Nestle Japan started a KitKat cafe some time ago at which you can get your chocolate and wafer fix. They're looking to expand the menu with a little help from their friends. It would actually be more accurate to say they're hoping to do it with help from their customers who run restaurants or cafes. The whole baked KitKat business is one that they're investing more in as time goes by and they want to see recipes featured on menus and are willing to reward people with a starter kit if they fulfill certain criteria. Among those are providing links to their establishment's web site and posting the recipe on Facebook for Nestle to inspect. They'll send qualifying businesses a KitKat toaster oven and some KitKats to work with (as shown in the picture above).
This is a very interesting promotional choice. My guess is that this is to spread the possibilities one can explore with the idea of baked candy... well, besides setting your kitchen on fire or charring sugar until it sets your smoke alarm off. ;-)
Image from Mosdo - click this image to see a larger one with more detail.
I'm a fan of balancing things out when I eat, but some people really like to stay with the same theme. For me, if I have pizza, I want to have a salad on the side as a way of balancing the nutrition. I don't like to have, say, fried cheese sticks. Cheese plus cheese is not my thing. I'm not criticizing those who enjoy such pairings, but, simply saying that they are not for me.
If you are someone who likes to layer on the fatty food all together, then the happy marriage of Mos Burger and Mister Donut has something you might like. For a 2,500 yen (about $25), you can get 4 pieces of Mos chicken (breaded and deep-fired, onion rings and French fires plus 4 donuts and a couple of Mosdo mugs for your coffee. I suggest you make that coffee black and let that be the only thing you drink the next day after chowing down on this fat fest.
Image courtesy of KFC Japan. Click to load a larger version.
May 5 was "children's day" in Japan. It is one of the holidays celebrated during "Golden Week" in Japan. As part of the celebration, KFC Japan dressed the Colonel statues in warrior garb at various locations. Given the range of costumes that I have seen on the statue, I have to wonder if there is a storage room in every branch which houses his wardrobe or if these things are rented for the day and then sent back. Between Santa and witches costumes and traditional Japanese holidays, old Colonel Saunders has a bigger wardrobe than I do.
Incidentally, if you have a thing for old Southern Colonels and you'd like to put one on your desktop, KFC has a couple of pictures you can make your computer background. You can get them here.
Pocky products on display that were eligible for the promotion - these are mostly variations on green tea.
In my post about Nijiya Japanese market, one of the things that I was told and forgot to mention was that the shop is often offered promotional items, but they are so small that they have no chance to display them. During a festival in San Jose, the Nikkei festival, they made an effort to get those items out where customers could see them.
If you look behind the blurred picture of my husband holding an inflated Pocky stick, you can see three enormous reproductions of boxes of Pocky and Glico's Pejoy. I hadn't even noticed those boxes until after I'd taken this picture as I was focusing on the sticks themselves. There was a sign at the check-out counter which said that you got "free Pocky swag" if you bought three or more boxes of Pocky. My husband is holding a sample of said swag.
Obviously, the swag are leftover inflated sticks from the display that you can see behind them. No, they weren't going to climb up and take a stick out of the display. There was a trash bag with the leftovers sitting next to a shelf with stock and in front of a refrigerator case. While hardly an elegant presentation, at least it made it easy fro them to tell us what the swag was. That made it all the easier for me to decide it wasn't worth buying three boxes of Pocky, particularly since I've never been the world's greatest Pocky fan anyway.
I'm curious about whether or not my readers would want this sort of collectible item. Would you buy three boxes of Pocky (at $1.69 each/about 170 yen) just to get one of these tubes?
I've mentioned in my other blog that the Japanese don't do April Fool's day and I was always immensely grateful for that. It's not that I don't appreciate a clever joke. In fact, I very much appreciate one. It's just that April Fool's jokes are rarely clever. They are often mean-spirited, childish, and lacking in true imagination. Mostly, they play on making your victim look like a fool after trusting you rather than being creative and amusing everyone with your ingenuity.
This past April Fool's Day, there were two jokes that I appreciated. One was the Lil Bub video which was very nicely constructed to make it appear that there are actually two of these adorable cats with dwarfism and the other is the Kirin April Fool's advertisement promoting a 1 ml. can of beer. I appreciate these jokes because they take effort and they provoke a smile rather than embarrassment. While I do like the ad (shown above), I also hope this isn't the start of a wider trend in Japan.
For spring, Mister Donut is releasing a host of strawberry-flavored donut options. Three of them are new (which you can tell by the little circles that say "new" in them). From left, top row: strawberry milk donut, strawberry milk pon de ring (a chewy donut made using rice flower), and strawberry whipped cream pie (made with strawberry jam). The prices range from 126 yen/$1.23 (the yeast-raised strawberry donut second from the left in the bottom row) to 168 yen/$1.64 (the strawberry milk donut). For the most part, they are variations on two single themes - one is a strawberry coating made with white chocolate and whipped cream either on its own or mixed with strawberry. The French crueller (second from right, bottom row) is filled with custard.
Those who live in Japan already know that Mister Donut has a point card system in which you get a stamp in a little booklet when you buy donuts. After collecting a certain number of points, you can get certain promotional items. Of interest at present is a Duskin sponge with the pon de lion or French crueller mascot on it. When I was in Japan, I often saw a variety of such rewards like little bags, bento boxes, and, most frequently, various dishes (cups, plates, bowls), but this is the first time I've seen dish sponges. You need 50 points to get these and, as a point of comparison, you can also get a free donut for 50 points or a free drink for 100 points. I think it says something about the Misdo customer base that they would offer cleaning products as a prize. It lets you know that they are overwhelmingly female.
This isn't about a particular food or item from KFC Japan, but rather about a promotional item. I think there are a lot of absolutely adorable mascots in Japan. In fact, I think they have more cute cartoon mascots per capita than any country in the world (likely any civilization in the universe - there's no chance an alien culture has more). That being said, this thing is a creepy hybird of Colonel Saunders and a bunny. When I look at it, it's hard not to think of some sort of unnatural coupling that produced a result that is horribly wrong. It actually reminds me a bit of the ugly Nova usagi (which I always called the "beak bunny" because of its weird yellow nose) that was extremely popular. I guess rabbits are something that artist struggle to anthropomorphize.
At any rate, the point of this post is not to talk about the abomination, but the fact that it is used in a game that KFC is making available for free to promote its greasy poultry products. I have not downloaded the game, but their web site says you can "summon" this monstrosity by tapping on something called "friend's power". I don't know what happens once it arrives in your game, but you might want to have a can of pepper spray on hand.
Those who want to give it a go can get it from Apple's app store or Google Play. If you can't understand Japanese, you can enable automatic translation of the pages in your browser (at least you can in Chrome) and bumble your way through in broken English.
I've mentioned on my other blog that there was a time in Japan when I was laid up with terrible back pain. The remedy according to the doctor I saw was to stay in bed and get up as infrequently as possible for up to three months. He insisted that I was risking a permanent crippling if I did otherwise.
After two months of this and not getting any better, I took matters into my own hands and started walking little by little every day. One of the things that I did was walk to the local Inageya market and buy 1.5-liter bottles of Diet Coke. The time when I concluded that "enough was enough" was near Christmas and there was a promotion going on in which they gave away adorable little ornaments with the famous Coca-Cola polar bears on them with the purchase of such sizes.
I could only carry two bottles at a time because of my back, but walking there everyday and trying to slowly acquire every single type of ornament provided with early motivation to keep conducting my personally prescribed "physical therapy". My back got better, and I had a full collection of the nifty ornaments.
Unfotunately, I didn't bring them back with me when I left Japan, but Coke is putting out a new set for those who'd like to start their own collection. These aren't nearly as cute as the ones I got (they were all polar bear themed), but they're still worth collecting. They're one of the more useful little freebies that you can get with a snack or drink. I'd also encourage people to give Coke some business because I have to give the company at least a little credit for pulling me through a very difficult time.
My mother once took a part-time job as a Santa in a mall. She was chubby enough and was willing to seat children on her lap and pretend to be jolly for a month or so. She told me that most kids weren't paying heed because the beard and outfit masked her female features sufficiently, but some did notice mainly because of her hands being too small and tapered to be man-hands. In America, anyone can be Santa.
Asian Santa takes a selfie.
Glico is promoting its line of children's biscuits called "Bisco" using what it refers to as an "Asian Santa". It's interesting not because they're using a Christmas theme to sell cookies to kids, but because of the way they talk about the Santa. In the U.S., we would never specifically refer to Santa as being a particular ethnicity. It would be considered racist. I think that the reason Glico is specifying that this is an Asian Santa is because kids can write to him in Japanese and he can answer in their language. I've had students in the past talk about how, when they were kids, they were worried that Santa only understood English so they didn't write letters to him.
He's not only certified, but he's up on current events!
Besides being capable of dealing with kids in their native language (and selling them Bisco cookies), Glico's Santa is a "certified/licensed" Santa impersonator. It is very important that fake Santas be qualified to do their job. My mother didn't have such qualifications. That may be why she didn't get to go back again the following year.
There's exclusive and then there's exclusive. Glico is producing a special version of their "Pretz" crackers in "karinto" (a sort of brown sugar log that is rather fatty and not really like a pretzel) for ANA (All Nippon Airways). Information on buying these is available via your local seat pocket on an ANA flight and they will be on sale on September 28, 2013 and be gone by the end of October. Each stick is a mere 22 mm/.86 in. in length and there are 6 individual portions per box to make them easy to distribute as a souvenir. The listed price is 840 yen ($8.40), but it may vary.
Though this sounds like you have to be on a plane to get it, you can pick one up at the "Glico Kitchen" shop in Tokyo station or the "Diversity Plaza" in Odaiba. The only way it seems to really have to do with airplanes is the shape of the design on the box. However, I could be wrong and ANA could be handing these out instead of your standard pretzels on flights for awhile. I never flew ANA while I was in Japan, but if anyone out there does, let me know if you get a box of these.
Baskin Robbins Japan has been churning out (no pun intended, really) ice cream in that island nation for 40 years. To celebrate this, they're selling a special "anniversary sundae" made up of one scoop of ice cream with a bit of whipped cream and some colorful candies. I guess the 40th isn't nearly as impressive as some others since that's a pretty puny sundae.
The mugs are actually rather nicely designed to have both a retro feel (the stripes bring about thoughts of old-timey ice cream parlors) and modern elegance. If I were in Japan, I wouldn't need another mug (as they appeared to reproduce when food touches them like porcelain tribbles) so I probably wouldn't buy the sundae to get the cup, but I'd surely get one if I hadn't had a cabinet overstuffed with dishes. Note how they kindly put the sundae in a paper cup inside of the mug so that you don't mess it up with the food. Also, the sundae being so anemic means that it'd languish down in the bottom and require some sort of deep sea camera to get a picture of it for promotional purposes.
They are available only at some Baskin Robbins shops and in limited quantities. No price is given because old "31" is a franchise and pricing is controlled to some extent by the owners. They will be available up until May 10 or the end of their supplies. You can choose your scoop, but I'm guessing you can't choose whether you get the pink or green mug.
Have you ever wondered why pizza is so expensive in Japan? It's because the pizza-making companies have to keep paying licensing fees to various pop culture icon creators so they can use their images on whatever bits of junk they offer in their campaigns. If you pay 2,180 yen ($22), you can get a pizza, "Original 4", with 4 different topping sets (tuna mild, idaho special, bacon asparagus, and meat trio) and the items pictured above.
Most of what is given as part of campaigns is of limited utility. In fact, cups and bowls tend to be the biggest "gifts" that come with overpriced food. This time, they're offering a wooden "tray" and a cutter which could conceivably be useful. That being said, if you buy a pizza from Pizza Hut, there's a pretty good chance that they're going to cut the pizza for you and you'll eat it out of the box rather than grease up the adorable little Rilakkuma tray.
Personally, I think that the wooden tray would be put to better use as part of some sort of S & M furry activity... not that I think about that sort of thing or anything.
McDonald's Japan is running a Twitter campaign in which they'd like you to tell/show them all of the ways or situations in which one might use their plastic french fry holder. If you can't think of enough uses for it, they've got models to get your creative juices flowing:
You can use it for plastic utensils as you sit outside having a cup of tea.
You can use it as a pencil holder, because it doesn't look so incredibly unstable on its narrow base that it may tip over or anything.
Or you can use it for your cell phone, but I'd recommend not having used it to hold your fries first. Notice how incredibly happy they all are to be adding this decorative object to their tasteful surroundings.
A bunch of folks on Twitter are tweeting how they would like to use it to get a chance to win. Most of them echo what you're seeing in the pictures with these models. I'm not sure though if this is a chicken or the egg thing where McDonald's put up the pictures after they got the ideas or the tweets are the result of the pictures. Either way, I'm not sure that a plastic container that looks like a carton of fries is worth the brain power to imagine what one might do with it. Of course, being the horribly demented individual that I am, I can think of a lot of perverse uses for it. The most family friendly of which would be a pooper scooper for a small canine, a soap dish, or a planter. I'm pretty sure that I'd only actually entertain the first option if I had one because I'm not really much of a McDonald's fan. I don't want one of those things in my home.
If you want to see the tweets (they're in Japanese though), you can check under this hashtag: #ポテトホルダー
Posters for these McDonald's glasses are all over the place because of the World Cup. I have no idea if these are unique to Japan (I doubt they are), but glasses nearly identical to these have been given away in promotions in the past. These glasses have a Coke logo on one side and a soccer design on the other. Previous versions were available in similar colors, but with a Coke logo design on both sides. We had a green, pink and blue one at one point, but they were so crappy that they developed cracks from normal use within months.
I'm not a soccer fan, but a lot of my Japanese acquaintances and students are talking about it. Most of them have said that the Japanese team is woefully poor this year. I'll have to take their word for it.
Updated: October 24 with YouTube video of people eating it added.
Some things are so bizarre that you think they have to be a Photoshop mash-up or part of the Onion. When I learned about this, I thought it simply had to be a joke. Why would Burger King push Windows 7? Why would Microsoft want to ally itself with a fast food place to promote software?
Well, it turns out that it is no joke. From October 22 to 28, Burger King is selling a monster burger with 7 patties (each about 4 oz./113 grams) on an "American size" (13 cm/5 in.) bun. The catch is that they are only selling 30 of these burgers each day at the price of 777 yen ($8.50), but this is no surprise. They couldn't possibly make any money off of these if they sold an unlimited quantity of them at that price. After the first 30 people, the price is the usual price one would pay for having extra patties added to the burger (1450 yen/$15.88).
The burger comes in a paper wrapper with a Windows logo on the top and is about 10 cm/4 in. in height and 11 cm/4.3 in. in diameter. Word is that it has over 2000 calories. One person who sampled it said that it felt like eating a small animal in terms of the feel of the quantity of meat. It was also impossible for the writer (a Japanese person) to open his mouth wide enough to wrap it around the burger. Obviously, I won't be tracking down one of these as I don't even like hamburgers, let alone ones that are likely to lock my jaw if I try and eat one.
If this sort of food were offered in the U.S., everyone would be crashing down on both Microsoft and Burger King and talking about how this sort of excess contributes to the obesity epidemic. At the very least, it'd show up on This is why you're fat (I spoke too soon, it's already there!). In Japan, it's just something people chortle at, shake their heads at and about which they say, "those kooky Japanese".
A little update: The Shinjuku iLand Tower Burger King said they ran out of these (that is, sold the first 30 at 770 yen) by 9:00 am when they open at 7:00 am. They also said that some people then paid the full price (1450 yen) for them thereafter. I guess that once they got the idea in the idea in their heads that they wanted it, they just had to have it.
