Decades back when I was growing up in India, I don't remember seeing a lot of life-size mascots roaming around. Air-India used to have a mascot referred to as the Air-India Maharaja, and so we were used to seeing these dolls of Maharaja in various sizes. But I have never heard of anyone dressed in that costume dancing around in the airline ticket office or welcoming passengers at the airport. These days some of the IPL (Indian Premier League) cricket teams seem to employ team mascots. Occasionally I hear mascot sightings in front of clothing stores or a mall promoting a sale. Beyond that, even after all these years, this concept is not seems to be widely popular in India.
In the US, each Basketball, Football, Baseball team, housed in any little town will have a mascot. In addition to selling small doll replicas of the mascots in their gift shops, team managers hire a man or woman wearing that mascot costume to perform exaggerated acts during the game. They will be running around the field/stadium, do somersaults and other wacky tricks entertaining the crowd, inviting them to cheer for the team. In Allentown, PA where we live, we have a local minor league baseball team called Iron Pigs. Their mascots Ferrous and FeFe, seen in the picture, will be in the field entertaining the audience whenever Iron Pigs play. Since this area hosted the famed, but now defunct, Bethlehem Steel plant for most of the 20th century, and is known for a lot of steel mills and workers, the team name itself is derived as a play on words, flipping Pig Iron we used to produce. You might have noticed the mascot names having the chemical symbol/name connotation to iron.
Beyond the sports arena, Disney World employs a lot of such characters. Starting from Micky Mouse and Donald Duck, you can see life size versions of every Disney cartoon character walking around Disney parks all over the world. If you have been to the Times Square in New York city, you might have come across Superman, Spiderman, Wonder Woman and various other characters walking around in nice looking, full-size costumes. They invite unsuspecting tourists to come take photos with them and then pester them for tip money. While it adds cute imagery and color to the touristy Times Square area, at times their badgering tends to be excessive, leading to newspaper articles on how to avoid them (e.g. don't engage) and the city trying to regulate them and so on.
While mascots are more common in US than in India, Japan has taken this idea to an extreme. There you can find a mascot for pretty much anything you can think of. Thus, going beyond sports teams or big companies, Japan tends to have a mascot for every town, prefecture, grocery store, dentist, train station, nuclear power plant and even for prisons. I am not exaggerating when I say there is even a contemplative poop mascot!
This mascot called Kumamon looks sort of like a black bear. It is the mascot for the Kumamoto precinct in Japan. Mascots of this kind, promoting tourism are easy to understand. There is nothing unusual about Kumamon that looks cute, soft, cuddly and friendly, serving as a nice advertisement vehicle for a region.
But if you look at the Matagi no Momiji next, it looks a bit annoyed and seems to be carrying a rifle! Apparently, it is out to hunt hunters.
Next one called Kan-chan that looks a bit like a pink colored penguin is actually the mascot for a drug company producing enema! When you start thinking that it is getting a little weird, we come across the Melon Kuma mascot from the Hokkaido region of Japan, which is known for bears and watermelon. So they have created this ambassador as a hybrid that looks like a bear that has a watermelon for its head! Doesn’t look very cuddly and cute but perhaps functions well as a memorable nightmare you can’t forget.
There are a lot of ongoing discussions as to which one is nice, which one is cute which one is really ugly and so on. Since there are regular annual competitions held, votes tallied and prizes worth thousands of dollars given away in multiple categories, designing, promoting, maintaining mascots is indeed a big business in Japan! Since there are thousands of such creatures, we can keep introducing them one after the other endlessly. Instead, let me ask you to search the web and introduce yourself to all these mascots. Might feel similar to playing Pokémon Go where you chase imaginary characters around, while I veer off in another direction.
This Shinjo-Kun mascot belongs to a town call Susaki. Once upon a time there was a kind of otter that was prevalent in the rivers found near Susaki. Shinjo-Kun mascot was designed to evoke the feel of that river otter. For some reason it is wearing a plate of noodles as it's hat, which may be a bit weird. But other than that, so far so good. Right? Without leaving Shinjo-Kun alone at this point, this same town has also adopted another otter named Chiitan. This is not a mascot but a real otter. The town designated it as its honorary goodwill ambassador. Chiitan had its own Twitter account and thousands of fans. After a while, in a moment of amusing enlightenment, the township thought the Chiitan needed its own mascot, despite the fact that there is already an otter inspired town mascot called Shinjo-Kun running around!
Since the Shinjo-Kun mascot was designed to look like an otter, the town wanted to make the second mascot look a little different. So, they gave Chiitan yellowish color and made it look like some sort of a child angel that has a turtle as its hat, making it oddly cute. But the team responsible for managing the image of Chiitan went rogue and started posting a lot of pictures on its Twitter account showing it as a crazed lunatic beating up a lot of other mascots, rolling cars (see the picture closely) in the streets and so on. If you do a simple search on the web for Chiitan, you will easily find many of these videos and pictures starring this villainous mascot. The Susaki town's elderly population was getting confused between Chiitan and Shinjo-Kun and started writing letters to the city mayor saying this is destroying the town's image. The city managers started scratching their head wondering what kind of trouble did they bring upon themselves. Pretty soon they called for a press conference and declared that the Chiitan mascot is retiring and so publishing pictures or videos of the mascot anymore would be considered a crime. Thus, Chiitan which was very popular, gaining a lot of media attention in 2018, suddenly got its Twitter account blocked putting it to sleep in 2019. But the fans of this rowdy mascot went to court arguing that the mayor has no right to block this mascot and won the case. Don't be surprised if Chiitan starts making its rounds destroying property and beating up other mascots this year. Is your head spinning yet?
When we start wondering why are Japanese so crazy about mascots and start digging around, we come to know about the Yokai culture that is behind it. In the Japanese folklore, Yokai used to represent any good/bad demon or spirit that is not an ordinary human being. A Yokai could arise from an old grandma's tale or it could be a character created out of someone’s imagination. They will basically be a monster creature that cannot be easily understood. People who have researched various yokai that roam around Japan and have written books about them, argue that these are symbols of superstition and paranormal personalities used to explain naturally occurring phenomenon. In other words, these are supernatural personas given to anything the Japanese society could not understand easily in the centuries past. There are many such explanations abound spanning time, space and imagination.
To give an example, this particular yokai call Tengu is supposed to have bright red skin, a large nose and wings. This demigod like creature is supposed to be an expert in martial arts. Whenever it wants, it can flap its wings to create huge cyclones. Though it tends to be saintly and normally minds its own business, if it finds souls that are really annoying, it can kick them so hard that they will land in some other galaxy. There are hundreds of such yokai that blend in the Japanese beliefs spanning centuries. It is not even a requirement that they should resemble human beings. Some Yokai are said to be capable of changing their form, possessing stupendous strength and energy while others could be more like little cute kittens giving us company. These have nothing to do with any religion but are manifestations of tradition, custom and culture in Japan.
For more than 12 centuries, associating anything they came across with some spirit is part of the Japanese culture. Thus a tree or the sky or an Android smartphone will be associated with a spirit so that we can talk about it in terms of its nature, how it works/feels. Thousand years back, people and folklore described these spirits in every which way possible based on their imagination. Just about 200 years back, an author named Toriyama Sekien started collecting all these yokai folklore, drew pictures of each one in color, wrote about their characteristics and published the collection as a book, standardizing many of the yokai qualities. That book became a big hit, providing a permanent look and feel to many of the yokai characters. Of course the idea of spirits & demons as well as personifying various naturally occurring phenomenon are well-known allover the world. We can sight tons of examples from Greek Gods, Hindu religious practices, African cultural manifestations and so on.
At the beginning of the 20th century, a Japanese scientist named Inoue Enryo felt that if Japan is stuck in this superstitious yokai culture, it can never pursue scientific advancements earnestly or rise to the levels of European countries. He went around documenting each Grandma’s tale associated with a given yokai, demolished those myths, gave lectures and wrote articles, thus relieving the Japanese society from the clutches of yokai methodically. As the age of science blossomed, explaining away most of the things that were occurring in nature, the need for yokai to step in as a proxy explaining how a natural phenomenon occurs had continued to recede. Still the Japanese society never allowed the yokai to completely vanish from their imagination. Thanks to that tradition and by remaining as convenient explanations to things unknown, several yokai manifestations continue to sustain themselves till now. 
Amabié is one such yokai. It has a bird like beak, long flowing blue hair, three legs and scaled skin that sort of makes it look like a morphed version of a baby mermaid. In the 19th century, Japan went through several rounds of Cholera infections. As the decease kept returning to decimate the population, in 1846 Amabié apparently came out of the ocean to save the Japanese people. After curing the whole country, it said if there ever is another pandemic, people should keep and post pictures of Amabié in their homes. Then it will come back to save the society. After making this promise Amabié went back into the sea. This story, captured even in the newspapers of that age, has established Amabié as the guardian angel of Japan against all kinds of infectious diseases. As the whole world was struggling to deal with the Corona pandemic this year, somebody in Japan reminded them about Amabié that promptly catapulted its popularity to the top. People started drawing pictures, baking cakes, creating sculptures, thus bringing Amabié back in the midst of their lives, making it a lucky charm or amulet for Japan. This is not surprising based on the culture that spanned centuries. 
At times when the world is moving in directions totally out of our control and when we are not sure how we are going to manage the problems confronting us to bring back life to the normalcy we are used to, it is common for human mind to become worried, developing unusual fears. We find ourselves in one such situation now, where the villain Corona we need to face in a Herculean battle is not even visible to our eyes. Under these circumstance if there could be one more paranormal power that we don't fully understand that appears to be capable of dealing with this terrifying villain to save us, belief in such an entity can potentially provide a sense of peace to the human mind even in this 21st century. Until this human nature searching for comfort lingers on, Amabié like yokai and their modern representations in the guise of various mascots will continue to thrive in this planet.
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