Stuffed cat Meggy Weggy with her Unagi Travel tour group in Tokyo.
A travel agency in Tokyo, Japan, does tours for … teddys. Teddy bears. Really.
And Unagi Travel even offers a few different options for your stuffed animal's Japan adventure.
For $45 a day, you can send your toy on a Tokyo tour. That'll get you five sightseeing stops, like the Tokyo Tower, The Imperial Palace and the Meiji Jingu Shrine. There's also a spa day at the Onsen hot springs. That's $55 for the day. Your stuffed love can see more old temples and shrines in Kyoto. But she has to be willing to stay overnight.
Soneo Azuma says she started Unagi Travel on a lark. At one point she was blogging about her life and, rather than put her picture online, she used a stuffed eel (unagi) as an avatar. As a joke, friends would carry the eel with them on trips and take pictures of it near landmarks: Outside the Empire State Building, say, or the Eiffel Tower.
"I thought, 'if I'm having fun, maybe people who can't travel would enjoy this more,'" Azuma said.
Whenever she gets orders for tours, she sends the customers a questionnaire. She asks them why they want to send their stuffed animal on the tour. And she gets the history of the stuffed animals, their hobbies and whether they have food allergies. Azuma said you'd be shocked by how many of the stuffed animals have very particular dietary restrictions.
Colin Green from Hull, Massachusetts, sent his girlfriend Megan Small's stuffed cat, Meggy Weggy, to Tokyo. Meggy Weggy — like Colin and Megan — is a vegetarian.
"You're vicariously living through your stuffed animal," Green said. "Because Megan and I eventually want to go to Japan … now we have a tour guide we can bring. She scoped it out for us."
In this case, Meggy Weggy got a fairly exhaustive tour of Tokyo, and Small got a load of pictures of her stuffed animal at Tokyo's most famous sites.
And there are also lots of pictures of Meggy and the other stuffed animals in her group eating lots of food.
"It's super silly," Small said with a chuckle. "They post photos on Facebook and you watch wherever the animal goes. But it's also really endearing."
Green gets an "A" for effort and creativity this holiday season.
A previous version of this story contained an incorrect caption for one of the photos.
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