This past spring I was lucky enough to spend a week visiting a friend who was living in Japan. I’ve slowly been working my way through the digital and physical debris that followed me home, and one item has emerged as my ‘go-to’ example when people ask about weird stuff I brought back.
A little backstory: my plan was to pick up a variety of snack / junkfood items to foist upon friends and family once I returned to the US. As such, I got into the habit of blindly picking up elaborately packaged yet reasonably priced items from the snack food aisles of any shop where I was already making a purchase.
These are the circumstances under which I purchased the item below. It is imperitive that you keep in mind that ALL I saw of this item was the external packaging:
Decent-sized box in the snack aisle, reasonably priced, with some fun engrish to top things off (It reads: “I won’t take anything except this one. Only who knows this taste can really appreciate it. Part 2”). Sold!
So once I’m home and picking through my loot, I open the box, and see this:
Somehow, even at this point I still wasn’t tipped off as to where this was heading. I was thinking: “Whoa! crazy die cut packaging with a bunch of intricate folds” (I am a huge packaging nerd). What I was not thinking was: “I bet this snack food includes nudity!”
But guess what? It did! So, what you are looking at here are two cups of a pudding-like substance of some sort, inverted and packaged to look like breasts. The hands in the illustration manage to push the whole thing up and over the edge of a new weirdness plateau.
Bulleted list of insanity:
- Intricate, unnessecarily expensive-to-produce packaging
- Engrish
- Snack Food
- Uniquely overt sexuality.
Here are the ‘cups’ removed from the packaging. I am still not sure exactly what sort of pudding this is, but also included are two pouches of ‘topping’ and two clear plastic spoons that look like doll shovels.
Bravo, Japan. Even after a solid week of having my mind blown several times a minute, you still managed to surprise me.
UPDATE! Since writing this it has come to my attention that this is a “thing” in that there are multiple companies offering pudding packaged in this manner, with the apparent variation being different heads attached to the Pudding. Internet documenter of all things Japan Danny Choo posted a piece detailing a similarly packaged product here in which he links to this google image search that reveals the breadth of extant variations on this packaging theme (NSFW).