Chiikawa’s Kendama Ojisan and the Carddass Card He Stars In

Chiikawa Carddass Vol.2 — Kendama Ojisan, HP20

Chiikawa: A Twitter Webcomic Turned National Franchise

Chiikawa — whose full title translates roughly as “That Small, Cute Thing” — began as an intermittently posted webcomic on X (formerly Twitter), where the artist Nagano started building a following around 2020. The strip’s appeal rests on an unusual tension: characters that look entirely soft and adorable find themselves navigating genuinely unsettling or emotionally layered situations. That combination hit a nerve, and Chiikawa grew into one of the defining pop-culture IPs of early-2020s Japan. A television anime followed on TBS, and the franchise expanded into one of the country’s most active merchandise ecosystems — plush toys, acrylic standees, pin badges, capsule toys, and trading cards across several formats, including this Carddass series from Bandai.

Kendama Ojisan: A Character Built Around One Motif

Among Chiikawa’s many supporting characters, Kendama Ojisan — the name means “Kendama Uncle” — is immediately recognizable. The kendama is a traditional Japanese wooden toy: a handle with two cups and a spike, used to catch a tethered wooden ball through a series of balancing tricks. Everything about this character folds that reference inward. His body is white and round, he sports a small mustache that fits the avuncular quality his name implies, and his head is topped with a bright red sphere that unmistakably echoes the ball of a kendama. He carries two miniature kendamas in his hands. The phrase “Ha-i” — a casual, drawn-out version of “yes” used as a greeting — is widely associated with the character among fans, though that attribution rests on fan recognition rather than a formally documented source.

Kendama Ojisan falls into the category of Chiikawa side characters who earn followings largely on the strength of visual concept alone. The kendama motif runs so completely through his design — name, head, hands, personality — that the character reads as a unified idea from any angle. For collectors drawn to the intersection of traditional Japanese objects and contemporary pop culture, that layering is part of what makes him stand out within a crowded cast.

The Carddass Format and Its Place in Japanese Collecting Culture

Bandai’s Carddass line dates to 1988, when the company began selling character-illustrated cards through dedicated vending machines. Early series featured Dragon Ball and Saint Seiya artwork, and the format became a phenomenon through the 1990s — a single-card pull mechanism that paralleled the gachapon capsule-toy experience but in printed form. Carddass is a Bandai registered trademark and a distinct product line, separate from conventional trading-card games even when individual series incorporate game statistics.

The format contracted after its 1990s peak but has been revived steadily through collaborations with current IPs, and the Chiikawa Carddass series sits squarely in that modern era. This card, from Vol.2 released in 2025, carries an HP20 stat — a gameplay value within the Carddass system that implies different characters across the series hold different HP values, and that the cards are designed to function as both collectible art and a playable set. Vol.2’s existence confirms that a Vol.1 preceded it, making this card one piece of an ongoing run. As an officially licensed Bandai product, it carries the manufacturing standards and IP authorization that distinguish official Japanese character merchandise from unlicensed goods.