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【Lucky Bag Roundup 2018】Meg tries her luck with a fukubukuro from Japan’s top lingerie maker

Casey Baseel Jan 3, 2018
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Intiame apparel lucky bag is available only through Amazon Japan.

With the new year here, shoppers across Japan are snapping up fukubukuro, also called lucky bags. We’ve already picked up a couple from some of our favorite purveyors of sweets, drinks, and anime merchandise, but our Japanese-language reporter Meg recently got her hands on a particularly unique fukurukuro: a lingerie lucky bag.

Available exclusively through Amazon Japan, the pantie fukubukuro contains intimate apparel from Wing, a sister brand of Wacoal, Japan’s largest lingerie manufacturer. Considering Wacoal’s reputation for exceptional quality and reasonable prices, Meg already had high hopes for this lucky bag, and her confidence in it was bolstered even further by the involvement of online retail giant Amazon.

Oddly enough, though, when she went looking around for online impressions, she found plenty of one-star reviews of the Wing fukubukuro. But this merely served to get her investigative journalism juices pumping even harder, so she logged onto Amazon and ordered the Wing fukubukuro, which is priced at 2,268 yen [US$20] (after tax).

When the package arrived, Meg quickly opened it up, and out fell a pair of snowy white panties, wrapped in clear plastic.

This was Meg’s first surprise. Usually, fukubukuro are festively decorated, so it was a little startling to see such austere packaging, especially since the transparent plastic meant that anyone in the vicinity could see her new underwear. Then again, if you order lingerie over the Internet, you’re probably not going to tear open the next package that comes to your door in front of prying eyes.

The second surprise came when Meg emptied out the rest of the contents and saw the three pairs of panties the lucky bag contained. As with all fukubukuro, you don’t know what you’re getting until you open it, but you do at least get to pick what size of clothing you’re buying, and Meg had asked for medium-sized panties. The three pairs of boxy undies she’d received looked much larger, however.

Double-checking the tags, though, confirmed that these were indeed mediums (or, technically, two mediums and one medium/large intermediate size).

Looking at the tags also revealed that the three pairs of panties are from Wing’s Pants Parlor series, and that cleared up why they looked like larger sizes than they really are. Pants Parlor is Wing’s line of “seamless” panties, with a design that emphasizes comfort and not interfering with the appearance of your outer clothing. Their construction does make them a little on the boxy side, though.

On the pure-plus side, the material is all high-quality. But the big question with lucky bags is whether or not they represent a good value. To find out, Meg took the model serial numbers on the tags, and searched online for the panties’ regular sale price, and found that the pink and purple pairs are each listed at 1,000 yen and the off-white at 1,200. After tax, the total for the three would come to 3,456 yen, meaning that she’d saved almost 1,200 yen with the fukubukuro.

Granted, the three pairs of panties she got are all sort of drab-looking (though Wacoal isn’t known for bold designs in the first place), and Meg did find herself wishing there’d been at least one cute or sexy pair included as part of the mix. But she can always put the money she saved towards buying a special pair of her own choosing.