I feel like I missed the boat on the Beyblade fandom by only a few years. The Takara Tomy spinning top toys first made a splash after I’d finished high school. It was the latest in a rich history of anime being used to spruik playground toys.
For the uninitiated, Beyblades are boisterously decorated spinning tops comprised of several parts. The tops are loaded onto handheld zip launchers and fired at each other in an enclosed arena. The tops knock each other around, circling each other and shaving off their momentum in clashes that mimic boxers throwing punches. The top that retains the most momentum and topples its opponent is declared the winner. Bouts are short, fast, explosive affairs, promoting repeat matches and a one-more-go moreishness.
But, like I said, it passed me by. When Hasbro’s Australian arm asked if I’d like to visit Japan to learn more about the 2024 version of the product, I couldn’t understand why on earth they thought of me for the pitch. I do now, though.
A dream factory in Tateishi
When one imagines a building where people dream up toys, the mind conjures up a kind of workplace wonderland. A place of endless amusement, where creative minds are allowed full and free expression in the name of child-like whimsy.
Takara Tomy’s Tokyo head office is a boxy, unremarkable building in Tateishi, the heart of the Katsushika City special ward. There was no way to know that the building before me was the headquarters of a major toy company, a foundry of joy. Inside, it was a picture of Japanese corporate efficiency, a maze of meeting rooms and fluorescent lighting with a large marketing bullpen on the fourth floor. It was a fine office building, but it was about as far from a dream factory as it was possible to be.
Nevertheless, it was a building filled with toy designers very excited about the range of Beyblades they’d worked so hard on. Takara-Tomy knows its baseline conceit is a stretch, well aware that it is repackaging the literal, actual oldest kind of toy on earth. Spinning tops have been around for thousands of years and have independently recurred in almost every human culture on the planet. Reinventing a toy played with thousands of years before the birth of Christ for children in 2024 sounds like the definition of a tall order.
“Between the ancient spinning tops children played with hundreds of years ago and the Beyblades of today, I see one commonality,” a Takara-Tomy developer tells me through a translator. “The concept of spinning tops taps into the human instinct for competition. This is how you keep the spinning top relevant and fit the moulds of modern society.”
Twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom
Beyblade X is the latest version of the product line, a collection of gnarly, metal-rimmed tops that spin differently depending on how they are assembled. Each top can be broken down into three constituent parts — the blade (the moulded, metal-gilded upper counterweight), the ratchet (the central connector that augments the top’s total height) and the bit (the tip on which the top is balanced).
The construction of each top augments its behaviour while spinning and each is coded by name and colour. Understanding these codes and colours will immediately tell you what you’re dealing with. Primary types of Beyblade are built for attack, defence, balance, or stamina. For instance, the Dran Sword 3-60F Beyblade sounds like a fairly typical nonsense anime name until you realise that it tells you exactly which parts have been used to construct the top. Dran Sword describes the three-sided attack blade. 3-60 describes the ratchet, a three-point 60mm configuration. F describes the Bit and stands for Flat. A Flat bit creates the kind of aggressive spinning movements that pair well with the Dran Sword blade.
There are numerous permutations and die-hards hunt for rare or limited-run components to get the edge on competitors. Certain types work better against each other than others. Stamina tops are an excellent counter to attack tops because they’re hard to knock over and wear their foes down.
This is where Hasbro’s interest in the product developed. The build types, the part and colour codes, the collectible nature of the game—there’s a lot of overlap with games like Magic: the Gathering. In Magic, you brew up a deck, carefully choosing which cards to take and how you plan to use them together. The cards are colour-coded to ensure players only take one or two types of cards. If you describe your deck in mechanical terms, most Magic players will know what you’re about to run with. The really good Magic players can even correctly guess the cards in your deck and mentally prepare a strategy. Beyblade developers and their players view the hobby in similar terms.
Spin to win
Competition is at the centre of the Beyblade X product. Beyond entertaining children in playgrounds, the hobby has fostered a fully-fledged tournament scene in Japan. Kids, teenagers, and grown-ups alike attend major tournaments to compete for rare and limited-run Beyblades, glory, and other prizes.
The day after visiting Takara-Tomy, we were taken to Tobu Zoo in Miyashiro, Saitama Prefecture. Tobu Zoo opened in 1981, and it is every inch a concrete relic of the 1980s. It’s a zoo plainly designed in an era before anyone bothered to ask about the comfort of the animals in captivity. At no time is this more apparent than on a hot, humid, 30-degree summer’s day far from the seaside, when the concrete footpaths sear and the animals all fall asleep by midday.
The most prized animals in Tobu Zoo’s collection are a family of white tigers. They’re advertised all over the park, and are the reason it was selected as the site for a new Beyblade X tournament. The latest release in the product line, the Weiss Tiger 3-60U, was released as a booster that same weekend. Everyone was there to get one and compete for other lavish prizes.
The Weiss Tiger 3-60U is a balance-type Beyblade comprised of a Weiss Tiger blade, itself comprised of Attack, Defense, and Stamina blades. It sits on a 3-60 ratchet like the Dran Sword 3-60F and a Unite bit, hence the U in the name. Unite is a brand-new Performance bit released with the Weiss Tiger booster. Fans are still experimenting with it to figure out how best to place it in the game’s current meta.
The competition was unexpectedly fierce and very well attended. The benefit of living in a small country with a population of 125 million is that, even if your hobby is extraordinarily niche, you will always find thousands of others who are interested in it. It made for an incredible people-watching experience. Children as young as six, their Beyblade parts carefully arranged in compartment storage containers bought from a hardware shop. Their mums and dads, drawn into the hobby as a way to play with their kids, testing out new tops of their own. The pros, largely men in their 20s, with driving gloves for improved grip and collections worth thousands.
Rules Of Engagement: Beyblade Edition
What observing this tournament taught me is that there’s an art to almost every stage of a Beyblade battle, short and explosive though they tend to be. Tops are generally built and entered prior to any bout so that opponents know what they’re up against ahead of time. Under tournament rules, any rare or powerful parts will incur a points handicap for that player. It’s a novel idea. If you’re going to use those parts, you’d better damned sure they’re going to work.
Next is the launch phase. There are several decisions to make when it comes to launching your Beyblade. Launch high or launch low? Fast or slow? Will you drop it flat and upright onto the bit, or will you tilt your hand ever so slightly to send your Beyblade out on an angle? They all matter, and all play into the careful rock-paper-scissors design that Takara-Tomy has sought to strike.
Finally, the battle and the pleasantries. Every battle proceeded in a very Japanese fashion. Both competitors would crane their necks over the little arena to watch their Beyblades clash and churn. Sometimes, there was a clear and immediate victor. At other times, the battle would go on for up to a minute, a pair of sustain tops menacing each other. At battle’s end, the two competitors would exchange a polite bow and either depart or move to the next round. Japanese Beyblade players don’t talk smack; they do their talking in the spinning top Thunderdome.
The tournament ran from 11 that morning to around 5 in the afternoon. Sat in the shade and swigging from a novelty-size bottle of Welch’s Grape Juice that had turned out to be green tea, I watched as four 20-something pros carved through the kids in attendance. What was interesting was that, though some families drifted away to take their kids around the zoo or headed home after crashing out of the tournament, many stayed to watch its progress.
A bespectacled man in his mid-20s took home the top spot. This man was utterly impassive the entire time he was on stage. It was hard to say whether he was elated to win or had ever been rattled during the competition. The children gathered at the front of the stage to watch him play via an overhead camera above the battle arena and loved every minute.
Damn, these spinning tops got hands
When Hasbro originally asked me if I’d like to come to Japan to hear about Beyblades, I thought it was a funny suggestion. I told a few younger coworkers about it, and many of them immediately outed themselves as Beyblade fans. “No, it’s sick,” they assured me. “You have to go.” Like I said, these were toys that passed me by when I was younger, but my coworkers had all been in the thick of it, battling in Australian playgrounds where the rules were fluid and people wanted to play for keeps like marbles. It told me there was something here.
I’m glad I went on this trip because it exposed me to something I’d never have given the time of day otherwise.
Hasbro’s plan is to make the brand big in the West again, and part of that is leaning into the competitive angle that has worked so well in Japan. It is entirely likely that when you go to PAX Australia this year, you will encounter a Beyblade stand in Tabletop. Perhaps a tournament or two across the weekend. I encourage you to check them out. For some of you, the last thing you need is another hobby. For others, it may be the one you’ve been looking for this whole time.
The author travelled to Japan as a guest of Hasbro.
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