Unstructured Suntory

If you have even a passing familiarity with the Final Fantasy games, I think you'll get a kick out of this tie-in commercial for a line of Final Fantasy themed "Suntory" drinks.

Unstructured Furoshiki

I have always sucked when it's come to trend spotting. I started sipping Chai about a month after the entire population of Omaha, Nebraska had fallen in love with it. I was the guy who learned about Doom from Dateline NBC. I started saying "All your base are belong to us" right about the time when most people were ready to cockpunch the next mofo who injected the meme into a conversation.

Given this, you should regard any pop-culture prognostication from me with a hefty grain of salt. That said, if I had to make a guess, furoshiki seems like it could be a contender.

Strictly speaking, furoshiki is a Japanese term for a special kind of cloth used to wrap up various objects. More informally, it's the technique used to wrap the objects. As you can see from the chart, below, there's a lot of techniques. Although I'm not sure if you'll ever get the good folks in Branson to take it up, I can see this sort of thing appealing to Upper Eastsiders who are started to get bored by Feng Shui, especially given that there's an environmentally friendly pitch to using furoshiki over disposable materials.

Unstructured Red Riding Hood

A friend of mine and his wife are leaving for Japan for two weeks so, in his honor, I present to you this rather odd Japanese commercial featuring a singing Red Riding Hood and her animal friends (including one rather special fellow).

As near as I can tell, it's a commercial for an architectural firm. Go figure.

Unstructured Slapping

Exhibit 56,402,355 for the case that the Japanese are weird is the game Nigoro, a.k.a. "Rose & Camellia" wherein the player attempts to slap the hell out of another woman for reasons that are thoroughly lost in translation. ¹

I'm not sure what actually disturbs me more: the existence of the game or the fact that there are YouTube videos demonstrating how far people have managed to get in the game.

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¹ Don't believe me? Here's Google's translation of the rationale.

Reiko who marries as a wife of the nobility and camellia path head of a family man Siyunsuke. The husband received breath in that following day. While the noble harassing [ri] of the people of the camellia path house continues, the blood of the populace in Reiko burns up. The rose is received in Siyunsuke in the chest, Reiko declaration of war was proclaimed to the people of the camellia path house. “I who am the wife of the eldest son receive the camellia path house.”...... This the women becomes gorgeous, it sways.

Unstructured Engrish

Japanese pop culture has an interest in English words that's rather analogous to certain westerner's interest in getting Japanese tattoos, which is to say that the coolness of the shapes is often more important than the actual meaning.

This, of course, leads to quite a lot of inadvertant humor on either side. Since this is an English site, I will, perhaps unfairly, highlight the Japanese side of that equation by pointing you to Engrish.com which is a photographic collection of English-like oddities that have been found in Japan.

While it would have been easy to make a site like this with a cruel underlying sense of mockery, I think you'll find that Engrish.com is a good-natured site whose only goal is a bit of gentle humor at the sort of garbling that naturally occurs when cultures mix.