@samuelszuchan: In 2021, one of Japan's top 10 buzzwords went to nobody. Usually, there is someone to accept the award for each of the top 10 words, but for this word, the official record reads "no recipient." On the same day, it was also selected as the word of the year for Shogakukan's Daijisen dictionary. From the 1,509 public submissions, it received 102, the highest of any word. This word was "oya gacha" (parent gacha). In Japan's mobile games, users spend real money on randomized draws to obtain the rarest characters in the game, called SSR (SSR stands for Super Special Rare). The word is named after the capsule-toy vending machines outside supermarkets: put coins in, turn the crank, and see what you get. Your parents, the word says, are what dropped. There are ways out of an unfortunate draw. Some players repeatedly uninstall and reinstall the app, doing the free initial pull over and over until they get something good. They call this a "reset marathon." Also, most games have a "ceiling": if you do enough pulls, you are guaranteed to get a rare character. One user summarized the situation on Twitter: "parent gacha has a lower SSR rate than any social game, and you get one single pull." The sociologist Doi Takayoshi of the University of Tsukuba brought the word into adult discourse in September 2021, saying that students have told him "I lost the parent gacha." TV commentators interpreted this as an insult to parents, and the idol Koyama Keiichirō called it "a nasty word." But Doi had also heard it used the other way: "quite a few of my students seem to have been told by their parents, 'we lost the child gacha.'" The students who use the phrase, he says, do not blame anyone for their situation; they are trying to find words for poverty. "You can't say something like 'there was nothing to eat in the morning,'" he says. Saying you lost the parent gacha wraps that fact in something easier to swallow, and he insists "it is not a word for blaming parents." The committee that compiles the list of the top 10 buzzwords of the year directed the word to the parents. Parents, they wrote, "have always demanded effort from children." "If you try, it'll work out": they say this, but they never mention the one thing children never got to choose: their parents. The committee concluded that telling a child to try harder "is hard on a child."

Sam Szuchan

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Wednesday 14 October 2026 19:00:00 GMT