Japanese YouTuber Hajime Shacho (はじめしゃちょー) has revealed the results of his latest lottery challenge, a recurring series in which he buys huge sums of Japan’s Summer Jumbo lottery tickets on camera. In a video posted on August 12, 2026, Hajime and thousands of fans who joined a group purchase collectively spent close to ¥35 million on tickets.
The segment is a regular fixture on his channel. In previous editions, Hajime bought ¥1 million worth of tickets solo, aiming for a life-changing jackpot; the 2025 Summer Jumbo edition returned ¥208,000, and the year-end Jumbo returned ¥200,000. For this round, he expanded on a “group purchase” system first introduced during last year’s Year-End Jumbo. Under the system, Hajime buys his own share of tickets, while any fan who wants in can also contribute money toward tickets bought in the group’s name, with any winnings split among everyone who joined.
Hajime personally visited a lottery outlet in Hyogo Prefecture known for a strong history of big winners and bought ¥500,000 worth of ¥500 “Summer Jumbo Premium” tickets, split evenly between random-number (bara) and consecutive-number (renban) sets. Separately, 8,751 people signed on to the group purchase, together buying 69,272 tickets worth ¥34,636,000. Combined with Hajime’s own share, the total spend came to roughly ¥35.1 million, matching the ¥35 million figure in the video’s title.
When the results were converted to the standard “per ¥1 million spent” benchmark Hajime uses to compare each year’s luck, this round returned ¥201,645, landing close to last year’s Summer Jumbo result of ¥208,000 and the most recent Year-End Jumbo result of ¥200,000.
Who is Hajime Shacho?
Hajime Shacho, real name Hajime Fujimoto, is one of the best-known creators in Japanese YouTube history, having built his channel since the early 2010s on elaborate stunts, challenges, and social experiments. His channel has grown into one of Japan’s largest, and his lottery-buying videos, in which he tests his luck with large sums of money on camera, have become one of his signature recurring formats.
Author’s Comment
Only in Japan does a grown man walking into a lottery shop with fifty million yen count as "content," and only Hajime Shacho could turn it into an annual tradition people actually look forward to. I love that he’s brought in nearly nine thousand fans to gamble alongside him like some kind of communal shrine offering. And of course the payout basically breaks even, because that’s how lotteries work everywhere on Earth, yet somehow every single year the comments section reacts like it’s the first time. Bless the eternal optimism of the Japanese internet.
