Apologies for the lack of BLog posts lately! We’ve been pretty busy in-house working on lots of great BL series (look forward to it!) and thus have less time for writing and research. But today (July 9th) happens to be my babygirl Genshin Impact Kaveh’s birthday, so I figured why not do a short and easy oshikatsu post about celebrating your oshi‘s birthday?
This culture has been going global more and more, considering an entire mall in Shanghai is currently celebrating Kaveh’s birthday, there are birthday cafés set up all over China, and there will be a video showcasing his beauty in Times Square. It’s always been A Thing in fandoms worldwide to acknowledge and celebrate your beloved’s birthday. Japanese fandom often likes to play it on Hard Mode, though, so I’ll talk a bit about common ways to celebrate your oshi’s birthday here.
I would say the most visible and common celebration you’ll see online is: fanart! It’s very common for fans to plan way in advance and compose an artwork that perfectly sums up their oshi, what they love about them, how they feel about them, etc. I don’t think this is particularly different between the cultures—there’s tons of wonderful artwork from all around the world every time a much-beloved character has a birthday. Of course, there’s other great fan content that’s often released on and around characters’ birthdays as well, such as cosplay photoshoots, fan videos, etc. These are often marked with the tag #NAME生誕祭YEAR so they’re easy to search!
Another one that’s super common is cake! Since really cute, fancy cakes are a dime a dozen in Tokyo department stores and around the station in rural districts (I’m looking at you, Ginza Cozy Corner), it’s incredibly common for people to pick up a tiny cake during their after-work commute and have a one-person celebration at home. It’s equally common to go to a trendy café and have tea and cake, either by yourself or with a fellow fan (or even as a whole group if the birthday falls on a day many people have off)! Taking photos of nui and acrylic stands in public is pretty common in Japan—especially in specific nerd-centric districts like Akihabara and Ikebukuro—so doing so isn’t really treated as a big deal.
Want to go one step further, though? How about buying a whole cake for your oshi? There are entire sections of some bakeries and online stores that are dedicated to peddling cakes that are oshi-specific, whether in color or vibe or via collabs that include official photos or artwork. It’s also common to purchase photo cakes using nui or cosplay photos, or personal fanart. (Using official artwork is also not uncommon, though it’s a bit of a legal gray area for the shop so the order might be refused…)
Don’t want to consume an entire cake on your own, but still want to special-order something cute and enjoy some privacy while partying it up with your fellow fans? It’s also incredibly common to rent a party room for the day. This is always a fun option because you can have a whole room to yourselves equipped with all the necessities: a kitchen, furnishings, a TV, games, etc. Apartments in Tokyo are pretty small, so asking an individual to host a whole party of fans can be a bit much—thus, rental spaces are incredibly popular.
Earlier this year, for instance, my Touken Ranbu friend group and I all got together to have joshikai—a get together of your full female friend group—over a nice takopa—a party where the main attraction is having fun making different varieties of takoyaki together. There were seven of us, and since none of us live in a space that would have been both convenient for everyone and big enough for that many people, a rental space was key! Plus, they had lots of board games available for us to play after we were full.
Another great thing about rental spaces is that, while you’re renting them, you can decorate them however you’d like (so long as the original room decor isn’t damaged in any way, of course!) so they’re great for taking lots of incredibly cute nui and acrylic stand pics with the cake and backdrop, all while you blast the OST and chat with your friends over your headcanons and the absolutely great doujinshi you bought at the recent event. (You can also bring the R-18 books with you, which would obviously be inappropriate to do in public… 
Another massive bonus!)
Don’t need a whole kitchen and also don’t want to be expected to clean up everything and leave it the way you found it afterward, all while communicating heavily with the rental host? A lot of people have small parties and take their oshi birthday pics in hotel rooms—yes, including love hotels! So whenever you see the birthday pics on Twitter of a girl posing cutely, surrounded by merch in a pretty wild-looking room, chances are that’s actually a love hotel she searched out specifically so it would look nice with her 500 copies of the same pin where her oshi‘s armpit is showing. (It’s truly the small things in life…)
But even if you’re not big on socializing and parties, you can still show your love and support for your oshi in a very public way: there’s now an entire industry around oshi advertisements! These are ad spaces littered throughout highly-populated areas like train stations, and are specifically rented out to fans who want to leave a little birthday message for other fans to see and enjoy. Think the Kaveh ad in Times Square, but multiplied and placed all around Ikebukuro station (the most common spot along with Shibuya station). These are usually drawn by a popular artist in the fandom, with a cute birthday message and perhaps a QR code that leads to the official SNS account. A fun activity can be spending your oshi’s birthday on an advertisement scavenger hunt, trying to track down all the ads that were posted. Usually fans go in on these as a group, since they obviously cost money to put up, but sometimes they’re bought and paid for by just one or two particularly passionate, wealthy patrons.
Wanna go even bigger? Purchasing truck advertisements or bus wraps is another option—then the ad can come to you!
Of course, these aren’t the only way to show your love for your oshi. In honor of Star Rail’s own blond babygirl Aventurine, for instance, Chinese fans adopted a peacock at the zoo and named it after him. Another Genshin example: fans of Dehya donated thousands to children in need in her name. You can also make crafts in their image, or showcase cute baked goods in their likeness. There are many really wonderful things you can do in honor of your oshi on their birthday, and I feel like how expansive that is really adds to the fun that is oshikatsu and being a fujoshi.
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