Edible iPhones – Cool Cookies in Japan
The Asahi Shimbun reports about how a cafe in Tokushima prefecture became famous across Japan after Twitter users discovered its iPhone cookies:
Kudo said the idea for the biscuits came from one of her customers, who asked her to make a look-a-like of the iPod touch media player for her husband’s birthday gift in October 2008.
Kudo mistook the gadget for the very similar iPhone, which had just appeared on the market, but the customer was delighted by the end product.
News of Kudo’s creation did not spread widely until a message on the Internet micro-blogging site Twitter in January by the well-known economic critic Kazuyo Katsuma.
[...]
When Kudo was invited to an event held by Softbank Corp. in March, she handed President Masayoshi Son one of biscuits, who had earlier posted his own Twitter message saying: “I want one!” Son was overjoyed: “I’m so happy. I cannot possibly eat this,” he said.
Kudo, who makes all her own cakes and biscuits, says she can create no more than 20 iPhone cookies a day. One biscuit is priced at 2,730 yen ($33), including tax.
Would you pay $33 for a cookie?
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Categories: Japanese Food, Technology
Bride and groom cut tuna instead of wedding cake
Who needs a wedding cake when you’ve got a bigass tuna to cut instead:
A company in Kanagawa prefecture has offered tuna-cutting marriage ceremonies for about 10 years now. This particular couple has purchased a 100kg BigEye tuna for their guests. They don’t reveal the cost of this particular fish, but they do say that minimum plan costs about 3,000 yen X 50 guests (150,000 yen).
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Categories: Japanese Food, Odd / Strange
Dancing Indians advertise Cup Noodle curry flavor
The last Cup Noodle commercial had Takuya Kimura walking through redwood forests. Now he’s in India for a Bollywood-style musical promotion of Cup Noodle’s curry flavor:
The song lyrics consist of Kimutaku repeatedly announcing the existence of corocha curry Cup Noodle. The woman interrupts him to suggest that he say it tastes good, since it is a commercial. Kimutaku replies by expressing supreme confidence in only having to say that it’s corocha curry Cup Noodle.
[Note: The "coro cha" he keeps singing about are little cubes of meat.]
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Categories: Japanese Food
Chinese people don’t know about Japan’s giant jellyfish problem
“Mezamashi TV” investigates the giant jellyfish invasion taking place in the Sea of Japan:
The jellyfish originate in the Yellow Sea and the East China Sea. No one is entirely sure of why the giant jellyfish population is increasing, but it has been argued that global warming or Chinese pollution has killed off some of their natural predators, allowing them to grow to an enormous size before leaving Chinese waters and heading into the Sea of Japan.
Their reporter took the streets of Qingdao to ask Chinese people about their views on giant jellyfish. Nobody seemed to know about the problem facing Japanese fishermen:
The report hints at a solution: using the jellyfish as a food instead of treating them like worthless pests. Jellyfish cookies are mentioned as one type of food. A new post over at Pink Tentacle reveals that high school students in the town of Obama have also created jellyfish caramels.
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Categories: General Japan
Energy Efficiency of Eating Dolphins
The recent articles on the Taiji dolphin hunt have generated a tremendous amount of discussion in the Japan Probe comments section. Many comments were well constructed and presented, while many were, well… not. One facet of the argument that I didn’t see come up (forgive me if you raised this point and I just missed it) is the energy efficiency (or rather lack there of) in eating top level predators, such as dolphins (or tuna for that matter).
Energy transfer between trophic levels is inefficient, about 10%. Thus, an herbivore only receives about 10% of the total energy captured by the plants it consumes. While determining a trophic level for any particular animal is not straightforward because of a varied diet, worldwide estimates for the bottlenose dolphin, Tursiops truncatus (the same species hunted in Taiji), place it at a level of between 4 and 5, probably closer to 4, which is equivalent to that of tuna, bonito, and other open-ocean large pelagic fish. This means if phytoplankton captured 100 units of net energy from the sun, by the time that energy is passed through two additional levels of animal and ultimately a dolphin on the way to your dinner plate, that you eat only 0.1 units.
However in theory, an herbivore, such a cow, provides 10 units of energy. In reality, the equation is not so simple, though. Just as physicists must invoke the hypothetical “frictionless surface” when explaining Newton’s First Law, I must invoke the hypothetical “free-range cow” because I am completely ignoring the energy and water costs of commercially raising cattle (not to mention the climate effects of bovine flatulence).
So, while in my honest, meat-eating opinion, many arguments against eating animal products made by some vegans are borderline silly, I have to agree with those that advocate, from the emotionally-detached perspective of efficiency and sustainable agriculture, eating primarily (though not entirely) corn, wheat, and rice. Having said that however, I sill plan to visit Fire House this weekend for what I consider the best bacon cheeseburger in Tokyo.
A side note on mercury in dolphins
A number of dolphin photo identification projects are ongoing in Florida, the oldest of which was started by Randy Wells in Sarasota Bay during the 1970s. By the late 1990s, it became clear that the mortality rate for first-born calves was unexpectedly high. The working hypothesis states that the transfer of bioaccumulated toxins and heavy metals from mother to calf is responsible for the high mortality rate. This seems to serve essentially as a “detox dump” for the mother, with deadly effects for the calf. Interestingly though, it is thought that this ultimately increases the longevity of female dolphins, allowing them to bear a larger number of offspring. Mortality rates for subsequently born calves is not unusually high.
Contributor Bio: Steve has been splitting time between the US and Japan for the past 10 years or so and is now a post doctorate fellow at a large, lumbering University in Tokyo, where he gets paid to play with dirt.
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Categories: General Japan
Japanese Curry King
Fast food chain Sukiya has jumped on the “mega” size food bandwagon with its new Curry King dish:
A 3X increase in rice and a 4X increase in curry. It will provide you with 2122 calories, the equivalent of 8.5 hamburgers or 13 onigiris. At 890 yen, it’s a pretty good deal.
According to an expert, fast food chains love adding “mega” items to their menu because it saves them the trouble of investing a lot of money in developing new dishes.
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Categories: Japanese Food