Apr 13, 2020 (soranews24.com) - Anyone whose ever strolled through Tokyo’s Akihabara district or comparable areas like Osaka’s Denden Town have likely encountered euliens (pronounced “eh-oo-lee-en“).
These are people who stand on the street and try to aggressively draw people into their “galleries†and purchase their very expensive new-agey airbrushed landscape paintings.
Their name is a portmanteau of e uri (“picture selling†in Japanese) because that’s what they do, and “alien†because the whole thing’s really weird. It’s similar to what’s called an “art student scam†in other parts of the world in that the pictures are said to be sold under the pretenses that the pictures are original works by student artists when really all that’s being sold are glorified posters.
Compared to other pushy street salespeople I always found them to be relatively innocuous. Still, I never understood how anyone could get successfully roped into such a purchase, but it must happen enough for these things to be perennial fixtures in the otaku marketplace landscape.
However, with a recent climb in the numbers of infected in Tokyo, a state of emergency has been declared with non-essential businesses being advised to suspend operations to the time being. This move has been criticized for its lack of assertiveness, leaving it up to individual companies to regulate themselves.
And while you might not expect it, the eulien have heeded the call too and began to take measures to help curb the spread on 7 April.
While it might look like the eulien store is completely open among the avenue of shuttered shops, there has been one significant change: no one is standing out front trying to shake people down. That might not seem like a lot but it’s a core component of the eulien business model. It’d be like if KFC stayed open but only sold Pepsi and gravy without any chicken.
