Yongfook is a web producer and usability consultant based in Tokyo

Today I review a particularly niche genre of snack foods in Japan, if you can call it a food. Targeted primarily at young children, these are candies who’s main raison d’etre is to act as some kind of flimsy pretext to getting a toy. That is, candy that comes with a toy in the box.

Now, this happens in other countries too, with those little trinkets you get in cereal boxes - which incidentally, never simply plopped out into your bowl one day during breakfast like on TV, the average 10 year old would simply rip the bag open as soon as it is within the confines of the house, root through the bag totally crushing the contents in the process, grab the toy and throw the bag in a cupboard to be forgotten forever - but Japan takes the “free toy inside!” concept to a whole new level of awesomeness with the “shokugan” genre of products, a word comprised of two Chinese characters meaning “food” and “toy”.

Because you see, the extent to which the toy / candy ratio in the average box of shokugan is warped beyond the level at which a child would uncontrollably spew glitter from their nipples in glee upon opening the box can be SPECTACULAR. Often you’ll find a huge, exciting looking box and inside some kind of cleverly mechanical self-assemble toy (that’s also BIG) complete with decals and accessories - with a measly, tablet-like single nugget of white candy wrapped in plastic found at the bottom of the box as the only clue as to why this product is still allowed to be defined as “confectionary” and is sold along with the potato chips and m&ms in the supermarket.

I suppose my main gripe - apart from the fact that the candy really IS a throwaway afterthought and does taste like crap - is that children in this world really do not need more opportunities to get toys.

I hate to start sentences like this as it is melodramatic and pretentious, but when I was a child we didn’t have HALF the cool shit you have. Well, I say “you” as if the majority of yongfook.com readers are children, which they clearly are not unless you spend most of your time at home saying things like “mum, what’s a ‘cuntfricked jizz-leper’? I read it on a website” and having horrified parents immediately smash up the computer before your eyes with a baseball bat and call the local priest to come and douse you with holy water. No, I like to think that most of the readership here are also in their twenties (I also like to think that most of the readership here are sex robots) and can perhaps appreciate my sentiment.

Nowadays children have computers, mobile phones, xboxes, PSPs etc ad infinitum and thanks to the glory of capitalism, these things are all sold at low prices and are well within the purchasing power threshold of the average middle class family, at least if the kids Keep Fricking Whining about them enough.

Additionally, I resent the fact that a child may be bestowed with both a toy AND candy in one fell swoop should a parent in a supermarket say “ok just ONE thing”. The entrepreneurial child will pick one of these every time and the hapless parent - bound by verbal contract and the frustrating vagueness of the product’s actual definition - will be utterly confounded. When I was a child however, I would be lucky if my parents ever GAVE me a choice when out supermarket shopping:

Mum: Chips for dinner. Me: Well how about these AlphaBites - it’s the same thing but they are educational too, look, A, B, C- Mum: OK NOW YOU’RE FRICKED YOU AREN’T GETTING ANYTHING.

Mum: Bread? Me: Is that a question? What is the alternative? What is the foodstuff that is supposed to be the contextually derivable opposite of bread, which I would have to eat as a result of responding with “no”? Mum: We’ve passed the bread aisle now. Oil?

Dad: Ooh look, raisin bread. Me: Yeah but it gets stuck in the toaster, doesn’t it, it’s that awkward size. Dad: None of this shit is for you anyway, gay.

In fact, when I was child, things were a lot different than the future, the future being now, where all kids fly around on hoverboards and have virtual reality sex on electronic crack. If I wanted to send a friend a message I didn’t have email, MSN or SMS. My options were twofold. Either pick up the phone and call them, which involved interacting with whoever picked up the phone on the other end which would most probably be his mum or his older sister, forcing a 10 year old to think on his feet which can have unpredictable results such as simply slamming the phone down in terror or just screaming “Billy! Billy!! Billy!!” (even if I was calling, say, “James”) over and over again through desperate sobbing until the other person works out what is going on and passes the phone over. Or, I could write a letter and post it round his house the next day after school, which took some of the impact and urgency out of messages like “hey check out Michaela Strachan on Children’s BBC right now, does your willy feel funny?”.

Onto video games. Now, I’ve been brought up on video games (literally - my parents would leave me in the care of a Nintendo R.O.B. robot whilst they went on flamboyant drunken holidays abroad, who would neatly stack up crackers in a mathematically symmetrical pile to keep me alive and entertained) but looking at the standard of video games that kids routinely enjoy nowadays, they really do make my generation’s look SHIT. I mean, take Doom 3. That game has you walking around a dynamically-lit 3D world blasting hundred-upon-hundred of HELLSPAWN in full polygonal glory as you balance your ammo and keep an ear out for signs of creatures that are hidden in the darkness because they probably have AI that is cleverer than your pathetic human brain. The kind of game that will make you shit yourself into NEXT WEEK if you aren’t playing it with all the lights on and friends over to keep reminding you that the real world still exists. Compare it to say, Super Mario Bros, which was a chart topper back when I was a child and the number of ways in which the games of yesteryear were crap are now frighteningly obvious:

1) a NES controller had two buttons. That means in most games you could either run, jump, or stand there until the timer ran out and you died by default. You can imagine the thrilling choices that developers faced such as “shall we make the character be able to run and jump, or shoot and run? If the latter he’s going to be fricked on Level 3: Tiny Flying Platform City”.

2) Although speech in games nowadays is commonplace, back in the day due to storage limitations if a game had speech in it, it automatically made it AWESOME. Well apart from Altered Beast (powerrrrup!). I remember being engrossed in NFL Sportstalk Football ™ which was an American Football game, even though I am British and neither like nor comprehend the rules of that sport in any way whatsoever. However it filled me with delight to play that game as it was chock-full of sampled speech which made my Sega Megadrive say things like “he pa-ya-sses” and “oh go-od blo-cking” with all the dramatic flair of Stephen Hawkin’s even more crippled estranged brother affectionately named “Blobby McGee The Perfectly Spherical Man” by friends, until the computer tackled me and we spent another 15 minutes in a fricking huddle talking about “tactics” and “strategy” before the next 20 second burst of actual “moving around” time. Anyway despite this, back in the day things were positively medieval compared to now regarding audio. Blippy blop melodies that repeated forever and scratchy sampled effects that sounded like someone hissing profanities in Esperanto. Whilst drowning. A delight for your ears it most certainly wasn’t.

Moving on to toys, I look back at my He-Man and GI Joe collection, clearly reminiscing about how awesome they were but also now in retrospect the whole pseudo homo-eroticism of it all (young boys playing with dolls - dolls who are quite clearly EUNUCHS) has become way more apparent as an adult who a) is able to think about stuff without the aid of cool TV commercials, and b) thinks about sex all the time anyway, so EVERYTHING can be construed to have some kind of erotic slant. Even this pencil on my desk right now. This slutty, slutty pencil.

So in today’s review I will not only be reviewing the generic tablet of candy found in each box, since that would take all of 3 lines, but I will also be giving my opinion on the toys found within.

First lets get this out of the way, the manufacturers don’t even TRY to hide the fact that the candy in the various brands and varieties of shokugan is in fact exactly the same item. The candy in a box of shokugan is always some kind of white tablet that is invariably “ramune” flavoured, ramune being a cleverly invented marketing word for “cream soda gone all fricked”. Ramune is actually a traditional Japanese pop-culture drink that enjoyed massive popularity back in post-war Japan. It’s gimmick - which you can probably attribute most of its popularity to, since mankind hearts pointless innovation - was the fact that each bottle was sealed by an innovative means; a marble was wedged into the opening of the bottle. There was no screw off cap and no hole to pierce with a straw - to drink the beverage you had to push the marble IN to the bottle, the marble being of the exact diameter to ensure that it never falls back out of the bottle and into your esophagus whilst drinking, causing death.

Each candy is basically ramune powder made into a tablet, ie. pure sugar, and eating one is distinctly unworthy of describing.

So on to the toys!

Ultraman Super Retarded Plastic Model Shokugan

The first and worst - no moving parts! What a con. Not only that, but I somehow managed to pick up a box which DIDN’T contain one of Ultraman’s many iterations and instead bought one of the “enemies”, much to my dismay. The problem is, Ultraman’s enemies - whilst fearsome and dastardly to Ultraman - are laughably stupid-looking to real people, all of them appearing to have been designed by putting an infinite amount of children in a room full of an infinite amount of green colouring pens, waiting for a few weeks until all the shuffling stops, opening the door and hoping there are some good drawings scrawled on the floor. Just by looking at the box we can see the kind of luxurious variety in characters that fans of the Ultraman series enjoy - Green Pink-Lipped Frog Man and Green Red-Lipped Frog Man being 2 of my favourites. My toy, however, is some kind of Mos Eisley bar alien reject, wearing a fetching snow-leopard-esque outfit and striking a pose which in a decidedly non-menacing way seems to say “don’t fricking shoot”. 2/5

Crayon Shin Chan Epileptic Baby Tragedy Shokugan

I see what they tried to do here, but no. A bottle is attached to the baby’s THROAT via a cord. By pulling this cord out, a mechanism is activated and the baby vibrates it’s way to the bottle, causing joy and happiness to the player. This mechanism works well for the other characters such as a dog, cat or a pig, but it doesn’t work so well for a baby - it’s wide-eyed mad stare coupled with the frantic vibrations giving it the distinct appearance of a baby having some kind of seizure. 3/5 (for the vibration)

Really Crap Train Shokugan

You would be wrong in thinking that this toy is a train that then transforms into an awesome robot that shoots acid lasers from it’s brain. No, this toy is just a train and it doesn’t do anything apart from “not be a robot”. 1/5

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 10th, 2005 at 6:19 pm and is filed under Food Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.