Kumamon and VERDY Turn Vick Into a Fundraiser Mascot for Kumamoto’s Earthquake Recovery

A pin badge and tote bag pairs Kumamoto’s prefectural mascot with VERDY’s rabbit-panda character Vick, joining a small wave of merchandise built to support relief efforts after the Reiwa 8 Kumamoto earthquake.

Kumamoto’s prefectural mascot has a new convincer. A pin badge and tote bag combining Kumamon with VERDY‘s original character Vick began circulating this week under the banner “Reiwa 8 Kumamoto Earthquake Support,” a designation that ties the release directly to relief efforts following last month’s earthquake. The pairing puts two very different characters on the same accessory: Kumamon, the black bear with red cheeks that Kumamoto Prefecture introduced in 2010 and has since turned into one of Japan’s most commercially successful yuru-chara, generating over ¥11.8 billion in merchandise sales in the first half of 2012 alone, and Vick, the rabbit-panda hybrid VERDY designed as a friendlier counterpart to his Girls Don’t Cry and Wasted Youth output. Vick has spent the past several years popping up across VERDY’s collaboration slate, from Human Made’s reversible Yokosuka jacket to capsule drops with OTSUMO PLAZA, Dover Street Market pop-ups, and Fuji Rock Festival merchandise, giving the character a recognizable, low-stakes visual identity well suited to a fundraising item aimed at a broad audience rather than sneaker-line collectors.

Specific retail details for the badge and tote, including price and the exact sales window, were not indie verifiable at the time of writing; a Japan market release notice was the only source found reporting the item, and neither Kumamon’s official channels nor VERDY’s own accounts had posted item-level product photography as of publication. What is confirmed is the format: a can-style pin badge (缶バッジ) paired with a tote bag, a combination VERDY has used before for smaller-ticket charity and pop-up rel rather than his higher-price apparel collide. That position fits the apparent intent here, a low-cost, high-volume item design to move shh and funnel proceeds toward earthquake relief rather than a flagship collectible.

 

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The Kumamon pairing is not VERDY’s first rel built around the disaster. On August 1, 2026, his design collective VK Design Works, formed with K.I.T. in 2008, put out a T-shirt and soft vinyl figure explicitly framed as Reiwa 8 Kumamoto earthquake support, sold through VERDY’S GIFT SHOP with a portion of proceeds donated to the affected region. The badge and tote appear to extend that same charitable framework using a mascot with a far more direct connection to Kumamoto itself, since Kumamon is literally the prefecture’s own PR character rather than one of VERDY’s indie creations.

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The earthquake behind both rel struck on July 28, 2026, at 4:27 p.m. local time, a magnitude 7.1 quake centered in the Kumamoto region at a depth of 16 kilometers. Uki City and the town of Hikawa recorded the maximum intensity of 7 on the Japanese seismic scale, the first time an intensity-7 tremor had been recorded in Japan since the Noto Peninsula earthquake of January 2024, and the first in Kumamoto Prefecture since the well-documented 2016 Kumamoto earthquakes. The Japan Meteorological Agency formally named the event the “Reiwa 8 Kumamoto Earthquake” roughly three hours after the initial shock, only its second named earthquake since the Noto disaster. Aftershock activity remain elevated for weeks afterward, with JMA tracking hundreds of individual tremors above magnitude 2.0 across the following ten days and continuing to flag the risk of further shaking above intensity 5 in the hardest-hit areas.

 

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Merchandise tie-ins have become a familiar, if modest, piece of the response toolkit for Japanese disasters, and Kumamoto in particular has a track record here: the prefecture leaned on Kumamon-branded goods to help fund recovery after the 2016 earthquakes as well, including tote bags sold through crowdfunding campaigns at the time. The VERDY collide reads as a continuation of that pattern rather than a new idea, but the specific pairing of a government mascot with an independent streetwear artist’s character is a more contemporary wrinkle, tapping VERDY’s own audience, built largely outside Kumamoto, to move product and dollars toward a specific regional cause. Whether the badge and tote reach anywhere near the scale of VERDY’s higher-profile apparel collection remains to be seen, but the format suggests the goal was never volume so much as visibility, giving a national streetwear following a reason to notice a regional disaster that might otherwise scroll past.