Snacks Come to Life in Japan: Part 1
All kinds of things come to life in cartoons and we don’t think twice. Walking, talking animals – that’s so normal it’s boring. Sponges that wear pants, whatever.
Food is usually food, though, even in cartoons. In this country, that is. But not in Japan.
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: An Pan.
It’s a traditional Japanese snack, starring in a traditional genre of popular culture. Maybe that makes perfect sense. Hmm. I’ll think about it and get back to you.
His friends are other types of bread – plain sliced white bread, buns filled with melon or curry – as well as humans, who, I guess, see nothing odd about the situation.
I’ve seen food packages with Anpanman on the label – not buns, mind you, but things like mix for okonomiyaki (a kind of dinner pancake), the same way we’ve got cartoon characters trying to get us to buy cereal and so on in the US. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but isn’t it odd for Anpanman to be helping sell other kinds of food entirely? Or maybe he thinks that it helps keep his bun relatives out of our hungry mouths?
Anpanman has apparently got at least two museums devoted to him in Japan, one in Yokohama and one in the creator’s home town. And, of course - what could be more important - his own Wikipedia page in English.
I don’t know if Anpanman, who dates back to the 1970s, is the first, but he’s hardly the only Japanese character who’s a snack food item. You have to wonder if Japanese children have nightmares about their lunchboxes coming to life. Even more so, in fact, when you meet the next character in the bean paste genre.
Kogepan is Anpanman’s modern descendant – or perhaps the dark side of cheerful, pink-cheeked Anpanman, the anti-Anpanman, 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. I think there’s something peculiarly Japanese about that, but I’ll leave that to the sociologists.
Like An Pan Man, 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.
I have always wondered whether Kogepan is some kind of homage to An Pan Man, but he could just come out of the apparently overwhelming tendency of Japanese snacks to become characters. Because it goes way beyond bean paste buns. In our next installment we’ll look at some of Kogepan’s fellow characters from the San-X company, including the rice balls, the chestnuts, and in particular, the kitties that are turned into every kind of food you can imagine.
Until then… sweet dreams, and if you find yourself in a Japanese market, take a close look at that bean paste bun before you take a bite….
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