Honey Lemon Soda’s Takamine Gets His Own Bandai Keychain

Tomoya Takamine Mini Rubber Keychain from Honey Lemon Soda

The Ribon Manga Behind the Character

Honey Lemon Soda is a high school romantic comedy serialized in Shueisha’s monthly shojo magazine Ribon since 2016, created by Mayu Murata. The story centers on Hana Ishimori, a quiet girl who has spent her school years trying not to stand out. When she enters high school, she meets Kai Miura — a blond-haired classmate whose confidence and warmth gradually draw her out of her shell. The manga has grown into a long-running series with more than ten collected volumes under Shueisha’s Ribon Mascot Comics label, and an anime adaptation in the 2020s expanded its audience well beyond the magazine’s core readership. Among contemporary Ribon titles, Honey Lemon Soda has become one of the magazine’s defining works — no small claim for a publication that has been running since the mid-twentieth century and counts Chibi Maruko-chan among its alumni.

Who Is Tomoya Takamine?

Takamine is a supporting male character — a classmate or associate of protagonist Hana — whose presence in the story is shaped partly through his contrast and relationship with Kai Miura. His design gives him a distinct visual identity: dark blue hair, brown eyes, a yellow accent detail, and a school uniform of white shirt, blue-striped tie, light blue V-neck vest, and blue trousers, finished with a small piercing on the left ear. On this keychain, he appears in chibi form — the super-deformed style, or SD, in which characters are reduced to round heads, shortened limbs, and exaggerated proportions that have defined Japanese character merchandise for decades. That a supporting character earns dedicated goods is itself telling: it signals a level of fan investment in Takamine specifically, the kind that develops in a series where the secondary cast carries genuine personality.

Rubber Keychains, Bandai, and Oshi-Katsu

This is a mini rubber keychain in Bandai’s standard format — a die-cut PVC piece shaped to the character’s silhouette, built from multiple colored layers that give it a slight dimensional quality at the edges. A silver ball chain allows it to clip onto a bag, a zipper, or a keyring. It comes sealed in a clear plastic bag, consistent with how Bandai packages this type of product domestically.

Bandai is Japan’s largest toy and character goods manufacturer, and the BANDAI Japan label marks this as an officially licensed release rather than an unlicensed copy. Rubber keychains sit squarely within what Japanese fans call oshi-katsu — the practice of incorporating devotion to a favorite character into daily life through physical objects. They are a practical format that lets publishers and manufacturers produce a broad roster of characters from the same series in a single lineup, and Bandai has used it across a wide range of anime and manga properties since at least the 2010s.

Domestic Bandai character merchandise of this type is typically sold through specialist anime retailers, event venues, and online channels in Japan, and rarely enters formal international distribution. Ribon’s readership has grown internationally over the years, reaching fans across Asia, North America, and Europe who follow the shojo manga tradition the magazine represents.