7.1% of Young Koreans Are 'Resting' — and Queuing 4 Hours for Chiikawa

Some 7.1 percent of Koreans aged 21 to 25 were neither working nor looking for work from 2023 to 2026 — up from 4.9 percent in 2015-2019, according to an Oct. 20 report by the Korea Research Institute for Vocational Education and Training. That number helps explain a strange sight in Seoul: young adults queueing nearly four hours to buy plush toys from a cartoon about characters who keep failing their job exams.

Chiikawa, a Japanese web comic started by illustrator Nagano on X in 2020, follows round, hamster-like characters who pull weeds and hunt monsters for pay, and repeatedly fail the certification exams they study for. The strips are drawn in soft pastels, but the content is stark: crying over failed tests, fleeing monsters, counting thin earnings at day's end.

How big has the craze got?

The fandom has moved well past a niche base, and the sales data shows it:

• A Chiikawa pop-up in Seongsu-dong, eastern Seoul, in August sold out of everything within seven days.
• Three batches of Chiikawa-shaped popcorn buckets at CGV cinemas sold out.
• "Chiikawa the Movie: The Secret of the Mermaid Island" had drawn more than 2.2 million viewers in Korea as of Tuesday, topping the box office that day.

At the official Chiikawa store in I'Park Mall, Yongsan District — Korea's first, opened in February — joining the waitlist at 10:30 a.m. on Wednesday meant standing behind 402 people, with an estimated wait of three hours and 55 minutes. The registration line stretched past the mall's entrance gates. Some people brought suitcases for the haul.

Plush toys, keyrings and pouches on the pink-and-white striped shelves run from 15,000 to 60,000 won, or roughly $11 to $45. A second Nagano-themed shop, Nagano Market Seoul, also opened in Seongsu-dong in February.

Why do job seekers see themselves in it?

The people in line don't say the characters are cute so much as accurate. "I got here before 8 a.m.," said Choi Ji-hye, a 26-year-old architecture major who has been job-hunting since graduating this year. "I couldn't go to the pop-ups earlier this year because I was studying."

Park Yu-na, 27, quit a small logistics company last year and is retraining in data analytics. Holding a plushie she had just bought, she put the appeal plainly: "Chiikawa characters fail the weeding certification exam, cry and try again. They don't pretend things are fine."

Kim Seung-ho, 29, works short-term gigs for design agencies and reads the strip as a schedule. "They work hard, still fail, then eat something good with friends in similar situations and move on," he said. "That's pretty much my week. But it's okay, my girlfriend will like the plushies I get her."

That's the mechanism: a labor market where more young people sit out of work entirely has produced an audience that treats a children's-style comic as documentary. The characters' economy of odd jobs, failed certifications and small consolations maps almost one-to-one onto gig work, exam retakes and rest breaks between applications.

In short, the four-hour queue is a jobs statistic you can stand in. If the share of "resting" young Koreans keeps climbing, expect the fandom — and its sell-outs — to grow with it.