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The story
Tokai Onair, a YouTuber group under UUUM based in Okazaki City, Aichi Prefecture, has had its economic impact on the city estimated at ¥36.91 billion over 10 years, based on a survey conducted in April and May 2026. Member Tetsuya reacted, “That’s an incredibly incredible number!” On 5ch’s Geinou/Sports News+ thread, many commenters questioned the calculation method itself, pointing out the shakiness of estimates based on input-output tables and the failure to separate this figure from the tourism boost from the NHK taiga drama “Dōsuru Ieyasu” (What Will You Do, Ieyasu?) — while others noted that local restaurants really do see lines of visitors from outside the prefecture.
Survey period: April 3–7, May 11–29
Tokai Onair’s economic impact on Okazaki City: ¥36.91 billion over 10 years — Tetsuya: “That’s an incredibly incredible number!” – Yutura –
September 17, 2026, 12:19
Source: yutura.net / Original article here
What people said
Even got his idol wife to relocate to the area too.
https://diamond.jp/articles/-/187407
For the 50-and-up crowd,
he's more of a TV guy than a YouTuber.
There's a lot of pilgrimage tourism,
plus whatever boost comes from the place name getting media exposure.
and I have no idea who's actually a fan.
Same deal as HIKAKIN (another huge Japanese YouTuber everyone's heard of but nobody seems to watch).
but for a place like Okazaki, which is kind of unremarkable especially to younger people, they're probably a welcome presence.
They still doing that series?
Pretty sure they only did it once a few years back and haven't done it again in like 4 years.
Would be funny if they brought Hori Daisuke onto that one.
Well, 'economic ripple effect' as a metric is sloppy to begin with…
If it were net new spending, that'd be a different story.
Did this actually improve Okazaki's finances?
Did that ¥36.91 billion really come without spending a single yen?
And where did that ¥36.9 billion even come from?
If a collab lunch set sells for ¥1,000, that counts as ¥1,000 of 'economic impact.'
They don't factor in that people probably skipped their usual lunch to buy it instead.
They're just a bunch of amateurs.
You claim no interest, yet you sure know a lot about them.
but I'd like actual sales and profit figures.
What was the projected economic impact before the Tokyo Olympics again?
It ended up a huge deficit in the end, COVID included.
This used to be treated as a running joke, like Professor Miyamoto's estimates for Hanshin Tigers fans,
but somewhere along the way everyone started taking it way too seriously.
Back when 'Dōsuru Ieyasu' was airing, it felt like just as many tourists were coming to Okazaki for this group as for the taiga drama.
Not that I have any interest in the group myself.
Places like Manpukuya have lines every day.
That whole area is packed with young people.
Well, the thing is 'economic ripple effect' probably lumps in the taiga-drama tourist numbers too, so it's kind of murky.
Feels like view counts are down across the board these days.
Countless knockoffs of these guys have popped up.
There were groups where everyone wore their own color-coded outfits,
but they've all disappeared, huh.
Well, these guys are basically old-guard veterans, second only to Fischer's.
I have no clue about all these Shorts creators aimed at overseas audiences that popped up lately.
Just the money spent by people who traveled to Okazaki for Tokai Onair, ate out, stayed overnight, and bought souvenirs?
"Many fans visit our city on pilgrimages, and we've even seen young people move here or take jobs here because of them —
our city's contribution is so remarkable that a figure like ¥36.91 billion doesn't even come as a surprise."
Background and key points of this discussion
An “economic ripple effect” is an estimate that municipalities and events typically produce through commissioned studies, using an input-output table to add a chain of related transactions (indirect effects) on top of the direct effect. As pointed out in the thread, such figures tend to come out inflated because they can’t cleanly exclude substitution effects (spending simply shifted from elsewhere) or overlap with pre-existing tourism demand — a point economists have long criticized. The economic-impact estimates published by Professor Katsuhiro Miyamoto (formerly of Kindai University) for various booms are especially famous, and online they’re often treated as something of a running joke. Tokai Onair is one of Japan’s biggest YouTuber groups, formed in Okazaki City in 2013, notable for the fact that its members have stayed based in their hometown rather than relocating to Tokyo. This survey period also overlapped with tourism driven by the NHK taiga drama “Dōsuru Ieyasu” (What Will You Do, Ieyasu?), making it difficult to cleanly separate the two effects.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Geinou/Sports News+) thread “[UUUM] Tokai Onair’s economic impact on Okazaki City: ¥36.91 billion over 10 years — Tetsuya: “That’s an incredibly incredible number!”.”
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