Nui

Nui is short for nuigurumi (a plush toy or stuffed animal). It usually refers to plushies modeled after characters from anime, games, or idol groups. The term spread through otaku culture and social media, and it isn't limited to your own oshi (the character or idol someone is a fan of). Any character plushie might casually get called a nui.

While it covers character plushies in general, in the context of oshikatsu (fan activities devoted to one's oshi) it leans toward meaning a plushie that makes your oshi three-dimensional, whether that oshi is a character, an idol, a VTuber, or someone else. It isn't only the official nui sold by makers or rights holders; it also includes self-made nui that fans sew from fabric, as well as store-bought plushies adopted as stand-ins for an oshi.

Small, portable sizes are preferred, and people tend to pick ones meant to be carried along in a bag or held in hand. Keeping an oshi's nui close and taking it out to carry around, photograph, or dress up is a type of activity called nui-katsu.

The closest English word is plushie, but the nuance differs slightly. Plushie refers to plush toys in general and doesn't carry the link to a particular character or oshi. Merch overlaps in the sense of official goods, yet it loses the side of nui that fans make themselves or carry around as a stand-in for someone.

Nui is nuigurumi clipped down to two syllables, so the story of the word starts with where nuigurumi itself came from.

How The Word Nuigurumi Came to Be

Nuigurumi is written with characters meaning to sew and to wrap, a combination of nuu (to sew) and kurumu (to wrap). Fabric is sewn together and stuffing such as cotton is wrapped inside to form a shape. The act of sewing fabric into the form of an animal or doll and wrapping filling inside became the name for it.

How the Short Form Nui Spread

Shortening nuigurumi to nui took hold within otaku culture and on social media. It lines up with a trend in which more plushies depicted characters in a deformed, cutesy style, and fans who collected them or carried them around increased. BT21, a set of characters that came out of K-POP, appeared in 2017, and around this time the practice of carrying a plushie of a single character spread as well. BT21 isn't the origin of nui culture, but it's one example of carry-along character nui becoming more popular.

The Standard Sizes

Nui sizes roughly split into small (around 10cm), medium (around 15cm), and large (around 20cm). Of these, 10cm and 15cm are treated as the standard sizes, and related goods like nui-fuku (clothes for a nui) and pouches are often made to match those dimensions. There's no official, unified standard for what to call each size. The labels stay rough guidelines that distributors and makers have come to share naturally.

Social Media and the Role as a Double

A nui is also used as a stand-in that appears in social media posts in your place. When you want to record a trip or a meal without showing your face, you set the nui down and photograph it instead of yourself. By letting the nui take your place you can protect your privacy while still sharing time spent with your oshi. The very presence of an oshi's nui in a photo also works as a signal to others who share the same oshi.

Affection Directed at a Nui

A nui can be stand-ins for expressions of affection you can't direct at your oshi in person. It can be kept close and talked to, dressed in clothes, or slept next to, a kind of up-close interaction that wouldn't work with the real oshi. Through a double that stays within reach, fans can turn their feelings for an oshi into concrete actions.

Differences from English-Speaking Plushie Culture

The English-speaking world also has a culture of loving plushies, carrying them around, and taking photos of them. But the English word plushie points to the plush toy as an object, and it isn't tied to attachment toward a specific target like an oshi or to a framework of activity like oshikatsu. The Japanese nui, along with surrounding terms like nui-katsu, nui-dori (photographing a nui), and nui-fuku, carries a whole culture of taking an oshi around and treating the nui as a stand-in.