This might be surprising if your concept of cartoon characters is based on American models. Sure, all kinds of improbable things exist in American cartoons that we don’t think twice about. Walking, talking animals – that’s so normal it’s boring. Sponges that wear pants, whatever. But not usually a fillet of fish that gets on Twitter and says “Please eat me, I’m delicious.”

But for the last few decades at least, cute characters that are live, walking, sometimes talking, foods, have been totally normal in Japan. And it turns out they have historical precedents that go WAY back.

Anpanman: The Granddaddy Of Modern Food Characters

Anpanman: He’s your classic superhero. He wears a cape, he fights for truth, justice and the Japanese way. And… he’s a bread roll with sweet bean paste inside.

His friends are other types of bread – plain sliced white bread, buns filled with melon or curry – as well as humans who apparently see nothing odd about the situation.

Anpanman apparently never gets stale. After starting as a manga in 1973 and as a TV show in 1988, it aired its 1,000th episode in 2009and its 25th movie in 2013.

Anpanman also set the stage for using these characters for merchandizing, having been used to promote almost every conceivable product including other foods (isn’t that kind of like cannibalism?). I’ve even seen him on boxes of okonomiyaki mix, which isn’t something I imagined was marketed to children.

Perhaps Anpanman’s most direct modern descendent is Kogepan – modernized in part by making him the emo version. Unlike the cheerful, pink-cheeked Anpanman, he’s full of existential angst: Having been left in the oven too long, till he’s burnt, Kogepan is depressed about no one wanting to buy him. Yes, instead of rejoicing that he’ll escape being eaten, he’s miserable that he can’t fulfill his life’s work as a bun. He drowns his sorrows in milk, which makes him drunk.

Like Anpanman, Kogepan’s friends are all different kinds of bread, but his relationships are far more conflicted. He’s jealous of the pretty, unburnt breads, the Kireipan, and I can’t blame him – the cheerful little strawberry breads annoy even me.

But bean paste buns are far from the only walking, talking foods, as we’ll see on the following brief journey through Japanese foods, characters and history.

Beyond the Bun

Traditional sweets like Anpanman have always been big in the food-character market. In another animation from the 1970s, a taiyaki, the fish-shaped pancake filled with beanpaste, comes to life and swims in the ocean:

およげたいやきくん

Later in the 90s, three dango brothers and their tango song had a huge hit:

だんご三兄弟

Nowadays though, almost any food can be made into a character. It’s easy to make fruits and vegetables come to life by giving them faces and arms and legs. From just one company, San-X, there are over a dozen, including Amagurichan, a chestnut who’s impatient to be eaten, Mikan Bouya, a mikan (a citrus fruit like a tangerine), Mamepyon, a family of peas, and Soreike Otamachan!, an onion.

Elsewhere we find an NHK character who is a bitter melon and the incredibly adorable Nameko mushrooms.

Prepared dishes can come alive too. In the picture book and anime Oden-Kun, all the different ingredients of oden are made into creatures: you’ve got your boiled egg, your various fish cakes, and your chunk of daikon radish:

Fusion Food

Food character designers often go beyond giving a fruit or bread a face and limbs, resulting in strange, unnatural chimeras combining food with other creatures. A simple example is Momobuta, who’s a cross between a peach and a pig:

Hokkaido, too, has been all aboard the hybrid food train. The northern prefecture is known for a few main things, one being a bear, the other being various types of food (salmon, melon, onions, to name a few). How do you combine those things? Oh, let me count the ways.

First, let’s start with this melon-higuma mascot mashup.

Okay, so maybe this one’s not as “kawaii”

From there it can go many different directions, including bear+salmon, bear+onion, bear+crab, bear+squid, so on and so forth. Koichi happened to have the bear+crab and bear+squid combinations on hand and took a picture:

My favorite food-creature combination, though, is the San-X characters Nyan Nyan Nyanko. These little cats were presented in various scenarios over the years where they were incorporated and/or transformed into every conceivable dish and type of cuisine.

Their first appearance was a festival theme, where they were various traditional foods you’d buy at festival stalls, like takoyaki:

Next came traditional sweets eaten with green tea, which of course also had a cat in the cup.

Over the years they appeared as dim sum, burgers, onigiri, bubble tea, school lunch, sushi, Western sweets like cream puffs,… just about everything you can think of.

If you think too hard about this, it ought to be incredibly gruesome. Instead, it’s adorable. With every limited edition iteration you could buy stationery, stickers, plushes and what have you, so it is sad but good for my personal budget that the cats appear to have been retired in 2010 after ten years of appearing as various foodstuffs.

Classical Characters

Anthropomorphic food turns out to have some pretty ancient precedents in Japanese art. What’s funny about the early examples is that they also seem to presage another Japanese invention: the TV show food battle.

In the 15th century, a fashion started of illustrated stories of battles between food characters. In the Shoujin Gyorui Monogatari, an army of vegetarian foods, Shoujun, led by the lord Natto, battled against the seafood army led by the lord Salmon. The vegetarian army won, killing the lord Salmon in Nabe Castle.

The picture above is a similar battle from 1859. Although these stories are humorous, this one is said to have a pretty serious historical context: a cholera epidemic. The vegetarian foods won the battle this time too, supposedly symbolizing the fact that they were less likely to spread cholera (presumably because cholera is a water-borne disease).

Other Edo-period anthropomorphized food includes this lovely dancing ear of corn:

There are also precedents to the food-creature chimeras. The famous folktale of Momotaro, the Peach Boy, is about a boy who was born from a large peach floating in a stream. There’s at least one illustration where he is half peach, half boy

Maybe that version didn’t stick because it was too hard to believe that anyone was desperate enough for an heir to raise that creepy creature as their own.

Modern Battle of the Food Characters

With all this as background, it no doubt seemed totally normal for Sanrio to decide to have a new character contest where all twenty of the candidates were some kind of food, or something combined with some kind of food.

Fairly standard sorts of contestants included dog-mochi sweets, panda rice balls, an egg, and my favorite, a long negi onion.

Others were really stretching it, if you ask me, especially some of the food-animal fusions. Yeah, a giraffe’s horns do look a little like mushrooms, but if you have a whole bunch of mushrooms growing out of a giraffe’s head, it just gets creepy:

And I love tanuki like nothing else, but I cannot accept the combination of a tanuki and kiritanpo, a cylinder of pounded rice that a specialty of Akita and Aomori prefectures:

And the public seemed to agree with me that those were overdoing it, because the winner is the one that’s the foodiest of all. Kirimi-chan the salmon fillet has nothing added but tiny dots for eyes and a line for a mouth, and a tiny body. Simple, like Hello Kitty’s expressionless face. In fact, she might not look all that out of place in one of those fifteenth-century battles of the anthropomorphic seafoods.

So although she is brand new, she’s way more old school than anyone probably imagined.

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That’s what happened to me when I started taking photos of my stuffed Kogepan toys on my vacations. I took them with me to California, to New York City, and around the monuments and museums of Washington DC. I thought I was original and maybe a little bit odd. Then I went to post the photos online and discovered there was more than one Flickr group devoted to traveling stuffed toys.

And now, I’m kicking myself for not realizing that this was actually evidence of a huge under-served market. Sadly, I was not as brilliant as Sonoe Azuma, who three years ago opened a travel agency for stuffed toys in Japan.

It’s called Unagi Travel, and it started out because Sonoe Azuma had the same hobby I did: she took photos of her stuffed eel Unasha and blogged about it. Now Unasha serves as stuffed animal tour guide and together they’ve taken about 450 stuffed toys from all over the world on trips around Tokyo as well as excursions to other areas. Her customers are so satisfied that more than half come back for another trip, and one, a hippo named Kaba-san from Osaka, has been on six trips.

Customers can choose from various options: a tour around Tokyo including Asakusa, Meiji Jingu Shrine and Tokyo Tower, a one-day tour to an onsen, a weekend in Kyoto, and special tours that are sometimes offered, including to the Tohoku region. While you follow along via social media, your stuffed animal will see the sights and learn about Japanese culture, like calligraphy:

…and have Japanese meals that you will envy:

If your toy is a real free spirit, you can surprise it with a Mystery Tour. The Mystery Tour may visit other parts of Tokyo, Azuma told us, such as Shibuya, Ginza, or Roppongi, or places in nearby prefectures such as Kawagoe or Odawara. Or it may have a cultural theme, and your toy may come home knowing more than you do about architecture of the Meiji period or bronze statues.

Tours are limited to ten so everyone gets enough personal attention. You’re assured that your animal will never be placed directly on the ground, and asked whether your toy has any food allergies, whether it gets seasick or carsick, and if there’s anything in particular your creature wants to see or do on the tour.

The form that customers fill out also asks how long you’ve been together and has you tell something about the toy’s character. Along with the photos, the answers to these questions often show up on Unagi’s Facebook page, so it’s fun to follow even if you’re not sending a toy on a trip yourself. People have all sorts of creative stories about their toys, and there’s often the hint of interesting human stories behind them as well.

One toy from France on a recent trip was said to have been with its thirty year old owner since she was one day old, and loves chocolate and knitting. A pair of handmade cats from Nara Prefecture called Custard-san and Hana-san from Nara Prefecture were said to be on a mother-daughter trip together. They’re supportive of each other, and the mom loves to listen to enka. And a toy called Little Brother Bear was returning to Tokyo where he had lived sixty years ago.

All sorts of creatures are allowed, as long as they weigh under 250 grams, and you need to mail your toy to Tokyo. The Tokyo tour is $45; special tours cost more, like $95 for two days in Kyoto.

Do you have more questions about this? So did we. Azuma was kind enough to answer a few questions for Tofugu:

Tofugu: What kinds of toys do foreigners send? Are they different from Japanese, or does everyone like the same kind of stuffed animal?

Unagi: Foreigners tend to send us realistic animal toys, whereas Japanese tend to send us cute toys. Regardless of whether it’s from Japan or overseas, the teddy bear accounts for a large percentage.

Tofugu: What’s the most unusual toy you have taken on a tour?

Unagi: It was a Japanese spiny lobster.

Tofugu: When you go on overnight trips, how do the innkeepers feel about having stuffed animals as customers?

Unagi: Once the business understands the concept, we are very welcome.

Tofugu: Your job sounds like so much fun. What do you like about it?

Unagi: I’m happy that I can make my customers happy and energetic. For example, there was a man who applied for our trip in order to make his wife happy, who was very busy raising their child. After the trip, he gave us the feedback that our trip became a good pastime for her and she really enjoyed it. Although this is a small business, it’s very satisfying for me because I can do something for someone else. This job also requires imagination, creativity, and interpersonal skills. That part of it is also fun for me.

Now, I know what some of you are thinking: “What is the matter with these people? What normal adult would pay good money to send a stuffed animal on vacation?” If you don’t get the fun of this, maybe what you need are some of the heartwarming tales: One customer who was in a wheelchair wanted her toy to go down narrow alleys that she was unable to navigate. Or you’d have to have a heart of stone not to be touched by Connor the Chemo Duck from Tennessee, a stuffed therapy animal for children with cancer, especially when he went to Senso-ji temple to fan himself with the healing smoke.

And if you’re thinking this is one of those uniquely weird Japanese things, not so fast: right now, Azuma says that half of her customers are from overseas.

There was actually once a similar business in Prague – the owner was half-Japanese, and it eventually failed, and one in Berlin seems to be hanging on, although they seem to do tours far less often. But I think there’s global potential here. I’m thinking maybe I need to open a company like this of my own. Don’t you think Japanese stuffed animals would love to come see the cherry blossoms in Washington DC?

If you’d like to send your stuffed animal on a tour of Japan, be sure to visit Unagi Travel’s website to get more information.

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Links:

• http://unagi-travel.net/
• https://www.facebook.com/unagitravel
• https://twitter.com/unagitravel

References:

• http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/20…
• http://abcnews.go.com/Travel/japan…
• http://kotaku.com/a-japanese-trav…
• http://www.japantimes.co.jp/communi…

Cooking on American TV is basically always nonfiction. Japan has this type of show too, so in both countries we can watch how-tos that teach us to cook elaborate dishes from scratch, whether we set foot in the kitchen ourselves or not. And for better or worse, there’s been cross-fertilization: the US now owns the TV cooking competition, a genre we borrowed from Japan after the successful importing of Iron Chef (a show that I loved, but that I think now has a lot to answer for).

But in Japan there are also many series where cooking and food are a central element of fiction. In these series, chefs are main characters, average people are obsessed with a certain dish, and even the plot may turn on a particular detail of a special recipe or ingredient.

Sure, in the US we have shows where the characters gather to eat in a certain restaurant or bar. There was one old show, Alice, about a waitress in a diner, and historical shows like Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey may have a shot of the staff working on dinner while they’re talking about something else. Maybe you can think of one or two more. Contrast this handful of shows with the fact that on a fansub site like gooddrama.net, there are enough shows with food that you can actually search for it as a separate genre, and that isn’t all of them.

Numbers aren’t the most important difference, though, because comparing those few shows to Japanese food drama is like comparing apples and oranges, or sushi and a Maine lobster roll. Take two tales that involve a soup-maker. You may have seen the Japanese movie Tampopo, where (in between other odd unrelated food-centric vignettes) the plot follows a woman who owns a ramen shop and is working to come up with the perfect recipe. We see her slaving over variations of broth and getting the advice of experts who make comments on her noodles like “They have sincerity, but lack substance.” Compare this to the most famous soup-maker on American TV – the character on Seinfeld who’s famous for yelling at people, not for obsessing about the details of his cooking.

The focus on culinary detail in Tampopo is far from unique. Japanese dramas reflect an obsession with the quality of food that that isn’t seen on American TV – reflecting the fact that it’s also not, I’m sad to say, part of American culture.

Becoming A Chef

Let’s start by looking at a particular sub-genre of the food genre in Japanese television shows. Yes, the story of “becoming a chef” seems to come up so often that I’m giving it its own category.

Western food: Hungry!

Start with a drama where the title fits this theme perfectly: Hungry! (Hanguri!). As a child, the main character, Yamate Eisuke, wanted to follow in the footsteps of his mother, a French chef with her own restaurant. Instead, he forms a rock band with three friends, but as the series opens, he’s nearly 30 and they haven’t broken through to the big time. He goes to his mother and tells her that he wants to return to her restaurant and study to be a chef again. Unfortunately this touching reunion is marred by the fact that his mother has a heart attack and drops dead.

Further complications ensue when he declares he’s going to take over the restaurant: his father has already sold it to a rival restauranteur, who in the course of the series becomes obsessed with Eisuke, going back and forth between wanting to ruin him and trying to hire him. (A relevant side note is that this bad guy is played by Goro Inagaki, a member of SMAP, which is a band that has its own line of food products at Japanese 7-11s, something else we’d never see in the US.)

Along with that business rivalry, which turns very personal, there are romantic complications, fights with his friends – but even the interpersonal drama usually turns on the food. One character’s family runs a small market garden nearby where the restaurant buys vegetables. She falls in love with Eisuke’s cooking first and then, as a sort of side effect, with him. And the rival tries to make trouble by convincing that family to sell all their produce to his restaurant instead. I definitely can’t think of an American series where the bad guy’s plan of attack consists of buying up all the tomatoes.

And much of the emotional drama is about Eisuke’s struggle to learn to be a French chef worthy of his mother’s legacy- a process we watch in extreme detail. Don’t watch this show when you are Hungry! yourself, because a huge amount of screen time is spent on shots of prepping, cooking, plating and serving French food. They’re so serious, they present the name of the dish on-screen when it is served. In fact, they’re so serious that there is a recipe book based on the series, and the star took French cooking lessons as part of his preparation for the drama.

Japanese food: Ando Natsu

Ando Natsu is a young woman with the dream of becoming a French baker. She starts as an apprentice at a cafe run by an older woman baker who she worships… who promptly drops dead. Watching these two dramas in succession, you get the feeling that making French food in Japan is not good for the lifespan.

With no idea what to do next, she stumbles into a wagashi shop in Asakusa. Wagashi are those exquisite traditional Japanese confections that are basically small edible works of art, made in different seasonal shapes including flowers. She sees that these sweets give the same joy to the customers as French pastry does, and asks to become an apprentice.

The title of this series and the character’s name actually refers to sweets – Ando Natsu is a pun on An-donut (a doughnut filled with sweet bean paste) which is pronounced the same in Japanese, and other characters often tease her by referring to this pun.

This series also spends a lot of time in the kitchen, referencing how hard it is to make the beautifully detailed sweets, how long the apprenticeship lasts, and the menial tasks the beginner is saddled with. Natsu washes a lot of dishes and gets very excited every time she’s allowed to do some simple part of the actual confection-making process for the first time.

Particular processes and ingredients in making wagashi are often central to the plots. In one episode, Natsu has to stay awake all night to supervise the fermenting of the starter for a special order for an important memorial service. She’s called away for a time to prevent someone from committing suicide. (Yes, really. The writers of this series did not fear improbable melodrama.) She thinks it still looks OK when she gets back, but in the morning, the master tells her it’s ruined. Fortunately, they’re expecting a delivery of koji, the starter for fermentation, and might have just enough time to make a new batch – till they find out the delivery truck was in an accident, and all the containers overturned and spilled.

Natsu thinks she’s solved the problem when she runs all over town and manages to buy a package of koji that comes from the same prefecture. Unfortunately, that’s not close enough. She’s crushed when they tell her they can’t use it, that without the exact same koji, they can’t claim to be selling the same sweets they’ve always made. The master explains in mystical detail that the skill of the chefs is nothing without the wind in the town, the atmosphere of the store, and the tiny living things in the koji.

You understand, this is like saying it’s not worth baking bread if you can’t get the same brand of yeast you’ve always used. For all I know this is true about wagashi, or even bread if you’re a true connoisseur, but that fact sure wouldn’t sustain that amount of drama in an American TV series.

Another element we see in Ando Natsu that frequently recurs in this type of drama is someone’s longing for a favorite food from long ago. One episode is about a woman who comes to buy their persimmon-shaped sweet which is the favorite of her dying father. For complicated and dramatic reasons they no longer make this sweet, but Natsu finds the recipe and tries to replicate it. This effort to satisfy a dying customer gets her fired (temporarily) for trying to pass off her inferior beginner’s work as the product of this revered generations-old shop. (Don’t worry, there’s a happy ending and the man does get his wagashi in the end.)

Cooking at Inns

Not all shows about professional cooks are set in restaurants. Some are about traditional inns, where the quality of the cuisine is a huge part of their reputation.

O-sen

O-sen, about an inn in Tokyo’s old shitamachi neighborhood, is practically an education in traditional Japanese cooking. (Like some others of these shows, O-sen is based on a manga – there are also many manga where fictional plots, settings and characters are food-related.) As we watch the training of a character who’s talked his way into a job in the kitchen without really understanding what this kind of cooking is all about, we learn about different kinds of miso, why a fire made of straw is best for cooking rice, and other details of extremely traditional Japanese cuisine.

O-sen is another show where a vital plot point turns on a particular ingredient. The cooks use a traditional hand-made katsuobushi, the dried bonito fish which is the fundamental ingredient in the broth used in nearly every Japanese dish, but is now mostly made in a more mass-produced way. The inn not only uses the hand-made variety, in fact they’ve always used the katsuobushi of one particular producer who is now threatened with being closed. Without this particular dried bonito, O-sen says, the taste will change, the food will no longer be their food, and the inn will have to go out of business.

There isn’t space here for me to explain all the intrigue that swirls around this – but all I can say is, I wish I lived in a country where dried fish can be so important to a plot.

Kamo, Kyoto e Iku

Along with the longing for a favorite food from the past, another recurring theme is people’s exquisitely accurate memory for such foods. Kamo, Kyoto e Iku is set in a traditional inn in Kyoto. One episode is about a couple who has been coming to the inn for 40 years. The woman, who’s had a stroke, loves a tofu dish they serve, so her husband brings her to the inn so she can have it again. While she no longer recognizes her own husband, she remembers the taste of the dish well enough to be disappointed that it doesn’t taste exactly the same. The inn’s owner goes to the 200-year-old tofu store to ask what’s happened. The tofu maker blows up at the suggestion that the tofu has changed, but eventually admits that the woman is right, that he’s gotten too old to make it properly. The happy ending comes when he teaches a younger tofu-maker his method, and the woman gets to have exactly the dish she remembers one more time.

Not Just Professionals

You’ll also find these elements in shows that aren’t set in inns or restaurants and where the main characters aren’t culinary professionals. My favorite example so far comes from Tokyo Bandwagon, which is about a family that runs an antique bookstore. In one episode the family is trying to reunite the cook from their local izakaya with a former momento. Long ago he wronged this man and can’t believe he will ever forgive him. They invite the cook for a meal and present him with a dish of simmered turnip. One taste and he basically says “OMG, it’s him!” and insists that no one else but his former master could have made that dish. He’s proved right when the man steps into the room for a dramatic reconciliation. It’s ridiculously improbable, but if you’re a fan of Japanese food, how can you not love it? (What’s more, how can you not weep with envy when they sit down to one of the family meals pictured above.)

I’ve also just started watching the first episode of a show called Lunch Queen. The main character is a waitress in a coffee shop who keeps a detailed notebook about places to go to eat lunch. A customer tries to convince her to pretend to be his fiancé as part of a ruse to approach his estranged family. She’s having none of it – till he tells her that they own the restaurant that makes the best omu-rice in all of Japan. I can’t wait to see what hijinks – and recipes – follow.

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Japan’s special take on cute is unique enough that we even borrow the word “kawaii” in English to talk about it. But although there is some cultural variation in the details, cute is very much a universal concept, and you might be surprised at the fundamental role it plays in human psychology.

What is Cute, Exactly?

What makes something cute? Think about how characters and toys based on animals look compared to their real-life counterparts. Compare the bear above to this teddy bear:

Or take our friend the ubiquitous tanuki statue and his wild cousin:

…versus…

What are the differences? The snouts are shorter (in some teddy bears it’s gone, or close to it). The head and eyes are big and round. The legs are stubby and rounder and generally, everything is softer and more rounded than in real life.

But why are these the particular features that turn a dangerous animal that could bite your head off, like a bear, into something that makes us go “awwwwwww”? Scientists have actually thought about this subject, starting with the zoologist and ethologist Konrad Lorenz in the 1940s.

Lorenz proposed that the features that make up “cute” are all characteristic of human infants. We coo and squeal at the sight of heads that are large for their bodies, little button noses, and chubby, soft bodies. It also doesn’t hurt if the critter has a floppy, clumsy gait like a human toddler.

Basically, the more a a cartoon character or animal is like a human baby, the cuter it is. One interesting thing that shows this is the importance of round forward-facing eyes like humans have. An animal with eyes on the front of its face, like a panda, looks cuter to us than one with eyes on the sides of its head, like a horse. (If you don’t believe it, check out the next photo, which shows that if you want to turn a a horse into something absolutely horrifyingly cute, you move its eyes to the front of its face.)

Why The Short Face?

Lorenz theorized that there’s an evolutionary reason that these characteristics make you want to grab something and cuddle it. Human babies need a lot of care. If you’re a giraffe, your baby can stand up and run within moments of birth. If you’re a frog, you dump a whole bunch of eggs somewhere and get on with your life, figuring at least one of your hundreds of offspring will manage to survive on its own. But if you’re a human, your baby needs constant attention for months.

So the reason we go “awwww” in response to babies has an obvious evolutionary explanation: the people who reacted that way to round, soft creatures with big heads had babies that survived better. Those babies grew up to have more babies, and passed on the genes for wanting to cuddle things that look that way. On the other hand, the people who didn’t react that way to cute features would be more likely to leave their babies lying around in dangerous places, forget to feed them, etc. So resistance to cuteness would tend to eliminate itself from the gene pool.

This response is now so ingrained in our brains that we react the same way even when it has no evolutionary advantage to our species. We’re just as smitten by pandas as by human infants, despite the fact that they have no benefit to the survival of the human race whatsover. And we even create stuff that has those features, like Hello Kitty, sewage-treatment-plant mascots, and teddy bears. So if you’re one of those people who thinks all that cute stuff is stupid? Blame it on the babies.

This Is Your Brain On Cute

Psychologists have actually experimentally tested Lorenz’s theory that those specific features of “cute” result in a care-giving impulse. One study, for example, manipulated photos of real babies to make their heads more or less round, etc, and found that photos with more of those characteristics were rated as cuter, and made subjects feel more strongly that they wanted to care for them.

But research has also shown that cuteness has other effects – both positive and negative.

There’s one recent study out of Japan that’s probably going to be good news for everyone reading this. You’re on the Internet, so the odds are high that you spend some of your time at work looking at photos and videos of cats – or, if you’re not a cat fan, of whatever other cute animal floats your boat.

No doubt you try to hide this apparently time-wasting behavior, but instead, maybe you should send your boss a link to this article titled The Power of Kawaii: Viewing Cute Images Promotes a Careful Behavior and Narrows Attentional Focus. The research reported shows that looking at pictures of cute animals might actually help you to do your work better.

Two different kinds of tasks were used in the experiment. One was a game called Bilibili Dr. Game which is like the American game Operation. If you’ve never played, it’s a game where you have to remove very tiny body parts from very small openings on a “patient”, using very tiny tweezers.

The subjects played the game, and then they were shown photos: Either of dogs and cats, or of cute puppies and kittens. Then they played the game again, and the people who saw puppies and kittens got better scores the second time around. They also took longer to play the game, so the researchers concluded that seeing cute animals made them do their work more deliberately and carefully.

If your job doesn’t involve the same kind of fine motor control as the game of Operation, you may think this study won’t convince your boss to count looking at Cute Overload as work. Never fear! The experimenters also used another task, which involved looking for certain numbers in a large matrix.

Subjects also did better on this task after looking at photos of puppies and kittens, so the researchers concluded that cute animals made people more attentive. And there’s no job that doesn’t benefit from careful attention, right? So surf away for the those cute kitties.

Cute: The Dark Side

Other research has shown that the effect of cuteness isn’t always so benign. If you’ve ever told a baby that it was so cute you wanted to eat it up, you’ve experienced the effect studied in another recent study: cute animals actually make people feel more aggressive.

Subjects were shown a slideshow including cute baby animals, animals in silly situations, and “neutral” adult animals. One group was asked to rate how much the photos made them want to squeeze something or give an aggressive “want to eat it up” sort of response. The cute pictures made them feel that way more often. Then, another group actually put their money where their mouth was: they were popping bubble wrap while watching the slideshow. They popped an average of 120 bubbles when looking at the cute photos, compared to 100 for neutral ones and 80 for the silly ones.

Cute Clouds The Mind

Maybe being more aggressive at popping bubble wrap seems like no big risk, but there are lots of real-life situations where our uncontrollable response to cuteness affects our judgement about important matters.

For example, you probably wouldn’t hesitate to walk right up to a cute little Chihuahua and pet it, while you might cross the street to avoid a big dog. Turns out you’ve got it exactly backwards. There are fashions in what breeds are considered dangerous, but from German shepherds in the 1960s through Rottweilers and Dobermans to pit bulls nowadays, the breeds considered dangerous are always large ones. But the truth is, as this study showed, the dogs that are most aggressive towards humans are cute little guys: Dachshunds, Chihuahuas and Jack Russell Terriers.

Even professionals who work with animals are not immune to the bad influence of cuteness. A paper in the journal Conservation Biology showed that cute animals are much more likely to be studied by scientists and to get funding for their conservation. Apparently even scientists aren’t attracted to animals because they’re important to their ecosystems or more endangered: it’s more important that they be fuzzy, with 500 times more published studies on large furry mammals than on slimy little amphibians.

Cute animals also cloud our judgment about our fellow humans. An experiment in France found that women were three times more likely to give a guy their phone number if he was walking a cute dog, and another showed that a panhandler more than doubled his income when he had a dog.

So if you always considered “cute” to practically equal “harmless,” maybe you better think again. I have to wonder, how many other ways is cute messing with our minds that science hasn’t found out about yet? How is this affecting the psychology Japan, the “Kingdom of Cute”? Will they all just one day snap and eat each other up?

You know, that Hello Kitty…. I always thought there was something a little sinister about her. Now I know why.

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Additional Reference:

• New York Times: The Cute Factor

Impostor Condiment

Freshly grated (right) and paste(left) wasabi by rdpeyton

A friend of mine who recently moved back to the States from Japan after ten years reported this on Twitter as her first experience of culture shock:

Shocked to find that there is no real wasabi in the US. only “wasabi” are tubes of horseradish mixed w/blue#1 & yellow#4.

It’s not quite true that there is no real wasabi in the US – you can sometimes get it in high-end sushi restaurants, and although I’ve never seen it in a grocery here, there is such a thing as American-grown real wasabi paste in tubes. But unless you’ve made a special effort and are paying extra, you can be pretty sure that real wasabi is not what you’re eating.

Of course wasabi is not the only Japanese ingredient that you can’t easily get outside of Japan. I have to grow my own shishito peppers and make a special trip across town to pay like $3.50 – seriously, that is insane – for just two of those long negi onions. But the rarity of real wasabi is totally different. Mostly, people in the US are not eating the meals that those shishito peppers would be missing from. But we’re all eating sushi.

So why did most the popular Japanese food abroad make its way around the world without this fundamental ingredient? The problem is that Japan chose a rather specialized plant to make such an important part of this dish. Wasabi requires unusual growing conditions that aren’t easy to reproduce, and are quite unlike the typical garden or farm.

The Natural and Unnatural History of Wasabi

The wasabi plant is part of the mustard family and is related to horseradish and daikon radish, other foods that have that same spicy kick. And like those two, the part you’re eating is the root, which in the case of wasabi is usually grated to a fine paste.

Wasabi is an aquatic plant, adapted to grow in cold, flowing mountain streams, and needs heavy shade – not at all the conditions of your average vegetable garden or farm field. So the best-quality cultivated wasabi grows in specially built beds with stream water flowing through them, shaded by a cloth covering or in some places, carefully spaced trees. And once you’ve got all that right, unlike your usual vegetable or herb, it takes two to four years for the root to grow to harvestable size.

Because of the difficulty of producing wasabi in this way that’s close to its natural habit of growing, the industry eventually come up with a way of producing it in more normal farm fields in wet soil. It’s cheaper this way, but everyone appears to think it’s lower quality (unless they’re a company that also produces the field-grown type and wants people to buy it.)

Of course, given that most of us can only buy the fake stuff in tubes, we can only envy people who have the luxury of arguing the relative merits of water- and field-grown wasabi. I’m in no position to be fussy, so if anyone wants to send me some fresh wasabi grown in soil, please go right ahead. I promise I will be absolutely thrilled.

History of Wasabi Growing

According to archaeologists, wild wasabi was eaten as along ago as the Jomon period (14,000 to 400 BC) for its medicinal properties (more on that later). Written records mentioning wasabi go back to the tenth century, noting its use in particular dishes starting in Buddhist temples.

But in those days wasabi was gathered from the wild. Where the history really gets interesting to me is when wasabi started to be deliberately grown. As an American, I live in a country where if something started a hundred years ago we think it’s old. So I am always amazed by those Japanese businesses which are run by like the tenth generation in the same family.

If you feel the same way, prepare to have your mind blown: the oldest wasabi farm in Japan is currently run by the 17th generation owner, in the town where wasabi is believed to have first been cultivated 400 years ago.

Monzen wasabi farm is in the village of Utogi in Shizuoka. It’s said that during the Keichou era (1596 – 1615), people in this village took some plants from a nearby mountain that had so much wild wasabi growing on it that it was called Mt Wasabi, and tried planting them near a spring called Idogashira. It worked, and the rest is history. The village has a monument to the origin of wasabi growing, which you can see a photo of here, which is the actual webpage of the 400-year-old Monzen wasabi farm.

(For those of you who feel the history of anything Japanese is incomplete without a shogun in it, there’s an anecdote for you too: Ieyasu Tokugawa, first Tokugawa Shogun, is said to have been so obsessed with wasabi that he forbade its sale outside his family. Not because he thought it was delicious, but because the leaves resembled the hollyhock leaves in the family crest. Those wacky shoguns!)

Wasabi in Traditional and Not-so-traditional Japanese cuisine

Fine sushi is an experience involving the freshest possible fish and appreciating the most subtle flavors. (That’s setting aside all those crazy rolls with wacky combinations of fried things and sauces and Western ingredients, about which the less said, the better.) So you might be surprised to learn the history of sushi: it actually developed from methods of preserving fish for later consumption. These methods involved fermention and sometimes actual decomposition. You can read a bit about it here (as long as you’re not actually eating while you read this, or else have a really strong stomach for, say, a description of fish surrounded by salted rice which after three months has “broken down into a kind of paste.” Yum!)

So the reason sushi rice is mixed with vinegar wasn’t originally for flavor, but because vinegar is a preservative. And wasabi kills bacteria, so before refrigeration it was probably a good thing to throw in for reasons aside from that entertaining tasty burn.

The root isn’t the only part of the wasabi plant that is eaten. In the spring it’s traditional to eat what are called sansai or mountain vegetables. These include young bamboo shoots, fiddlehead ferns, and the young leaves of the wasabi plant. I’ve read that they mildly taste of wasabi, although unfortunately I have never had the pleasure personally.

Something as awesome as wasabi can’t be constrained by tradition, though, so now you can find all kinds of imaginative innovations, even in desserts. In Japan I’ve seen wasabi ice cream (no, I didn’t try it) and eaten wasabi Kit Kat (white chocolate with a mild afterburn, and much better than it sounds). American companies have gotten into the game also: anyone want a wasabi candy cane or some wasabi gumballs? Um, yeah, no, me neither.

Wasabi Science

Wasabi is traditionally believed to have medicinal benefits, and modern science has confirmed some of these beliefs and discovered new possibilities as well. Aside from its antimicrobial powers, there’s research suggesting that it has anti-inflammatory properties and may have effects on various types of cancer . This research doesn’t seem to be at a state where you should be running out and consuming mass quantities of wasabi to cure anything, but if the potential health benefits would give you a little push to pay extra to try the fresh wasabi next time you’re at your local fancy sushi place, go for it.

Japanese wasabi science isn’t confined to medical uses, though. A team of researchers came up with a wasabi alarm that could be used to awaken deaf people in case of a fire or other emergency. They showed that canned wasabi extract sprayed into the air would wake up test subjects in less than two minutes.

In 2011, this research won the IgNobel Prize in Chemistry., which is awarded to “achievements that first make people laugh, and then makes them think.” The scientific team’s fellow awardees included researchers who proved that yawning wasn’t contagious in tortoises and and others that investigated how a person’s decision-making was affected when they had to pee really bad.

Wasabi around the world

Although the rest of the world is still more familiar with that artificially-colored paste in the tube, we can be encouraged by the fact that growers in other countries have stepped up to meet the challenge of growing wasabi away from its home turf.

In the US, one company started growing it in Oregon in the mid-1990s. The Pacific Northwest, with its cool climate, seems to be the main place to go if you want to start a North American wasabi farm – there’s also another company with growers in British Columbia, Michigan, Washington and Oregon. There’s even a company that will sell you plants, if you want to try it yourself.

Wasabi is also being grown in New Zealand, and the first wasabi farm in Europe started doing business a couple of years ago in England.

Of all of these places, first prize for overseas wasabi lovers has to go to British Columbia, where the Vancouver Canadians minor league baseball team has the three mascots pictures above: Ms BC Roll, Mr Kappa Maki, and most important: Chef Wasabi.

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Sources:

• http://www.tokyofoundation.org/en/topics/japanese-traditional-foods/vol.-18-wasabi
• http://www.sbfoods-worldwide.com/foodCulture/wasabi/secret.html
• http://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2001/05/13/general/just-what-the-herbologist-ordered/#.Up9s6VHFksw
• http://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2011/04/22/food/the-unmistakable-taste-of-a-new-season/#.Up9tJVHFksw

But quite on the contrary, what bothers me is this: We’re falling behind Japan. I’ve seen way too many things for dogs in Japan that we don’t have that I want. Yeah, there’s some wacky stuff I could live without, but mostly, I feel like we have some catching up to do.

Dogs Everywhere

If you’ve ever met a friend in Shibuya by the famous statue of Hachiko – a dog who died in the 1930s – you know the Japanese love of dogs is nothing new. But in the last couple of decades, pet ownership has increased to new heights. It’s estimated that in 2012, one out of four Japanese households had a cat or a dog, and one estimate of the number of pet dogs is 11,530,000.

In fact, it’s often noted that there are more pets than children. Figures are tossed around like, the number of dogs and cats combined has outnumbered children since 2003, or that in 2006, there were more pet dogs than children under 12.

I guess some people like children more than I do, because when I read articles like that, my reaction is, “You say this like it’s a problem?” And it’s true that with increased popularity come some new issues. But like in any good capitalist society, those increased numbers also mean new business opportunities, which result in awesome stuff for dog owners to take advantage of.

Going Places

The Japanese innovation that I’m most jealous of is the dog cafe. Dog cafes aren’t to be confused with cat cafes, where you go to pet cats that live at the cafe. A dog cafe is a place for you to go together with your own dog. There are fancy dishes you can order for your pet, and there’s human food, some dog-themed, like this pancake from the cafe pictured above in Odaiba:

It’s a good thing my two pugs can’t read this article, or they’d be demanding we immediately move to Tokyo. They’re not interested in playing ball or going for walks in the woods. Their taste in entertainment is the same as mine: they like to go out to eat. But since health rules ban dogs from restaurants in the US, our opportunities to do this are incredibly restricted. We have to find a restaurant with a patio or sidewalk table, they have to let us sit at it (many places don’t want dogs even outside, and it’s often strictly speaking illegal there also), and, of course, the weather has to be suitable, which it hardly ever is. To me and my dogs, these cafes would be heaven on earth.

If they were normal dogs that like to play outside, Tokyo would also be a great place to live, because I also came across the best off-leash dog park I’ve ever seen. Yoyogi Park is more famous for, say, synchronized rockabilly dancers and other wacky human activities, but it also has an amazing, huge dog park. As you can see from the sign above, it’s divided into sections for different size dogs, which is important for safety, but something there’s rarely room for in the dog parks in my neck of the woods.

But you’re not restricted to fun near home. Maybe the most amazing dog-related business that we don’t have is a chain of hotels called Wan Wan Paradise that are especially for people to stay with their dogs. There are services like groomers, trainers and photographers, activities like group hikes, and facilities for swimming and dog sports. Here’s a bulletin board of photos of happy guests at their hotel in Toba:

If you’re a very well informed American dog owner, you may say “But wait! We can do this. There are dog camps.” Yes, there are dog camps where you can stay for a week with your pup and do all kinds of canine activities. But Wan Wan Paradise is no campground. For the humans, there are all the facilities of a hot spring resort, including the fancy food (check out the photo galleries here and here)

It’s hard enough to find a hotel in the US that will simply tolerate letting you bring your dog along. A resort that actually catered to them would be paradise indeed.

Canine Cuisine

Dog cafes – like the one at Tokyo SkyTree that has the menu pictured above – are far from the only place where you can get fancy dog food in Japan. If you’re driving to one of those special dog hotels, apparently you can even get special dog bento at some highway rest stops

What’s a dog bento, you may ask? They’re probably a lot like this one, from a pet shop in the same mall in Odaiba that I mentioned above:

The shop also had amazing and creative treats that imitate both Japanese and Western style human food:

And if those aren’t fancy enough for you, you can order a special New Year’s dog bento:

OK, now that is over the top. But I admit it: if I lived there, I’d be first in line to pick mine up.

Fashion

Photo by Aaron Olaf

I’m totally on board with dog restaurants and hotels, but here’s where things start to seem crazy to me: Japanese dog fashion.

Yes, there’s a lot more dog clothing in the US than there used to be. But the majority of it is practical, to keep your dog dry or warm. And the clothes that are purely decorative are usually no fancier than t-shirts. There is more elaborate stuff, but it’s fairly rare.

In Japan, it’s a lot more common to dress your dog, and there’s a lot more fancy fashion. There are also particular categories of garments that are nearly unheard of here. Yes, we have dresses, although they have a lot more of them. And I can almost understand, for a special occasion, a dog manicure, if you have the sort of dog (unlike mine) that will let you touch its precious paws.

What they have that I can’t get my head around are the pajamas, and the pants:

Photo by Stéfan

Why would a dog need to sleep any way but naked? And why would one need to wear pants? But to be honest, I don’t understand most of Japanese human fashion either, so maybe I’m missing something.

Not All Roses

image by Lachlan Hardy

Not everything is perfect for the dog owner in Japan. Before I drop everything and move myself and my pugs to Tokyo, I’d need to deal with the fact that it’s still quite hard to find a rental that allows pets.

I also saw a video of a Japanese trainer suggesting that the polite dog owner should carry an absorbent pad for her pup to pee on – even OUTDOORS. Picking up poop has become standard in most of the developed world, but picking up pee is just plain nuts.

The rapid rise of the pet dog in Japan also has some dark sides. Like the US, Japan has a problem with puppy mills, businesses that churn out dogs with little concern for the welfare of either the parents or the puppies. And there’s not much of a culture of adopting from shelters, so most abandoned pets are euthanized.

But I feel pretty confident that a dog in a loving home in Japan has it as good as anywhere in the world. When I was at that cafe in Odaiba, there was a couple with a pug, and of course I had to show them all the pictures of my own pugs on my phone. The woman asked how old they were, and when I told her that the older one was 14, she reacted exactly the way I would have: She wanted to know how I did it. How did I care for my dog that she lived to be that old? My Japanese is minimal and her English was only a little better, but we managed to have the same conversation I’d have had back at home about the ingredients in dog food. It convinced me that Japanese dog lovers are the same deep down, even if some of them they do dress their pups in pants.

All images not credited are by Linda Lombardi

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