"Hey mister, doesn't this feel depressing?"
Children ask this of a man who paints his face white, pulls on a white bodysuit and walks the neighborhood dressed as a cartoon character. He has heard the question more than 10 times in person. The look may be a bit ridiculous, but he says it does not feel depressing. His livelihood is at stake.
This is Kim, a man in his 30s who runs the Muwon branch of Sulbing, a bingsu dessert chain, in Haengsin-dong, Deogyang District, Goyang, Gyeonggi Province. Since late last month, Kim has spent every Saturday dressed as a character from the animated series "Chiikawa," known in Korean as "Monjakgwi," or "Something Small and Cute," promoting his store.
Meeting at the store on the 22nd, Kim said, "If anyone at all comes in, there's no time to feel depressed." He added, "There's no choice if I want to make a living. I go out like I'm heading off to hunt monsters." Like the Chiikawa characters who hunt monsters to earn a living, Kim is fighting his own daily battle for survival.
Why go this far: 12 hours of work, 37,200 won in sales
The reason Kim turned to costumes lies in his sales figures. On the 21st, he minded the store for 12 hours, from noon to midnight. Sales that day came to just 37,200 won. That works out to 3,100 won an hour, less than a third of this year's minimum wage of 10,320 won. Factoring in ingredients and labor costs, the day was effectively a loss.
"For 12 hours, I could earn more than 130,000 won doing a day shift at Coupang," Kim said with a wry smile.
Winter is brutal for a shaved ice shop. In the sweltering summer, daily sales top 1 million won and the crowds can be hard to handle. But when the weather turns cold, sales fall to between 200,000 and 300,000 won. On a day like this one, when the morning low dropped to 5 degrees Celsius, even that collapses.
Of the three or four groups that visited the store that day, two came after seeing videos Kim posted on social media. "If I hadn't done the costume, it probably would have been about 20,000 won," he said. Impressed by two elementary school students who said they had come to cheer him on, he gave them an injeolmi bingsu on the house.
A part-timer's tip leads to 500,000 views
Kim did not start out as a Chiikawa fan. The costumes were less about personal taste than about saving the store. He was riding a wave of popularity.
He first saw the characters on a trip to Japan last year and paid them little mind. Then in mid-September, while chatting about current trends with part-time workers in their early 20s, he heard the names Chiikawa, Hachiware and Usagi again. At first he could not make out the unfamiliar Japanese, but once he looked up the characters, he remembered seeing them in Japan.
The series is already as popular in Japan as Sanrio, Kim judged, but still has room to grow in Korea. "They're cute, so I figured if they went mainstream the popularity would be insane," he said. "It was a very practical calculation about whether I could use them to promote the store."
His instinct proved right. According to the Korean Film Council's box office tracking system on the 23rd, "Chiikawa the Movie: The Secret of Mermaid Island" drew 23,254 viewers on the 22nd, holding the top spot at the box office for a ninth day. Cumulative attendance reached 1,927,845, and the film is understood to have already passed its break-even point.
Merchandise has sold briskly on the back of that popularity. Limited-edition popcorn buckets modeled on the characters at CGV theaters sold out in both the first and second production runs. Some limited-edition keyrings have appeared on secondhand marketplaces at more than five times their retail price. According to Bunjang, a secondhand trading platform, 72% of buyers of Chiikawa goods in the first week of this month were in their 20s and 30s.
Elementary students: 'He's working so hard, let's buy something'
Kim's first promotion featuring the characters came on the 22nd of last month. He played "Hitorigoto," a song from the 11th episode of the animation, on a ukulele, but the response was lukewarm.
Five days later, with help from a part-time worker studying fine arts, he attempted a Hachiware costume. Painting his face and getting into the full-body bodysuit alone took more than an hour. The video then raced past 200,000 views. The same content drew a completely different response once he was in costume.
On the 30th of last month, the day the movie opened, he saw the film and then, right after closing the store, put on a Momonga costume and shot a video. He has since filmed as Kurimanju and as a Siren, switching characters along the way.
Most of the filming happens after business hours. Because the makeup alone takes more than 40 minutes, the day he dressed as Kurimanju he finished shooting at 6 a.m., after sunrise.
Over the past month of steady posting, his Instagram videos have drawn 3 million views and his TikTok videos 2 million. His Instagram following grew from about 300 to more than 1,000. Customers began coming in after seeing the videos. "You can tell from the look in their eyes when someone came because of a video," he said.
Last Saturday he succeeded at street promotion for the first time. As he walked a loop around the neighborhood in costume, singing, six elementary school students said, "He's working this hard, let's go eat," and followed him into the store. Grateful, Kim gave them chapssaltteok rice cakes on the house.
'Me? I wouldn't call myself an otaku' — but he has watched every episode
It began strictly as a business decision. But the more Kim learned about the series for promotional purposes, the more he fell for the characters.
Kim himself waves off the label of Chiikawa otaku. "A real otaku would have a whole wall filled with merchandise, and I don't buy and collect things to that extent," he said.
Listen to him talk, though, and he sounds every bit the devotee. He watched every episode of the animation before the movie opened and can rattle off each character's personality and backstory. On weekdays, when he does not wear a costume, he works in an Usagi hat. Recently he went so far as to buy an Usagi mask.
Usagi is also his favorite character — someone who looks after friends with a casual air and lives as they please, much like the life Kim dreams of. Yet he has never once dressed as Usagi. He is saving it, he says, "because I like the character so much that I feel I have to do it really well."
For all his protests, Kim has clearly fallen deep into the series.
'I want to live like Chiikawa, but I live like Hachiware'
Unlike Usagi, his favorite, the character Kim says resembles him is Hachiware — living in a cave under a worn-out blanket while working diligently to get by.
The world of Chiikawa is not as easy as its cute exterior suggests. The characters make a living pulling weeds, sticking labels and hunting monsters. To earn more, they have to pass qualification exams. Chiikawa lives in a home won through a lottery, while Hachiware lives in a cave — a world infused with real-world hardships such as competition for jobs, income gaps and housing insecurity.
Kim's own reality is no different. On weekdays he minds the store alone from noon to midnight, then sorts deliveries or films promotional videos after closing. His home is in Paju, but he eats and sleeps at the store rather than waste time commuting. He showers at a nearby gym. He sleeps four to five hours a day.
"I'd like to win a prize while drinking yogurt, like Chiikawa, and live comfortably in a nice house, but the more I work, the more work there is," Kim said. "Somehow it feels like I'm living like Hachiware."
He plans to keep up the costumes at least until next spring. Customers stay scarce until the last cold snap passes. In summer, he has to work until dawn cutting watermelon and melon by hand, leaving no time for costumes.
"If it promotes the store, I'll do anything," Kim said firmly. "I'll take on whatever is right in front of me, like going out on a hunt."
