How Dokkiri Man Menko Captured Three 1980s Fandoms

Dokkiri Man Onyanko Menko Card

A Menko Card From Japan’s Late-1980s Pop Culture Peak

This circular piece of thick cardboard is a menko — one of Japan’s oldest children’s game pieces, with roots in the Edo period. Players slam cards onto the ground, using the resulting air pressure to flip an opponent’s card. By the 1980s, character menko were a fixture of dagashi-ya, the neighbourhood shops selling cheap candy and toys to schoolchildren across Japan.

This card belongs to the “Dokkiri Man” series — a name that signals its parody intent immediately. “Bikkuri” (surprise) becomes “dokkiri” (a sudden shock), a deliberate play on Lotte’s enormously popular Bikkuriman Choco snack. Dokkiri Man was not an officially licensed product; it represents the opportunistic parody goods that small manufacturers produced freely during this era, when informal norms often allowed such items to circulate without licensing agreements. The card bears a copyright mark reading ©JUN, though identifying the exact manufacturer behind that name has proven difficult — records for unlicensed novelty goods from this period are typically scarce.

Two Pop Culture Booms, Captured on One Card

Bikkuriman Choco had been on sale since 1977, but the 1985 introduction of holographic “Devil vs. Angel” stickers triggered a genuine social phenomenon. Children were buying the snacks in bulk for the stickers alone — a craze serious enough to prompt public debate. That moment sent a wave of parody products into shops, and Dokkiri Man was among them.

At exactly the same time, Japanese television was in the middle of the Onyanko Club moment. The group emerged from Fuji TV’s live variety show Yuyake Nyan Nyan (1985–1987), produced by Yasushi Akimoto — who would later create AKB48. The group eventually grew to more than fifty members and scored multiple chart hits. Its name and the show’s title both played on the Japanese word for a cat’s meow (nyan nyan), reflected directly in the card’s orange cat illustration and “Nyan Nyan!?” text. The central figure, Aiko the Onyanko Queen, is a parody character built on the group’s image. The card’s flavour text loosely translates as “wave the beckoning charm and even a tiger becomes a cat” — a riff on the maneki-neko (beckoning cat) tradition, suggesting that no one can resist Onyanko Club’s pull.

Where Three Collecting Worlds Come Together

This card sits at an intersection that appeals to collectors with very different starting points. Menko enthusiasts find a late-period character example from the form’s commercial peak. Bikkuriman followers encounter the parody ecosystem the sticker boom generated. And those tracing the lineage from Onyanko Club through to modern groups like AKB48 find a material artefact from the era that lineage began.

Unlicensed parody goods were produced in smaller quantities than official merchandise and treated as disposable at the time, making surviving examples uncommon. The estimated production window falls somewhere between 1986 and 1989, placing this card squarely within “Showa retro” — the growing collector category centred on 1980s Japanese popular culture. Exact production figures were not documented, as was typical for goods of this kind.