Glancing at the morning's site statistics, I noticed half a dozen referrals to the uBlog from a Google Images search for "Peko-Chan." Peko-Chan is the Fujiya Confectionery Company's trademark avatar, a statue of whom stands at the entrance of every Company retail store. When I documented the commercial character eighteen months ago I made a reference, in the press photo caption, to the obvious risks of leaving a jumbo-sized cartoon figurine accessible to the hands of the disreputable, the obsessive or the practically joking.
One look at Google News explained the spate of Peko-Chan entries:
A 39-year-old man was sentenced Wednesday to seven years in prison for stealing Peko-chan dolls, the trademark character for major confectioner Fujiya Co., that are traded at high prices among collectors. Peko-chan, the trademark of confectioner Fujiya Co., welcomes customers at a shop in central Tokyo in this photo taken in April 2004. The company says some 30 of the dolls have been stolen nationwide since January.The Yamagata District Court ruled that Hiroyuki Cho ordered a collaborator to steal 15 life-size dolls, worth about 1.1 million yen in total, from restaurants and shops in Gunma, Saitama and Yamagata prefectures from May to July last year. Cho, unemployed, lives in Takasaki, Gunma Prefecture.
Prosecutors had demanded 11 years in prison as violence was used in some of the attempts to steal the dolls. ...Although Peko-chan dolls are not for sale, they are traded among avid fans, and life-size ones can reportedly fetch more than 100,000 yen.
Two American equivalents are immediately apparent: the stone goose, which resides, in varying seasonal and holiday attire, on the front porch of every craftswoman homemaker; and Bob's Big Boy, which adorns, double-decker burger with everything on it in hand, the front walk of the eponymous restaurant chain; both of which regularly fall prey to pranksters. But neither of those sell for nine hundred dollars on anyone's black market — and no one in the United States will face eleven years behind bars for swiping one (or a dozen). You know the refrain.
