Momota the polar bear goes viral

In early August 2026, a video filmed at the Oga GAO Aquarium in Akita Prefecture, Japan, garnered 120,000 likes on the X platform in just a few days. The video, lasting only a few seconds, shows a polar bear cub named Momota putting on a traffic cone, suddenly sprinting at full speed, then slipping and falling.

The person who filmed it, @huber_mambaken, told Huffpost Japan that he noticed the bear was more excited than usual that day, and when it started playing with the hat, its movements became increasingly violent. The fall was completely unexpected.

The comments below were filled with remarks like, "This kind of fall must have been pre-recorded," and "He knows how to make people laugh." The uploader himself admitted he predicted the clip would go viral, but didn't think it would, and now Momota can be called "the Momota of the world ."

This is the second time in less than two months that the traffic cone has brought this bear into national news.

Prince Momota

Momota is a male polar bear, born on December 4, 2025, at GAO, the son of 11-year-old Momo and 22-year-old Gouta. He is one of twins; the other died later, a detail the aquarium proactively disclosed instead of keeping secret. Momo was born in a closed chamber, and his caregivers only saw the cub for the first time on February 9, 2026.

Momota was introduced to the public on April 11, 2026, and received his name on April 25, chosen through a fan vote during a live naming ceremony on YouTube. The name is a combination of Momo and Gouta. According to the aquarium, Momota weighed nearly 70kg at eight months old.

From the moment he was born, Momota became a topic of widespread attention. Besides his extremely adorable and cute appearance, Momota became even more special because of his "addiction to traffic helmets."

At five months old, photographers captured it struggling to pull a hat from the water to the shore, its eyes wide with effort. On June 19th, a photo of it with four hats stacked on top of each other, covering its face and transforming into an indistinct creature, garnered over 7,600 likes and was reposted by Maidona News, Yahoo, and Livedoor. By August, the hat had become the prop for the aforementioned frog-catching stunt.

In the photo, the bear is wearing four red and blue hats stacked on top of each other, completely covering its face and transforming it into an indistinct creature. The photo garnered over 7,600 likes and was subsequently reposted by Maidona News, Yahoo Japan, Livedoor, and au Web Portal.

The hat has since become Momota's personal brand. In less than three months, polar bears and traffic hats have become a separate content genre in Japan, and the biggest beneficiary is the facility that owns the smallest bear, GAO. One of the clips of Momota struggling with the hat "crossed borders," spreading to China 's Xiaohongshu network, where users called it "the mischievous little bear" and competed to see how many days they had watched it.

The product line runs behind an eight-month-old bear.

The predecessor of GAO was the Akita Prefectural Aquarium, built in 1967, which hosted Emperor Showa in 1969 and was the first place in Japan to successfully breed caiman crocodiles in 1972. It closed, renovated, and reopened on July 13, 2004, under the name GAO, operated by a mixed-capital company under a designated management unit.

Remarkably, the polar bear almost didn't make it. It was planned to be the mascot unveiled on the same day as the opening, imported from Canada. However, animal welfare organizations in both Japan and Canada objected, negotiations broke down, and the bear didn't arrive in time. Gouta only arrived in June 2005. To this day, it remains the only polar bear on the Tohoku side of the Sea of ​​Japan.

Over time, GAO's appeal has gradually diminished. According to the Akita Prefecture's business assessment report for fiscal year 2018, the number of paying customers has continuously decreased year after year, failing to meet both targets and the same period, and aquarium revenue has followed a similar trend. The company experienced two consecutive years of operating losses and only returned to an operating profit of approximately 3 million yen that year. By the fiscal year ending March 2023, the net profit for the year was only 3.81 million yen on total assets of 435 million yen.

Momota-themed merchandise sells very well at GAO.

The equity ratio has fallen from 84.3% in 2018 to 52%. And most importantly, this isn't the first bear cub. Gouta has had three cubs at GAO, including Fubuki, who was born in 2020. Previous events also had news and visitors, but nothing like this phenomenon. What's different in 2026 isn't the bear, but the hat and social media.

During the four-day holiday at the beginning of May 2026, GAO welcomed approximately 20,000 visitors to the aquarium, which is more than 11% of the total number of visitors in the past year. This number alone is enough to show the appeal of Momota.

Long lines of people stretched at the ticket counter throughout the final day of the holiday. One visitor, who traveled from Aichi Prefecture, nearly 700 kilometers away, said she had been watching the bear since it was a baby and felt like she was watching her grandchild grow up. With adult tickets costing around 1,300 yen and student tickets 500 yen, the ticket sales for those four days alone were estimated to be in the tens of millions of yen.

Following Momota's development journey, the aquarium has released a series of related merchandise. The first batch of products was released on April 11th, followed by a Momota-themed set on May 27th, including postcards, notebooks, acrylic keychains, note-taking clips, and 10cm stickers. A second batch was released on June 23rd, dorayaki and sablé cookies on July 4th, and yet another batch on July 22nd. The limited-edition tickets for the five Momota designs sold out by mid-May. A travel article from early August quoted a souvenir shop as saying that the polar bear plushie is currently the best-selling item.

From the time the bear was named to the time a cake bearing its name was made, it only took about ten weeks, at a small, local facility, not a large entertainment corporation.

Of course, the fanbase that GAO is reaping today was built before Momota was born. But it's clear that it grew stronger after the Momota "little prince" effect.

In April 2025, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Gouta the bear's arrival at the aquarium, GAO launched a crowdfunding campaign on the CAMPFIRE platform to renovate the exhibition area. The initial goal of 3 million yen was surpassed in just three hours on the first day, forcing the organizers to gradually raise the target.

In the end, they raised 10.732 million yen from 878 supporters, and the project was awarded the "Story of Empathy" prize by CAMPFIRE in January 2026, according to a report by the Akita Sakigake Shimpo newspaper. Among the gifts of gratitude was a particularly noteworthy commercial item: the right to see bear cubs in public if any were born, with the condition that if no cubs were born by 2034, the prize would be exchanged for a premium tour.

GAO sold in advance an event that was not certain to happen, and people still paid.