Kirin's April Fool's Day Prank (promotion information)

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. 

Lawson Uchi Cafe Bread campaign (product information)

I subscribe to a web site which shows retro ads for various products as well as one that takes old recipes and tries them out to see if they're decent. In both of these cases, you see a fair number of ads for things which are incorporated into recipes that don't really belong. Old 7-Up ads, for instance, encourage you to pour it in your meatloaf mix or to mix it with milk and give it to your kids.

It makes perfect sense for manufacturers to try and shoehorn their product into your recipes so that you'll use it more often. Lawson has taken a very different approach to trying to sell its bread. Rather than encourage you to buy bread and then incorporate it into your French toast, tsukune mix, or soak it in sake for a Japanized bread pudding, they just give you recipes for food that goes well with bread.

The idea of pairing your food in ads in order to put the idea in people's heads that, hey, 'food A goes well with food B', but I don't think I've ever seen recipes given which don't include the product being promoted. It's an interesting concept and the reason this caught my eye was a recipe for chestnut soup. In fact, at first I thought they were selling the soup in their convenience stores, but, no, it's about the side dish.

If you'd like to make the soup, the recipe is here. It's actually not too dissimilar from a recipe I created while living in Japan though I didn't use cream in mine and I included carrots, sage, and thyme. There are 7 recipes and only two of them show bread as a side. The others are actually for spreads to put on bread, sandwich filling, and, in one case, making a French-toast-style recipe with berries. The basic concept is to pair bread with a variety of other flavors (lemon, egg, chestnut, potato, apple, salmon, and berry) so you can enjoy Lawson's brick of white bread every single day of the week with a far more interesting flavor.

Nestle Adult Sweetness Matcha KitKat campaign and Gran Wafer

As I've mentioned before, Nestle Japan has changed its marketing. The days of a revolving door or weird flavors seem to be over. Indeed, they are now focusing a lot of attention on expanding their market toward less sweet and relatively approachable flavors. The core product line is split between regular milk chocolate KitKats in various types of packaing, regional KitKats, and the adult sweetness line. 

The adult sweetness line is offered in white, semisweet, and green tea flavors. They're all good, but, surprisingly, I like the green tea one best. I say that because I'm not a huge green tea fan. However, the texture and mixture of bitter and sweet flavors make it a pretty extraordinary mixture of the elements. 

Nestle Japan is pretty savvy in how they're shifting the product line and marketing. The birth rate in Japan was 1.3 for 2012. That means the number of kids out there looking to try new candy is going down while the number of adults is much higher. They're going where the money is, and catering to conservative tastes (less sweet, more common and known flavors). 

They've done their marketing and 70% of women between the ages of 20-30 are pleased with the matcha adult sweetness KitKat. Their PR talks about how the changes in Japanese society are creating a situation in which women are expected to work late just as men are and they want to position their candy as a way of relieving stress. To that end, they've made a few commercials showing a very thin Japanese business woman being given candy to help her get through the trials and tribulations of her day. 

Blogger won't let me embed a video from YouTube Japan, but I'll link to each one here. The one for a green tea KitKat shows the hapless heroine apologizing in English as foreign guests exit. Everything is just fine though after her coworker hands her a box with a green tea KitKat and she munches on it. The second one, for the bittersweet version, shows her exiting a meaning after apparently having done some sort of poor job and being consoled by the same coworker with candy again. Yes, professional failure can always be fixed with candy. 

Though this is a pretty stupid set of commercials, which makes it little different from most commercials, the focus is a good one. Many Japanese women have sweets while they're working at the office. They don't eat copious amounts of them, but every female coworker I ever had in Japan kept snacks in her desk. Nestle figures that it might as well be a KitKat. 

Beyond catering to the needs of hapless female business people, they're encouraging housewives to enjoy a "gran wafer" with their coffee while their tots nap. The gran wafer (which appears to have lost a "d" somewhere along the way) is a KitKat with chocolate wafers with chocolate between them and no chocolate coating. It is, essentially, a sugar wafer. They're sold 9 to a box as minis, so, you can "have a break", but not a very big one. I guess moms with sewing machines need to sugar-up a bit less than office workers. 

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Click this for a much bigger version that you can read, if you read Japanese.

Krispy Kreme Japan started selling mini donuts on February 22, and while we haven't tried the donuts yet, we did get this nifty advertisement with a cut out car somewhere around Valentine's Day. The car is supposed to be a replica of an early (1930) Krispy Kreme mobile (a donut-mobile?).

As I was writing this, I translated 3 of the flavors by reading the katakana below each picture, then I realized that it's written in English above each picture. This is something that starts to happen after you have lived here awhile. You stop seeing English when it's right in front of you while you doltishly squint at the Japanese and read it.

 The nice-looking Valentine's Krispy Kreme donuts. My husband was given these by a generous and kind student for the holiday. Two are still in our freezer waiting for him to want a morning sugar rush.

The doughnuts represent relatively poor value economically, but I'm guessing based on my experiences with various Krispy Kreme offerings  that they aren't going to impress on the taste front either. No matter how cute they look, I'm not likely to partake, but my husband is much gamer (and more interested in all things doughnut) than me.

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If there is one thing I've learned since coming to Japan and paying attention to what is going on with food, it's that the Japanese food producers won't hesitate for a second to jump all over any indication that foreign-produced food is less safe than Japan-produced food. Despite the fact that Japanese food sometimes is found to be unsafe, they are like sharks that sense blood in the water and make sure any negative press about foreign food is heard loud and often. Such has been the case for the last several  years now in regards to American beef. The BSE scare allowed Japan to promote its beef and that which Japanese business owners produced on their Australian farms at the expense of American beef. This sign which I saw on the subway not too long ago shows that the American beef producers are trying to fight back and promote their image more positively with the slogan "We Care."

The reason that U.S. beef (and Chinese produce) are maligned so quickly and roundly when any chance presents itself is that the prices are lower and food safety is a serious concern among the Japanese. Of course, everyone is concerned about food safety, but the notion that Japanese food producers are more reputable or careful than those in other countries is wrong.

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Really, do I need to even comment on this? Doors. Swinging. You know how many ways.

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 Click this picture to see a bigger version with more detail.

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.

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For the summer, Starbucks Japan is offering some exotic options. Since they accommodate English speakers by writing more of their advertising in English than in Japanese, I don't have to translate for my readers.

Mango continues to be the fruit du jour in Japan. Many things are sold in mango flavor including chocolates, but dried fruit tends to be one of the more popular ways for people to partake of it. While I like mango, I'm not really inclined to try that particular frappucino.

The other variety, yuzu green tea, is something I'm more drawn to. For those who don't recall or know, yuzu is a Japanese citrus fruit which is a cross between a grapefruit and an orange. It's one of my favorite flavor enhancers in snacks and I've eaten it as a dried fruit and really enjoyed it. That being said, I probably won't buy this because I'm not a huge fan of green tea or drinking a ton of sugar. A short yuzu green tea frappucino weighs in at 130 calories and a venti at a whopping 270. It actually beats out the mango frappucino which comes in at 115 for a short and 240 for a venti.

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Click this image to load a bigger one, because, you know, you really want to see that face up closer and with more detail.

When I saw this sign on a vending machine, the only thing that I could think was, "they are using Tommy Lee Jones's corpse to promote coffee." Seriously, if there were a little pillow behind his head, I'd think he'd expired and been embalmed. I have to wonder what the people who chose this picture were thinking. Coffee is what we drink to feel more alert and alive, and poor Tommy looks anything but.

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My husband and I went out last weekend in search of an available iPad (for him, not me) with no success, but I did catch this ad on the train (you can click this image for a bigger one). The three hands holding the cans are on springs and float above the poster. They jiggle constantly while the train is moving. "Fire" brands of canned coffee are made by Kirin, which is better known for its beer. The current promotional campaigns use baseball player Hideki Matsui to promote their coffee. Much canned coffee in Japan is sold cold in vending machines.

The idea of cold coffee was a peculiar one 20 years ago when I first arrived. Since the proliferation of designer coffee houses (like Starbucks) have made cold coffee much more common in America, the only thing remarkable about these canned coffees (besides the fact that they have jelly in them) is that they taste so bad but still sell well.