K-ON! Merchandising Madness

Recently concluded K-ON! offered during its run a plethora of easter eggs for otaku sleuths to identify, photograph, and in many cases, purchase for their ever-growing collections.

Cameos of real world locations featured in the show (such as Azusa’s musical hall) are plentiful, but pales in comparison to the truly staggering number of actual consumer products seen and identified in the show:

Tsumugi’s Phone

Mio’s Travel Bag

Sawa-chan’s Suitcase

Tsumugi’s Rice Cooker

Or, this is at least a rice cooker found kept at one of her vacation homes.

Ritsu’s Bag

You may need to squint to see it below.

Ritsu’s Phone

Ritsu’s Phone Strap

Azusa’s Tuner

There’s likely a better name for this than “tuner”…

Speakers

Mugi’s Yacht

(!)

Fans with keen memories will notice that Episode 10 was overflowing with such sightings – all the above screenshots (excluding the cover image) are from that episode of the show.

Presumably, having the girls not visiting school once and instead being focused on their practice trip / mini-vacation allowed for these many of the girl’s personal belongings to be on display.

There were many similar sightings in other episodes, however:

Tsumugi’s Bag

Part-Time Job Counters

These are the hand-held clickers the girls used on their part-time jobs when trying to raise funds for Yui’s guitar.

Nodoka’s Phone

Ritsu’s Pen

One Ritsu fan apparently already owned two of the pens before the anime aired in a strange twist of fate – he then bought a third to add to his Ritsu collection:

Mio’s Melon

One poster on 2-ch even managed to identify the mysterious item Mio was holding on the beach in Episode 4:

The Episode 12 finale continued the tradition, including several more sightings as well…

Yui’s Thermometer & Thermos

This shot of Yui’s table offers two identifiable products:

An Alfi Thermos (available for purchase here).

Yui’s thermometer, identifiable by the green dot and bulge on the outer case.

Sawa-chan’s Guitar

Sawa-chan uses the Gibson Custom Shop Limited Runs Flying V Mahogany / TV White, which is also available online for only ¥298,000.

Mio’s Laptop

The computer Mio was using in the bonus episode preview is easily identified:

One devoted fan who purchased Mio’s guitar, a Fender-Japan JB62 (albeit a right-handed version), is lucky enough to also have the same brand of laptop, making these lovely tribute photos possible:

Otaku devotees have hunted down many of these products to add them to their shrines, and many of the items can be seen advertised on Japanese anime sites by way of Amazon, leaving us to wonder whether these placements were all accidental…