SORA NEWS


 

An amazing value for anyone who truly thinks it’s not the destination that’s important, but the journey.

Living in Japan, you can sometimes start to get a little desensitized to just how unusual some Japanese capsule toy, or gacha, vending machines are.

Excruciatingly detailed miniature recreations of Yoshinoya menu items?

High-speed pull-back moving mountains, which are also a pun?

We’ve got both of those sitting on our shelves right now.

And yet, today we’re looking at something that makes even us say “Whoa, now that’s crazy” with this capsule machine.

Right away, you’ll notice the word “peach” written at the top, but those pink orbs inside the machine aren’t pieces of fruit. This is a capsule vending machine for the company Peach, a Japanese airline, and inside each of those capsules is a round-trip airplane ticket.

 

Technically it’s a code to exchange through Peach’s Peach Point mileage service, but the end result is the same: you buy a capsule, and you get round-trip airfare. 

To where, you ask?

What a silly question. This is a capsule machine, so of course the destination you get is random!

Not completely random, though. In keeping with gacha protocol, you get one of a set number of possibilities, 12, to be precise, for tickets with Tokyo’s Haneda Airport as the start/end of the journey.

The possible destinations are Sapporo Shin Chitose (CTS), Memanbetsu (MMB), and Kushiro (KUH) in Hokkaido, Kansai International (KIX) in Osaka, Fukuoka (FUK), Nagasaki (NGS), Miyazaki (KMI), Oita (OIT), and Kagoshima (KOG) on the southwest island of Kyushu, and Naha(OKA), New Ishigaki (ISG) and Amami (ASJ) in Okinawa.

 

At 5,000 yen (US$46) each, these aren’t the kind of capsules you’re going to buy with pocket change, but they’re still an incredible bargain, and far cheaper than any other alternative to get from Tokyo to those destinations and back. thankfully, your departure date isn’t random, as you can redeem the tickets any time between when you purchase your capsule and March 31.

In addition to the Haneda tickets mentioned above, Peach has a second set of gacha tickets going to/from Osaka’s Kansai International Airport.

For these the possible destinations are the Tohoku region’s Sendai (SDJ), Niigata (NHK) on the Sea of Japan coast, Narita International Airport (NRT), outside Tokyo in Chiba Prefecture, and the same destinations in Hokkaido, Kyushu, and Okinawa as the Haneda tickets, with the exclusion of Oita.


▼ The to/from Kansai International Airport ticket routes

 

Peach is calling the program Tabikuji (“Journey Lottery”), and the available tickets depend on which of two machines you buy them from.

For the Haneda tickets, a Tabikuji machine will be installed in Tokyo on the sixth floor of the Shibuya Parco shopping center, while the Kansai International tickets can already be purchased from the machine on the fourth floor of the Shinsaibashi Parco in Osaka.