

traumatized generations of children at Chuck E. Cheese. But in Japan, it's different. There are

mascots for towns, aquariums, prisons. Sometimes I just go to the dentist and the dentist has the

right mascot. There are mascots that tell people not to litter or remind them to stay quiet on the

train. Everything has a mascot and anything can be a mascot. There's an anthropomorphized bare

mascot. There's an anthropomorphized melon mascot. There's an anthropomorphized bear whose head

is made out of a melon. His name is Melon Kuma and he's the mascot of a region known for both

its bears and its melons. And so, as Carlier adjusted to his new life in Tokyo, he started

snapping photos of all these mascots he was coming across. I just realized one day I had like

hundreds of pictures of mascots so I started putting them online. Carlier's hobby has since morphed

into a wildly popular Twitter account called Mondo mascots and if you were to build a Twitter

account in a lab, you could not concoct a more Vivian Lay set of content than this Twitter account.

Yeah, it's one of my favorite things on the internet. That's producer Vivian Lay. Twitter has been a

roller coaster ride of emotions for the past few months so it's a real treat to see a picture

of a manatee with a pompadour made out of cabbage. Usually these costume mascots are out interacting

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