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Kyoto Subway's Moe Characters Get Male Counterparts

What better way is there to encourage modern youths to ride public transportation than to recruit attractive young men? Ryō Ono and Takeru Jūjō joined the Get On! Kyoto City Subway campaign on Tuesday to do just that.

The idea to use moe characters to promote Kyoto's subway system emerged in 2010, and the project's first character, Moe Uzumasa, debuted in 2011. The Kyoto native and illustrator Kamogawa joined the campaign and created new character designs in 2013.

Moe Uzumasa and her friends Misa Ono and Saki Matsuga have promoted Kyoto subways together since then. They appear on posters and special train tickets. They collaborated with the Kyoto International Manga Anime Fair and Kyoto Gakuen University (Moe has a cousin, Sono, who studies there). They even inspired the Kyoto Girls Days novel and an anime short.

Ryō and Takeru are the first male characters to join their ranks. Ryō is Misa's older brother, and he is a 21-year-old college student. He is a design student at the same college that the Kyoto International Manga Museum promotional character Myu Karasuma attends. He's normally fairly cold to his little sister, but he also has a soft spot for her. He is the type of guy who hates uselessness, and he likes more than anything for the subway to be on time.

Takeru attended the same high school as Ryō and is his best friend. He has an easy-going and optimistic side. After graduating from high school, his desire to become a bread maker led him to study at a bakery in Kyoto. He likes how people can buy bread around Kyoto's subway stations.

Like their female counterparts, Ryō and Takeru appear on posters around Kyoto's subway stations and inside subway trains. A special one-day subway pass featuring Takeru will launch in the middle of December, followed by a Ryō design in the end of January. The campaign will only offer 50,000 of each pass.

Come on, if these guys can't get people to ride the subway, who can?

Source: Hatena News