One weekday afternoon, I had a teppanyaki lunch at a classic hotel in Gamagori, Aichi Prefecture. The restaurant is the hotel's "Rokkakudo." According to the official website, it's a teppanyaki place where the chef grills beef and seafood right in front of you, and it offers a lunch set available on weekdays only.
After the meal, I needed the restroom, so I told the front desk, "I just ate at Rokkakudo." The answer came back instantly: "Of course, right this way."
That's all it was, and yet I felt strangely like a big shot.
I'd stopped being "a person who needs a bathroom" and become "a person who had teppanyaki at a classic hotel on a weekday afternoon."
And on top of that, my bag has a Momonga plush from Chiikawa (a hugely popular Japanese comic and character franchise) clipped to it.
A stately hotel. A weekday lunch. Rokkakudo. And Momonga.
My character profile is a traffic jam.
1. People invent a "character profile" from a few scraps
When we look at someone, we don't stop at what we can actually observe.
"Hanging around a fancy-looking hotel on a weekday" → probably has free time → probably has money to spare → probably high social status → probably good at their job
We fill in the parts that have no evidence behind them.
This isn't pure fantasy so much as a basic move of social cognition. In a study published in Nature Human Behaviour in 2020, the very same face was rated as more competent when it was shown wearing clothes that looked wealthy. The effect was replicated across 9 studies, and it stayed even when people were told to ignore the clothing.
In other words, even if you think "clothes don't matter to me," your brain quietly writes its own fan-wiki entry anyway.
2. Luxury goods signal "capable" and "kind of off-putting" at the same time
Research on luxury consumption gets even more interesting.
A study published online in 2025 found that observers saw people consuming luxury goods as having higher status, and as a result tended to rate them as more competent. But the same luxury goods could also make observers suspect "they just want to show off their status," which in some cases lowered ratings of how friendly and warm the person seemed.
So a luxury item can set off two thoughts at once:
- "This person seems successful."
- "But they might be a bit of a show-off."
In social psychology, the "stereotype content model" also names competence (being capable) and warmth (being friendly and approachable) as the two big axes we use when judging people. Status tends to go with perceived competence, while someone seen as competitive tends to be seen as less warm.
Put simply, gear that raises your status doesn't automatically raise your approachability too.
3. Then, suddenly, Momonga
This is where the Momonga on the bag gets to work.
With just a classic hotel and teppanyaki, someone's brain might generate a character like "comfortably well-off," "good at their job," or "maybe rich."
But then a Momonga sticks out of the bag: selfish, shameless, with a cute face, doing whatever it likes.
Suddenly the person is hard to read.
And that's not a bad thing. A one-note "luxury" status signal gets mixed with something else: hobbies, playfulness, approachability.
Prestige − intimidation + cuteness + mystery.
It's a brand design nobody intended.
By the way, loving Momonga doesn't mean I endorse everything Momonga does. "Cute," "funny," "personality is seriously questionable," and "it'd honestly be entertaining if it finally got what's coming" can all be true at once. When you grow fond of a nasty fictional character, you don't have to approve of a real-life person like that. You're just enjoying how well the character is built and the role it plays in the story.
4. Some people read luxury as "rich," others as "probably spends recklessly"
Flip the viewpoint and it gets even more fun.
Some people see an expensive watch or a designer bag and think, "They're rich!" Others look at the same thing and think, "That person probably spends money carelessly."
Same signal, different interpretation.
If an observer has repeatedly run into this pattern in the past:
"Owns lots of designer goods" → the person themselves: "I have no savings (lol)"
then the brain naturally learns "luxury goods = spending," not "luxury goods = assets."
That's a prior built from the person's own experience. In other words, it's Bayesian updating inside your head.
Later, if they learn the person's job and think, "Oh, that line of work pays well," the estimate gets updated again.
But there's something you must never forget here.
5. You can't read anyone's net worth or mind!
You can't see other people's net worth from the outside.
Someone wearing a 300,000 yen watch might be:
- earning 20 million yen a year
- earning 5 million yen a year and stretching to afford it
- planning to use it for 10 years
- someone who bought it secondhand at a bargain
- someone who got it as a gift
- someone with tens of millions of yen in financial assets
- someone who really does have zero savings
You can't tell from appearance alone.
And their inner life is even harder to read.
They own designer goods.
Up to here, that's an observation.
"Maybe they want to show off" is a guess.
"They crave approval, they're vain, and they're a big spender" is already fan fiction.
In psychology, the "fundamental attribution error" is the tendency to overestimate how much someone's behavior comes from their personality or attitude, and underestimate the role of the situation they're in. Deciding a whole personality from a single luxury item is an easy way to fall into that trap.
6. We see spending, but we don't see saving
There's another trap here.
We can see the car, the clothes, the trip, and the restaurant meal someone paid for.
But we can't see "didn't buy anything today," "put 100,000 yen into savings this month," or "quietly investing in index funds at home."
An NBER study (a US economics research institute) presents a model in which this visibility bias, where spending is conspicuous and non-spending isn't, leads people to think others consume more than they really do, which can affect their own saving behavior too.
So the "rich-looking people" you notice while walking around town are a biased sample to begin with.
A person with 50 million yen in assets wearing Uniqlo (a Japanese budget clothing chain) won't register as "a person with 50 million yen" when you pass them on the street.
Meanwhile, a person with 30,000 yen in savings dressed head to toe in designer labels is incredibly easy to spot.
Conspicuous people are just statistically easier to find. That doesn't make them representative.
7. You don't have to stop guessing. Just don't treat guesses as facts
Humans are creatures that guess, so "I will never speculate about anyone again!" is probably impossible.
What works in practice is sorting things into three levels in your head.
Fact: They own designer goods.
Guess: Maybe they spend a lot.
Fan-wiki entry: Vain, craves approval, and probably has no savings.
When you hit level three, just notice: "Oh, the fan fiction has started."
Then come up with exactly one alternative explanation.
"Maybe they just love watches." "Maybe it's cheap relative to their income." "Maybe it's a keepsake." "Maybe it's secondhand."
Then stop there.
You can't read anyone's net worth or mind!
8. Conclusion: Everyone carries an unofficial character wiki of other people
Eat teppanyaki at a classic hotel on a weekday.
That alone might make you "a comfortably well-off person" in someone's head.
Wear an expensive watch and you might look "capable" to one person and "careless with money" to another.
And clip a Momonga to your bag, and a mysterious patch lands on the character profile that was just finishing up.
But all of it is just fragments visible from the outside.
You can see the clothes. You can see the watch. You can see the hotel. You can see the plush toy too.
You can't see the bank account. You can't see the household budget. And you really can't see what's going on in their head.
It's fine to form hypotheses in order to understand other people.
Just don't promote a hypothesis from fan-wiki to official canon.
That alone makes your people-watching a lot more accurate.
And today, too, somewhere in a stately place, a Momonga is dangling from a bag.
Its owner's character profile stays unfinished to the very end.
