Chef Kawasaki Micro Bikini Club

About

Chef Kawasaki Micro Bikini Club (Japanese: コックカワサキマイクロビキニ部) is a hashtag for a series of mature illustrations on Twitter and Pixiv in which Chef Kawasaki^[1] from Nintendo's Kirby series, known as Cook Kawasaki (コックカワサキ, Kokku Kawasaki) in Japan, is wearing a micro bikini swimsuit. This hashtag went viral on Twitter in March 2020 and led to a controversial product shut down by the video game's developer in September 2022.

Origin

According to Pixiv Encyclopedia,^[2] the "Micro Bikini Club" (マイクロビキニ部) hashtag is a popular tag for illustrations of characters wearing the micro bikini swimsuit. Previous examples include "KanColle Micro Bikini Club" (艦これマイクロビキニ部)^[3] and "GochiUsa Micro Bikini Club" (ごちうさマイクロビキニ部).^[4] Following this, a small group of online illustrators started publishing illustrations under the hashtag "Chef Kawasaki Micro Bikini Club" on Pixv^[5] and Twitter^[6] around March 2020. One of the originators, Mafuyu (真冬), who made posts with the hashtag on Pixiv^[7] and Twitter^[8] on March 7th (shown below), reminisced in his 2022 tweet that it started as their inside fad on a Discord server.^[9]

Spread

On March 21st, 2020, the online presence of the hashtag began increasing among Japanese Twitter users thanks to artist Owari Owa (小和オワリ), whose post went viral on that day^[10] had earned over 8,700 retweets and 15,000 likes within two and half years (shown below). Mafuyu helped to spread the concept further as he continued releasing over 500 works of the Micro Bikini series for almost one and a half years until August 2021.^[11] As of October 2022, the number of illustrations of Chef Kawasaki wearing a micro bikini swimsuit on Pixiv is more than 700.^[5]

Chef Kawasaki's Micro Bikini Karuta

On November 1st, 2021, another Japanese artist Haru Uchida (内田温, 内田(CKMB部))^[12][13] launched @KWSKkaruta (コックカワサキマイクロビキニかるた)^[14] and began posting Chef Kawasaki's micro bikini illustrations in the Karuta^[15] playing cards format every Friday. On September 26th, 2022, after finishing updates for all 46 Japanese characters two weeks before, he announced the start of offering the actual playable cards in digital and physical formats on Booth^[16] (shown below), an e-commerce service for indie creators.^[17] The physical edition sold out just 4 hours after the announcement.^[18]

However, on the 28th, @KWSKkaruta quit the updates and announced closing the Booth store because they'd received a request from Hal Laboratory, the developer for the Kirby series (shown below).^[19] Online news media, including AUTOMATON WEST^[20], quickly covered this incident, and Kotaku^[21] and Reddit^[22] followed the report.

【おしらせ】たった今、株式会社ハル研究所様よりコックカワサキマイクロビキニかるた（冊子版・DL版）出品取下げのご連絡を頂きましたので頒布中止とさせて頂きます！
楽しんでいただいた皆様、ありがとうございました。
そしてハル研究所様、ご迷惑をおかけして本当にすみませんでした！

— コックカワサキマイクロビキニかるた (@KWSKkaruta) September 28, 2022

Translation:

We've decided to stop the distribution because we just received a notice from HAL LABORATORY Ltd. asking us to withdraw Chef Kawasaki's Micro bikini Karuta (booklet and DL versions) from the store.
Thanks to everyone who enjoyed it.

And HAL LABORATORY Ltd, we're very sorry for making you inconvenient!

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References