Long before becoming the father of Pokémon, little Satoshi Tajiri ran around the rural surroundings of Machida, on the outskirts of Tokyo, catching insects that he later studied with an entomological instinct. For the inventor of the million-dollar Pocket Monsters franchise (the original name), the small animals he collected in his childhood were the prelude to the Pokémon universe. For the children who played his video games and watched the animated series from the mid-nineties, collecting Pokémon cards was their own particular bug hunt.
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“I was about seven or eight years old when I started,” explains Swiss Jolina Gisèle (20 years old), the name without a surname (she does not want to reveal it, for security reasons) of the also known Pokémon princess, owner, she claims, of “the largest Pokémon card collection in the world,” which, by the way, is for sale.
From her vacation spot, where she is spending a few days with her family after an intense exam period, the young collector speaks to EL PAÍS via video call: “At that age I only had my little album, and my father started buying me specific cards on eBay for about a hundred francs. I asked him if we could have all the Pokémon cards in the world, which of course was silly…”
For months the young woman has been a mystery to the press and the sector. Last March she revealed her powerful collection, gathered over a decade with the help of her father, founder and director of a data and artificial intelligence software company.
He, who until now has stayed out of the media spotlight letting his daughter be the visible face of the campaign to find a buyer, is actually the great architect of the so-called Jolina Gisèle Collection, one of the most exclusive and complete private Pokémon collections in the world, with an estimated value of more than 100 million euros. Of its more than 60,000 cards, 12,000 are professionally graded by the authentication agency PSA and, of these, most have obtained the highest possible grade (PSA 10, which assesses authenticity and condition), making them a gem for the international collector community.
Since the launch of her marketing campaign with an action trailer included, alongside Swiss model Kevin Lütolf, Jolina Gisèle has been the subject of all kinds of speculation and suspected of being generated by AI. On the other side of the video call screen, this Swiss British high school student who says she recently finished her final exams seems quite human. She also does not resemble the sophisticated woman starring in the promotional video: almost four minutes reminiscent of a somewhat ostentatious parody of million-dollar heist movies.
Jolina Gisèle has little to do with the Pokémon princess in the video: “I don’t always go with that hairstyle and such extravagant makeup. I also don’t wear a red dress and high heels all day,” she warns. “Actually, I am a very family-oriented person. I grew up in the countryside and still live on the outskirts of the city. At home, my parents and I have dinner at seven and lead a very traditional life. I would say the princess is my alternate self.”
Asked about doubts regarding her existence and the authenticity of her collection, she says she found it “very funny, but also a bit strange”: “When we published the campaign, I never imagined people would think I’m not real because, obviously, for me and my family this is very real.” She explains that after presenting the collection, her final exams prevented her from giving many interviews, which fueled a mystery she now considers resolved: “It’s good that the speculation has come to an end. I think now it’s clear that I am real.”
She says promoting the collection forced her out of her comfort zone, although at first she was more scared than excited: “It was very hard, we had many discussions about whether we really wanted to publicize the collection. And about whether, by doing so, I would want to be in the spotlight,” she says. “It’s not that my parents had to convince me, but they did encourage me, telling me that maybe I would gain more self-confidence and that it would be a fun experience, my only chance to do something like acting, like in the trailer. But even now it’s still a learning process.”
Jolina Gisèle, who in the promotional video attends an exclusive card game and ends up doing somersaults through the supposed secret place hiding her collection, says she is clear that acting is not her thing. “Never say never,” she repeats a couple of times during the conversation and has just starred in a campaign with the watch brand Romago to present a Pikachu watch, coinciding with the 30th anniversary of the franchise.
The young woman says her collection began as a way to connect with her father, and all the fireworks that have come since, all the media exposure, have been a means to an end: to sell all her cards to someone who understands what they have meant to both of them, perhaps even to a museum. She says she is in no hurry to find a buyer, only the need for it to fall into good hands, as this is her legacy: “For me, it’s not just about the value of the cards themselves, nor that there is currently a huge Pokémon boom. What really matters is that my father and I did it together, it’s our achievement. I think it’s super special to have something that is ‘the biggest in the world,’” she reflects.
The card collection — which in the early years piled up in the bedrooms and expanded to the kitchen of the family home like a vine of shared memories between father and daughter — is now in high-security facilities that not even its owner can access. “At one point they didn’t even allow me to be there, precisely for our own security, so I wouldn’t know where they were kept. I think then we lost a bit of the enthusiasm for collecting them,” she laments, adding: “We could no longer keep it at home, not only because of the size of the collection but also because of its value.”
She fondly recalls how Pokémon cards brought her closer to her father, with whom this only child, “a mama’s girl,” had very little in common: “He was interested in dinosaurs, space, cars. I liked glitter, fashion, and everything pink. Pokémon was the only thing we could talk about during dinner or when browsing eBay — ‘hey, this card is missing,’ ‘have you seen this other one?’ —. We received so many packages from Japan, from the United States…, and sometimes they took weeks or months, that when they arrived we didn’t even remember what we had bought. On Thursday or Friday nights we would sit together and open all the packages.” “It was very fun,” she admits, “sometimes we didn’t even know if the card we were waiting for would really arrive.”
Jolina Gisèle looks toward a future she already imagines without her beloved collection: “I don’t want to stay in the spotlight for too long,” she insists. She is going to take a gap year to travel with her parents and then, probably, start training related to marketing and business. Although she assures that Pokémon will always be in her heart and that she does not plan to sell her childhood album, she also dreams of her next plans, this time with her mother, a “very creative” fashion enthusiast: “It would be a fashion brand for her, especially if we sell the collection and have money to invest.”
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