February 27th marked Pokémon’s 30th birthday, and the Pokémon Company revealed a bunch of new merch to mark the occasion, including a black and white, original Game Boy-inspired Pikachu plush. The rush to grab one of these limited-time exclusive plushies hit one particular Poké Center in Japan particularly hard, though, with one onlooker describing the chaos as “total war.”
User aeroflotlove shared a video of the commotion at the Tokyo Bay Poké Center on X, and shared their account of the ensuing panicked attempts to snag the limited-edition stuffed Pikachu (machine translated from Japanese.) “There were no tickets or lines, so I turned around at 10am, and there was a lot of people rushing into the store from all the entrances, pushing each other, fighting, screaming, children crying because they were being hit by other customers, it was total war.”
ポケセントーキョーベイ、整理券も整列もないとこだったので10時によーいどん、あちこちの入口から大量の人がダッシュで店内にすごい勢いで入ってきて押し合いやら喧嘩やら叫び声聞こえる、子供が他の客にたたかれて泣いてるなど戦争だった💦… pic.twitter.com/Br7rM9tIZN
— まゆ@⚡️o’ᆺ’o⚡️2026今年も宜しく (@aeroflotlove) February 28, 2026
Chris Explorer, a content creator living in Japan, captured a different angle of the bedlam from outside the Tokyo Bay store. The worker shouting at shoppers through a megaphone really adds an extra layer of pandemonium to the whole affair. It seems the Tokyo Bay Center wasn’t the only location hit by swarms of Pikachu-crazed fans, though, as users on X have stated that both the Yokohama and Osaka Poké Centers had a rough go of things as well.
Several posts online have blamed the ongoing Pokémon scalping epidemic for the desperate scenes. However, if that is true, fans can take solace in the fact that, less than 24 hours later, the Pokémon Company announced that the monochrome Pikachu plushie will be available to order through their website in the near future.
In fact, several Pokémon card shops in Japan have reported going out of business due to lower than normal demand in the past year, leading to speculation that the scalping-fueled ‘Mon bubble is set to pop. Hopefully that’s still the case, and the 30th anniversary chaos is just an outlier caused by the celebrations, because I’d like to be able to order Pokémon cards without having to rely on a Discord stock alert server in the near future.
