As every bored office worker knows, there are few greater - or more mysterious - satisfactions in life than the joy of popping all the bubbles in a sheet of bubble wrap. And now Japan has been swept by a craze for an electronic toy that recreates the simple thrill of squeezing the air-filled plastic packaging material.

“Eternal Poppety-Pop” is a keyring sized game that allows users to pop plastic bubbles, which are replenished immediately and endlessly. Since its release at the end of last year, two million of the toys have been sold in a country in which bubble wrap popping is regarded not merely as a diversion from boredom but as an antidote to stress.

The toy takes its place alongside a range of products including scented bubble wrap, star and heart-shaped bubble wrap and high-pressure bubble wrap specially engineered to make an extremely loud pop when its bubbles are burst.

Many of these innovations are the inspiration of the Poppety-Pop Culture Laboratory, the world's first, and so far only, bubble wrap think-tank. Eternal Poppety-Pop costs 819 yen (£4) and consists of a small pad of ten simulated bubbles powered by a tiny battery. On being squeezed, a cunningly simulated popping sound issues from a hidden speaker. Persistent poppers are rewarded every hundred squeezes with a randomly generated sound - either a klaxon, a sensual female moan, or a raspberry of flatulence.

“Behind the popularity of bubble wrap is people's natural urge to pop bubbles when they see them, like the desire to sit down when they see a chair,” said a representative of Kawakami Industries, the biggest manufacturer of bubble wrap in Japan, which developed the toy with Bandai. The Japanese word for the product is puchi puchi, an onomatopoeic term for the sound of popping bubbles.

Kawakami Industries also sells small pads of real bubble wrap for personal popping, and calendars that - like an Advent calendar - reveal a single plastic bubble for every day of the month. “Puchi puchi is cute, even though it's an industrial material,” Ayaka Sugiyama, head of Kawakami Industries' Poppety-Pop Culture Laboratory, told the Nikkei newspaper recently. “Even when we cannot talk to people because of language barriers, once we hand out puchi puchi sheets, they all smile and start popping. So the sheets not only fill gaps in product packaging but also between people.”

The laboratory has released a CD of bubble wrap songs (lyric sample: “Miracle puchi, squeezy puchi, everlasting wonder puchi”) and has designated August 8 as Bubble Wrap Day on the ground that the Japanese for 8/8 sounds vaguely like puchi puchi.

Conscious of the fickleness of popular taste, however, Bandai is already looking ahead to the next craze. Later this month it will launch Eternal Eda Mame - a toy that re-creates the equally delightful fidgety pleasure of squeezing edible eda mame soy beans out of a simulated pod.

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