Long before he became the father of Pokémon, Satoshi Tajiri spent his childhood roaming the rural outskirts of Machida, west of Tokyo, collecting insects and studying them with the curiosity of a budding entomologist. For the creator of the multibillion-dollar Pocket Monsters franchise, those childhood bug hunts would later inspire the Pokémon universe. For children who grew up playing the video games and watching the animated series from the mid-1990s onward, collecting Pokémon cards became their own version of f bug hunting.
“I was about seven or eight when I started,” explains Jolina Gisèle, a 20-year-old Swiss collector who prefers not to reveal her surname for security reasons. Better known as the “Pokémon princess,” she claims to own “the world’s largest Pokémon card collection,” which, she adds, is up for sale.
Speaking to EL PAÍS via video call from a family holiday after a demanding exam period, the young collector recalls her beginnings: “At that age I only had my little binder, and my father began buying specific cards for me on eBay for about 100 francs. I asked him if we could have every Pokémon card in the world, which of course was silly…”
For months, Jolina Gisèle remained something of a mystery to both the media and the collecting community. In March, she finally revealed her remarkable collection, assembled over the course of a decade with the help of her father, the founder and chief executive of a data and artificial intelligence software company.
Until now, he has largely stayed out of the spotlight, allowing his daughter to serve as the public face of the search for a buyer. In reality, however, he is the driving force behind the so-called Jolina Gisèle Collection, one of the world’s most exclusive and comprehensive private Pokémon card collections, valued at more than €100 million ($116 million). Of its more than 60,000 cards, 12,000 have been professionally graded by the authentication company PSA, and most of those have received the highest possible rating, PSA 10, which assesses both authenticity and condition. That has made the collection a prized asset within the global collecting community.
Ever since the launch of the marketing campaign, complete with an action-movie-style trailer featuring Swiss model Kevin Lütolf, Jolina Gisèle has been the subject of intense speculation, with some even suggesting that she might be AI-generated. On the other end of the video call, however, the Swiss student, who recently completed her final exams in the British educational system, seems decidedly real. Nor does she bear much resemblance to the polished woman portrayed in the promotional video, a nearly four-minute production that feels at times like an extravagant parody of a high-stakes heist movie.
In fact, Jolina Gisèle has little in common with the Pokémon Princess in the video. “I don’t always wear that extravagant hairstyle and makeup. Nor do I wear a red dress and high heels all day,” she says. “Actually, I’m a very family-oriented person. I grew up in the countryside, and I still live on the outskirts of the city. At home, my parents and I have dinner at 7 p.m., and we live a very traditional life. I’d say the princess is my alter ego.”
When asked about the doubts surrounding both her existence and the authenticity of the collection, Jolina Gisèle says she found the speculation “very amusing, but also a little strange.” “When we launched the campaign, I never imagined people would think I wasn’t real because, obviously, for me and my family, this is very real,” she says.
She explains that after unveiling the collection, she was unable to give many interviews because she was busy with her final exams, which only deepened the mystery, a mystery she now considers settled. “It’s good that the speculation has ended. I think now people can see I’m real.”
Jolina Gisèle says promoting the collection has pushed her well outside her comfort zone, even though she initially felt more apprehension than excitement. “It was very hard; we had many discussions about whether we really wanted to reveal the collection. And about whether, by doing so, I would want to be in the spotlight,” she recounts. “It’s not that my parents had to convince me, but they did encourage me, saying I might gain more confidence and that it would be a fun experience, my one 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 high-stakes card game before leaping through the air in search of the secret location supposedly housing her collection, says she is clear that acting is not for her. But she says “never say never” more than once during the interview, and she recently starred in a campaign with the watchmaker Romago to launch a Pikachu-themed watch marking the franchise’s 30th anniversary.
The young collector says the collection began as a way of bonding with her father, and that all the fanfare that followed, the publicity, the carefully orchestrated campaign, has ultimately been a means to an end: finding a buyer willing to acquire the entire collection and appreciate what it has meant to both of them, perhaps even a museum. She says there is no rush. What matters is that it ends up in the right hands, because the collection is their legacy.
“For me it’s not just about the value of the cards themselves, nor about the current huge Pokémon boom. What really matters is that my father and I did this together; it’s our achievement. I think it’s incredibly special to have something that is ‘the biggest in the world,’” she reflects.
The collection, whose cards initially piled up in bedrooms before spreading into the family kitchen like a vine of shared memories between father and daughter, has since been moved to a high-security facility that even Jolina Gisèle cannot 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 stored. I think we lost a bit of the thrill of collecting then,” she says. “We could no longer keep it at home, not only because of its size but also because of its value.”
She fondly recalls how Pokémon cards brought her closer to her father. As an only child and, in her own words, “a real mummy’s girl,” she says they initially had very little in common.
“He was into dinosaurs, space, cars. I liked glitter, fashion and anything pink,” she remembers. “Pokémon was the only thing we could talk about at dinner or when we browsed 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, so when they arrived we no longer remembered what we had bought. On Thursday or Friday nights we would sit together and open all the packages.” “It was a lot of fun,” she admits, “sometimes we didn’t even know whether the card we were waiting for would actually arrive.”
Jolina Gisèle is already looking toward a future she imagines without her beloved collection. “I don’t want to stay in the spotlight for too long,” she insists.
She plans to take a gap year to travel with her parents and will likely go on to study marketing and business. Although she insists Pokémon will always hold a special place in her heart, and that she has no intention of selling the childhood binder where it all began, she is also dreaming about a new project, this time with her mother, a highly 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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