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My husband was given a plastic packet with two samples of grape Halls cough drops while walking on the street to his work in downtown Tokyo. The strange thing wasn't the cough drops themselves, as they were just your typical Halls flavored cough drops which are the same as those back home. The weird point was the advertising illustration that came with it.
You don't need to read Japanese to get the gist of it. I must say that I never associated Halls with kissing, and this ad did nothing to strengthen any such connection in my mind, especially if I'm expected to hold the throat drop with my pinky raised like some tea-drinking socialite.
As an aside, the creepy bird with a man's face is to advertise the company's presence on Twitter.
