Every day for more than a year, phones at Hakuhinkan Toy Park have been ringing off the hook when the store opens at 11 a.m.

At the other end of the line, desperate parents and grandparents issue urgent pleas over whether new stock has arrived.

What the callers are after is Tamagotchi Plus, the latest version of a portable virtual pet game that became a social phenomenon in the late 1990s.