This past December, I visited Tokyo with my family. While my sister is a huge anime fan, I would describe myself as being more of an anime-adjacent fan. I loved watching Naruto growing up and even wrote my final paper in college about fanfiction for Masashi Kishimoto’s iconic series. Unfortunately, I didn’t really keep up with any series after graduating and entering the workforce. Rather, I chose to spend my evenings watching Ted Lasso which, to be fair, is basically a live-action American sports anime, and Abbott Elementary.
Yet, the bubblegum noises in the Lawson that we entered—a high-pitched chanting that was very much not the usual Lawson chime–piqued my interest. My sister and I ran straight to the chocolate aisle. “Oh my god, they have the horse girl racing anime-sponsored chocolates!” She exclaimed, wildly gesturing at the Crunky candy bar in her hand, which depicted an anime girl with horse ears on her head.
That was when I was introduced to the strange phenomenon that is Uma Musume.
I had never heard of Uma Musume, because people outside of Japan cannot download the mobile game. Uma Musume is region-locked and can only be downloaded with a Japanese App Store account, or through an app manager like Qoo App that allows you to download region-locked apps on Google Apps or the Apple App Store. However, in Japan, it is the most popular mobile game. And if you walk around parts of Tokyo, it’s impossible to not notice that Special Week, Silence Suzuka, and the other horse girls are quite literally all over Akihabara and Ikebukuro. Originally a mobile game that has surpassed $2 billion in revenue, the franchise inspired a popular ongoing anime adaptation, which debuted in 2018.
The game and anime both center on horse girls (the titular uma musume), who compete against each other in foot races at the Japan Derby. The winner of these races is showered with accolades, as they perform an idol concert in front of a cheering crowd of fans. It basically combines several of Japan’s favorite pastimes—notably horse racing, anime, and idols—into a single package. As an American, horse racing is supposedly popular, but I honestly do not know a single individual who bets on horses. However, Japan has about 21,000 official horse races per year, the most in the entire world. In 2015, Japanese folks bet over $22.5 billion on horses, and in comparison, folks in the United States bet only $12.3 billion. Naohira Goda, a horse racing analyst, believes because horse racing is one of the four sports people can bet on in Japan–the other three being keirin cycling, powerboat racing, and motorcycle racing–that it is “quite a rare opportunity to enjoy gambling.”
Uma Musume harbors a much darker side beneath its cheerful facade, though, which makes it different from other popular, clearly fantasy anime. The first is that Uma Musume sanitizes the very real, horrific conditions of horse racing and animal abuse in the sport. The second is that Uma Musume has also increased the interest of youth in the sport of horse racing and more importantly, horse betting, which had previously been seen as a hobby for older men. Put together, Uma Musume makes a strong case to emphasize the difference between fact and fiction.
I watched an episode of Uma Musume: Road to the Top, which described horse girl Narita Top Road, named after real-life 2002 Champion horse Narita Top Road, training for the Japanese Derby. The anime was written in a typical sports anime style—Top Road trained dangerously hard—more than the trainer advised—and went to school, where she would encounter her rival. The series followed Top Road as she faced trials and tribulations, but ultimately achieved her dreams thanks to her hard work.
The problem is, in real life horses are racing without their consent. Unlike other sports, where athletes choose to compete due to the love of their sport and competition, real-life horses are not able to consent to a brutal life of racing, abuse, and often doping to make them race faster. The New York Times reported that more than three horses break down every day on the track, and at least in 2012, more than twenty-four horses died on the racetrack each week. Oftentimes, racehorses who injure themselves will be euthanized immediately, and horses who cannot compete again will be sold for pennies for slaughter. For example, Royale with Speed, who earned $127,000 for his owners, was sold at a meat auction for only $350. In 2021, Japan’s unique Banei horse racing, a sport unique to Hokkaido in which horses pull heavy sleds through sand, had a horrifying video go viral of jockeys brutally kicking horses. While the video was reported by a nonprofit organization called Animal Rights Center to the Japanese police, it is unclear if stronger safety regulations or rules on proper animal handling were developed after the incident.
Beyond the real-life horrors, Uma Musume has also created a whole new youth culture of not only horse racing but horse gambling. As Leo Chu writes in his paper “Industries of Purity: Horses, Idols, and Affective Economy in Uma Musume Pretty Derby” that, “[w]ithin the otaku-related subcultures, the audience’s affect is often described as moe, or a burning passion for characters that “blurs the line between direct, mediated and purely machine contact.” The game itself even normalizes gambling with gacha mechanics, in which individuals can spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars to buy digital likenesses of their favorite characters through randomized drops.
While there are no real-life statistics in regard to an increase in interest in racing, Uma Musume has a much younger audience than Japanese horse racing. 95% of its players are male and 80% are men under forty, while men over forty are the main audience of horse racing. Anecdotally, many individuals who started out playing the game, collecting different horse girl avatars, and racing them have developed an interest in real-life racing and real-life betting. Individuals on forums warn others that while the game is an excellent gacha game, it can lead to real life gambling, and even v-tubers who usually stream games are now streaming horse racing instead. User @An_Ca_Te on Twitter even noticed that Uma Musume fan artists are now posting their horse racing betting results more and more. Compared to other gacha mobile games in Japan, Uma Musume directly parallels a gambling franchise, whereas other mobile games like Granblue Fantasy and Fate Grand Order do not. Thus, Uma Musume is uniquely positioned to become a feeder into a greater gambling addiction, which I ask fans to tread lightly.
Critics can point to how Uma Musume has benefitted horses in the sport. When Nice Nature retired in 2021, the Retired Horse Association arranged a retirement campaign as a birthday celebration and was inundated with donations. The target was 2 million yen, but they raised over 36 million yen. In 2022, the same fundraiser topped 50 million yen. The surplus in donations allowed more retired racehorses to be retrained as therapy horses, saving them from tragic ends at the slaughterhouse.
As a general casual watcher of anime, I defer to the more serious fans to use their best judgment. Just like how I know that in my favorite show, Prince of Tennis, Tezuka Kunimitsu did not cause the extinction of the dinosaurs with his tennis prowess, I also know that the real-life horses that inspired Uma Musume are probably not as happy as their anime counterparts. I encourage folks who are fans of the anime to research more into the problems with animal abuse that plague horse racing, such as PETA or other animal protection nonprofits such as Hanaeleh. Likewise, it can’t hurt to be aware that there are resources for individuals who believe they might have a problem with gambling, which can vary by country and location. In the United States where I am from, though, the National Gambling Addiction Hotline is 1-800-GAMBLER. (I know, we Americans love cheesy catchphrases like that).
And I will concede that whatever cultural impact Uma Musume has that I might not totally understand, the songs are incredibly catchy.
Edited By: Masha Zhdanova
