Potatoes, Chocolate and Lies!!!!

After that epic (seriously that last post was more than 8 pages long in word, my essays at University were shorter than that) we’re back to what Mummyboon does best.

And that’s reviewing kit-kats.

I can feel the excitement being transmitted down the net tubes.

First up is an autumnal offering that is no longer available but that I’ve been saving for when I finally finished that Kyushu write up.

Sweet Potato Kit-Kat



Sweet potatoes are huge in Japan. They come in tons of different varieties such as ; purple inside, purple outside but yellow inside, long and thing, flat and wide, round like a potato and lots more.

What’s more, being potatoes, they are really versatile and are used in a wide selection of dishes. They can be a savoury accompaniment to a meal, they can be salted and eaten as chips, they can be made into ice-cream (which is my favourite ice-cream in the whole world) they can be covered in syrup and eaten as pudding and they can be added to Japanese curry.

They are most commonly eaten though just baked and maybe with a little bit of butter. Whilst this might sound a bit boring it is anything but. Baked sweet potatoes are so good they could talk a suicidal man from the ledge. They are evidence of a benevolent and wonderful universe. More realistically they are lovely and fluffy, buttery and with a wonderfully complex sweetness. Not the sweetness of sugar that is simple and gone straight away but that of caramel which you can roll around the tongue. A rich sweetness. A sweetness for grown ups.

There are in fact little wagons that traditionally roam the streets of Japanese cities in autumn baking sweet potatoes and making little puffs of sweet smelling steam as they trundle along. Yaki-imo (baked sweet potato) the vendors cry as their little carts trundle along causing flocks of sweets crazed Japanese ladies to flock behind.

And one of these wagons is depicted on the packaging along with some puffs of inviting steam. In fact that steam has been co-opted into the design of the packet. I love that! In the same way that the real steam seems to say “look yummy sweet potatoes,” so too does the packet say “yaki-imo.” That’s brilliant theme-ing in the design there. And they added a picture of a yaki-imo looking fluffy and moist and oh so delicious. Plus it’s a sort of golden yellow, which is officially the best colour a biscuit can be (see custard creams and gold bars for reference).

The design of the individual kit-kat is nothing special, although I note that they’re including the calorie content on the smaller packets now. Apparently the sweet potato ones are 2 kcal’s more per serving than a standard chocolate one.



Considering what they taste like though that is totally worth it.

The taste, oh how can I describe the taste?! Well it tastes like sweet potato to start with but it is so much more than that. It tastes of dreams. It tastes of ambrosia. It tastes of honey and caramel and nectar and Elysium. It tastes of victory. It tastes of loves first bloom. This, my friends, may very well be the perfect kit-kat. This is the platonic biscuit from which all others are mere imperfect reflections. This is a biscuit fit for a deity.

Actually it tastes a bit like caramac only nicer. Does anyone remember caramac? I think you can still get them at newsagents.

Sadly nestle have stopped making them which may be the worst biscuit related news I have ever heard. In fact it is the worst biscuit related news I have ever heard and it’s worse than quite a few bits of non-biscuit related news I have heard. I would go so far as to say that it is much sadder than hearing that someone else’s hamster has died but maybe not as sad as your own dying.


Wow that got morbid. Ahem, excuse me whilst I mourn the loss of the perfect biscuit.

Better now, next one.

Extra Cocoa



Like a normal kit-kat but with nicer chocolate. Considering that kit-kats have crap chocolate these can only be an improvement.

And a whole 4 kcals more per serving, ooh la la, extravagant. Ambassador, with these nice kit-kats you are really spoiling us.

The box is pretty dull, although it does have a sort of festive snow thing going on. What’s more interesting for me is that it is in a box at all. Kit-Kat have fairly standard packaging formats on the whole. There are the 4 bars in a box, small multipacks, chunky, premiums, minis and one or two odd outliers but a square box with 5 double wafers is a new one.

And yes, I just realised that I said I was “interested” in a new box. I think that makes me the world’s only kit-kat nerd.



The packaging on the bar itself is much better. For starters it’s brown, which is the colour of chocolate. It’s as if it is saying “come, see how chocolately I am. I am the chocolateiest kit-kat, I scoff at the red ones, and I fart in its general direction.”

Snooty kit-kat then. And it maintains the winter wonderland theme but it works much better because we aren’t distracted from the snow pattern by a massive picture of some chocolate.

How does it taste?

It tastes like a kit-kat with nicer chocolate.

I don’t really know what to say. We all know how chocolate tastes, well like that. I mean, it isn’t amazing chocolate but it is good for a biscuit and amazing for a kit-kat.

It isn’t as sweet as a normal one and the after taste is actually pleasant rather than that horrible soapy taste you’d get with a regular one. I rate them highly but ultimately it’s nothing more exciting than a chocolate biscuit.

Royal Milk Tea



I despise Royal Milk Tea.

Tea, as every properly civilised person knows, should be black leaves, made in a pot with some, but not too much milk. I will leave the sugar debate open except to say that I drink my tea with sugar. My excuse is that I was abandoned on a building site as an infant and raised by a pack of wild builders who taught me everything I know about drinking tea, turning up late and wolf whistling at ladies.

Alright, that isn’t true, but what is true is that I was raised in Yorkshire, where the general rule of thumb is that tea should be stewed so long and have so much sugar in it that a spoon will stand upright if left in it.

In contrast the barbarians in Japan seem to think that tea should use green leaves, should be mildly infused and should have no milk. What’s worse is that they assert that this is the correct way to do it. They even have some kind of bizarre ceremony to demonstrate the “correct” way to drink it. Whilst there is neither excuse nor explanation for this abhorrent behaviour I have had to learn to live with it and I take solace that proper can still often be purchased.

Proper tea is known as kocha and sometimes as milk tea. Being English I will often ask for a cup of kocha or milk tea if seated in a Japanese café. Usually this will result in me getting a nice pot of tea. Sometimes it will result in me getting Royal Milk Tea.

Royal Milk Tea is not tea. It is some kind of disgusting powder consisting of powdered milk and something brown. When hot water is added it creates a deceptive and evil drink which looks like tea, smells sort of like tea and appears for the entire world to be tea until you drink it and realise that it is in fact the juice from Satan’s nipples.

It is, to be blunt, horrible. It is worse than vending machine tea.

And the worst thing about it, the way it pretends to be English. From the use of the word “royal” down to the packaging it tries to sidle up to England and borrow some of the country’s association with tea in order to pass itself off as something authentically British.

It makes me sick.

So I am not predisposed to be a fan of Royal Milk Tea Kit-Kat.

To start with the packaging is literally enraging. Not only are we calling it Royal Milk Tea but the package is bloody tartan! Tartan!! You don’t get more cosily British than tartan and Royal Milk Tea is the very antithesis of British values. Shortbread comes in tartan packets and Kit-Kats are no shortbread!

And then to make it worse the edge has little caricatures of the palace guard. The palace guard! Complete with bearskins! Does the Queen know about this? Can she sue? This is blatant false advertising, there is nothing royal about Royal Milk Tea but it not only has it in its name but has started adding palace guards!

Frankly this package makes me sick. I am revolted.

I will give it this though, the inside of the bag smells more like a cup of tea than any cop of Royal Milk Tea has ever done.



How does it taste?

It tastes of betrayal and lies.

No, actually it doesn’t really taste of anything. The first few bites are astonishingly bland. They’re a bit creamy and sweet, but pleasingly not too sweet but they taste nothing like a cup of tea or Royal Milk Tea.

In the after taste some tannins start come through (those are the sour notes in tea) that are surprisingly bitter for a kit-kat. But frankly I don’t know if I’m tasting them or smelling my mouth. The smell of these things is really strong but the flavour is aggressively bland. It’s almost as if the flavour was hiding from me in case it made me angry.

I cannot stress how tasteless this biscuit is and that puzzled me for a while until a thought struck me. I often ponder what the purpose of these tea flavoured kit-kats is when surely a kit-kat is designed to be dunked into tea. Perhaps what we have here is a biscuit that is designed to be dunked and absorb the flavour of the tea it is dunked into.

So I made a cup of tea and tried it out.

The difference is astonishing. It went straight from bland to one of the strongest tasting kit-kats I have ever eaten. The tea flavours and tannins come hard and fast and almost knock you out. And it’s nice too. Not too sweet with a lovely rich tea taste. Unfortunately it does have the weird soapy aftertaste that a lot of kit-kat’s have.

So I summary without tea it is boring and crap. With tea it makes a great companion but has a nasty aftertaste. Either way it didn’t make in vomit in rage and revulsion so it is a massive step up from the product it is named after.

Mummyboon 4: Mummyboon in Space

Yes, I’ve been gone for far too long but now I’m back.

Frankly I can’t promise how long back will be but I’m going to do my very best to at least maintain a weekly schedule along with any short updates I can fit in.

What has brought me back you ask? Well the people have spoken and they have demanded that I review kit-kats!

“suppai orange”



Suppai means sour, and although I love sour sweets the prospect of a sour orange chocolate strikes me as a little odd. Then again if what I’m eating is only a little odd then I’m doing very well for a Japanese kit-kat.

The packaging on this one falls squarely into the good category. At least the bag itself does. The shiny foil used along with the bursts of light and the streaks all add up to a very summery, fruity kind of feel. Very appropriate for what they’re selling. I suspect the tone was supposed to be akin to a starburst or some other kind of very fruity sweet. Again, a little bit off-putting for a chocolate bar though.

The packaging on the individual kat is a bit more boring. A plain orange with a little bit of decoration. Still the font is nice and energetic and again fits in with the whole energy, impact, xxxtreem thing going on. Plus I guess you can’t complain that the wrapper for an orange chocolate bar is orange, can you?

So how does the flavour stack up?

Well the first notes just taste like orange chocolate. Good orange chocolate but a bit of a disappointment really. Then as you chew on the sour stuff used in it really kicks. I mean really kicks in. I like a sour sweet but this is quite strong, almost unpleasantly so. By the end of it all you can taste is sour orange and the chocolate notes have entirely vanished leaving you wanting another bar almost straight away.

Let it sit for a moment though and the sourness soon goes leaving you with a lingering chocolaty mouth. Absolutely superb. Good chocolate, not too sweet, with a nice kick in the middle and then a pleasant after taste. Well done nestle, this is a top notch kit kat.

Mango Pudding



The second of our mini kit-kat offering this week and one I have been dreading. I am not the world’s greatest fan of mangos and I absolutely despise custard pudding. Their combination does nothing to appeal to me and the picture on the bag of some horrible gloopy custardy Chinese thing doesn’t help. Honestly does that look nice to anybody? It looks like a bowl of children’s sick to me.

There’s obviously something vaguely Chinese about the whole affair too. Not only is the kiddie sick served in a Chinese bowl but the bag has the same decorative edging as the bowl itself, as do the individual wrappers. Other than that it doesn’t look too offensive. It is an unassuming creamy colour that’s actually quite appealing. It’s just that the gleaming sprog vomit on the main bag is making my stomach churn.

Still, it is a kit-kat. It can’t possibly resemble pudding all that much.

The biscuit itself is bright orange and smells faintly of mango and mostly of McDonald’s milkshake. Actually lots of kit-kats smell and taste a bit like a milkshake. I wonder why. It is a nice smell that makes me want to eat it. Then I look at the kiddie sick, then back to the smell. The only possible outcome of this is that I’m going to be put off milkshakes for the rest of my life.

I can report that it tastes not in the slightest bit custardy or like a pudding in any way shape or form. In fact it barely tastes like a mango. What it mostly is; is sweet, vaguely milk shake like and kind of fruity but without resembling a distinct fruit. I mean if I had to guess I might say mango but nobody is going to be blown away by the stunning replica of mango flavour on offer here.

Overall I kind of like it. A bit too sweet mainly but it’s nice and creamy and just a little bit more complex than a standard kit-kat. I can see it pairing well with green tea.

Kinako Ohami-something



Points off right away for having an unreadable font that I can’t decipher. Judging by the picture it is supposed to taste like some kind of Japanese sweet (wagashi) made with rice, sweet soy powder (kinako) and some unidentifiable red substance.

This really has to be the ugliest kit-kat packet I have had to review. Look at it. It is awful. Unreadable font aside look at that picture. Does that look like something you wish to eat? It looks vaguely like something that has already been eaten. At my most charitable it looks like something savoury, I mean the main constituents I can identify there are soy powder and rice. The filling looks like corned beef. It looks like a pasty. Japan has done many strange things but it has yet to present me with a pasty flavoured kit-kat. Much like the mango pudding the picture on the cover just serves to put me right off the biscuit.

The rest of the packet is awful too. The fake scroll and the rice grains are combining to suggest early autumn in Japan. Nothing wrong with that, but the colours?! Yuck! Institution green and mustard yellow may just be the most horrible colour combination ever devised. It looks like a 1970’s living room or a doctor’s waiting office. I know that they’re aiming for rice paddies but they have missed and landed 40 years ago in a middle class flat in Birmingham.

The wrapper on the actual kat is no better. Plain yellow with wispy clouds.

I am actually a little bit angry at this biscuit. That isn’t a healthy attitude is it?

It smells nutty, really nutty. Actually, and I am not exaggerating here, it does smell very, very faintly of poo. Mostly nuts but a little bit like poo. Then again I think some nuts smell of poo anyway so it may just be me.

The taste is entirely non-descript. It tastes of a normal kit-kat with some slight nutty notes. Very, very slight too; in my opinion. The after taste is nice though, a big step up from the sort of chemical-chocolate you get with a regular kit-kat. It’s more complex and mellow, much nicer to roll around your mouth.

So basically they’ve put a slight improvement on a normal kit-kat in a really, truly awful bit of packaging. Sorry nestle, try again.

Vegetable Juice



Carrots!

Seriously, carrots.

Actually why not carrots? Carrots are quite sweet for a vegetable and they make a nice cake, why not a nice kit-kat. Plus the sooner nestle branches out into more savoury flavours the sooner I can look forward to my pasty flavoured kit-kat, smokey bacon kit-kat and salt and vinegar (actually, the salt and vinegar might not be so bad).

Technically this isn’t a carrot kit-kat though. This is a partnership with ito-en who make a vegetable juice that contains amongst other things carrots and apples. I haven’t tried it, vegetable juices may be popular in Japan but they scare me, and so I can’t comment if the taste matches up.

I have nothing but praise for the packet. That’s a good use of negative space there, the over saturation of white serves to make the veg seem fresher somehow and the mix of reds, greens, whites and oranges in the font and packaging also helps project a healthy fruity sense. The individual wrapper is much the same but adds a little more orange and somehow looks even better.

The kat itself is bright orange and smells strongly of both carrots and apples at the same time. That bodes well. Kit-kat’s struggle to do complicated flavours and usually only one comes through very well. If they can get it to smell like both main ingredients than this should be okay.

Sadly not. Although you can smell both apples and carrots it is hard to pick them out distinctly. However it does still taste quite nice. It is definitely more like an apple than a carrot but it really reminds me of something else that I can’t put my finger on. It’s not too sweet either, in fact it seems remarkably fresh and fruity rather than dessert-like.

The aftertaste is not very nice at all though. Really chemically and faintly bitter. It leaves bitter juice at the back of your throat that is tart and stingy.

And actually the more I’ve eaten of it the more I dislike it. It is too sweet actually and it gets progressively sweeter with every bite. Trying to eat another piece to remove the aftertaste just adds more tart juice and makes the whole situation worse.

Plus I can’t see this pairing nicely with a cup of tea. It is far too strong and far too weird. Maybe with water, but who has a kit-kat with water?

Sports Drink



Like the veggie juice and the ramune from our last session here we have a kit-kat based on a drink. Actually these have been becoming more popular with nestle recently, apple vinegar, coffee, green tea, etc are all drinks and they all share the same problem in my book. How can you have them with a cup of tea? You surely want a complimentary flavour, not some other drink entirely.

Sports drink refers to Japanese sports drink such as Pocari Sweat or Aquarius. I don’t know if there really is an equivalent product back home. Neither lucozade nor red bull really taste much like it at all. Maybe the lucozade isotonic water is the closest match but frankly I’m at a loss for comparisons. Probably the easiest way to know what I’m talking about will be to drink some Pocari Sweat. Its marvellous stuff and you can tell all your friends you’ve drunk sweat.

The outer packet is a total mess. It seems to be done as an offer in conjunction with some Japanese Football Association competition. Consequently it is full of blurbs and logos in horrible clashing fonts. The colour scheme is a balls up too with the yellow being underused. It is striking though so I suspect they were aiming for eye-catching rather than aesthetically pleasing. The football pentagon pattern is a bit washed out and hard to notice unless you’re studying it intently (as I do for the benefit of you people).

The individual wrapper is much nicer. No hideous yellow and the footballs work much better at that scale. Plus shiny foil. I always approve of shiny things.

The kat itself is a sort of pale yellowy-white. I guess that makes sense to try and recreate the vaguely translucent colour of Pocari Sweat which, to be honest, does look a little bit like a bottle full of spit.

The smell is absolutely uncanny. It smells exactly like a bottle of Pocari Sweat or Aquarius. I realise that isn’t helping you so I guess I’ll have to say that there are hints of lemon and spice.

But whilst the smell is uncanny the taste is a bit of a letdown. It’s quite bland actually with a tangy lemon taste on the back of the tongue. Pocari does taste a little bit of lemon but it has lots more flavours to it than that. This seems to offer almost no flavour whatsoever. It isn’t even that sweet or that lemony in fact. The lemon tang is principally an aftertaste. Nestle have produced here a chocolate bar that tastes of almost nothing and certainly not of sports drink.

It’s not horrible though, just quite bland.

We're on a boat!

Some friends of mine got drunk a few months ago and wrote down a list of crazy things they could do when they had some spare time.

I'm not usually one for planned whimsy. I like dicking about as much as any human being alive and spontaneous adventurous lunacy is always the most life affirming activity one can possibly take part in. When you're sixty years old you won't remember every birthday party, every friday night after work drink up or every holiday but by god you will remember that time you all went skinny dipping or invented a new sport called "elbow cricket" or got lost and ended up having an outdoor picnic at midnight involving frightened horses and loud impromptu singing.

That said certain things do require a degree of planning but still fall well into the joyously pointless endeavours category and these would be the bulk of the now infamous list. I missed out on the first list based activity (constructing a hut from objects found on the beach and ordering pizza to it) but dammit I was not about to miss out on this one.

We were going to build a raft using trash.

Some of this trash we found on the notoriously polluted Suma beach however the vast majority of it was plastic bottles we saved up from our homes and dutifully dragged out to Suma.

Which yes, did mean I was dragging giant bags of trash around with me on the train. I apologise to everyone in Japan.



I arrived at about 12 o'clock by which point only a few of the eventual team had gatehered and not much work had been done. Helping to devise a plan we swiftly set about the main construction.

For anyone interested in building a rubbish raft here is our technique.


First we attached two plastic bottles together with tape at the neck creating a seal.

We then got three of these sealed bottle sets and attached them together in a triangluar shape.

Once that had been done we laid them out in a line and taped them together creating long triangular tubes. We attached five of these tubes together arranging the triangles to make one larger triangle.

A quick test showed that this "pontoon" was indeed bouyant on its own.

Doing this 4 times gave us 4 basic pontoons 1 for each side of the raft and 2 in the middle for extra support in the centre.



Finding some string and wood on the beach we made cross struts sitting across the pontoons to hold the basic shape of the raft together.

So the basic shape was 3 pontoons linked by 3 bits of wood.

Then came the messy part.

With the basic raft shape in place we flipped it over and began filling any spare inch of surface with one of our sealed bottle pairs. Doing this we were hoping to just add more and more bouyancy by adding lots and lots of containers of air to our basic structure.



Finally we used litter bags and tarpaulins taped to the underside to make a skin to help hold all of the bottles together.

The end result being this.



My what sexy examples of manhood we are.

With the finishing touches of a flag and an improvised oar the maiden boyage of the S. S. PET was ready.



(PET in case you're wondering is an acronym for the kind of plastic used in the bottles. No we are not that nerdy, everyone in Japan calls them that.)

This video records the maiden voyage and all our successive attempts.



A complete and utter success!!

In lifting two grown men and letting them sail out to the bouys and back the raft was an unqualified success.

So we let the girls have a go.



With three of them insisting on a trip at once they didn't distribute their weight properly and consequently made a massive tear in the structure of the middle pontoon.

Still I was determined to have a go.

My trip was not so successful. My first mate abandoned ship when it was barely in the water. Moments after that one of the outer pontoons completely came loose. This meant rather than lying across the pontoons in the structuraly soundest position I had to lie along the length of the pontoons putting half of the raft in the air behind me.

Still I managed to get the raft working and out into the water about halfway to the buoy.

At which point...the central pontoon finally gave way along where it had cracked and the raft split in half.



This is all that remained of a once proud and glorious thing.

Still, we built a raft and it worked.

For a bit. Not bad for a Sunday afternoon's work.

And yes, for those curious we did clean it up at the end meaning we also had a net result of a slightly cleaner Suma beach.

Sod Japan, Talk About Sweets Some More

Everyone that has commented on this site, sent me e-mail or spoken to me about in person likes one feature of Mummy boon above all the others.

Well never let it be said that I am above a little bit of pandering to my audience so here is more of what you people apparently like.

Kit-Kat Reviews



First up is a selection of mini Kit-Kats comprised of ordinary ones (and yes, I have forgotten what they taste like) and some rose flavoured entries. Just in time for, oh wait, Mother’s Day was a while ago wasn’t it?

Oh well I guess June is the time roses bloom in Japan so that must be the connection. Unless I’m making the mistake of trying to understand Japan again.

The packaging on the bag itself is brilliantly, wonderfully girly. Not only are there 3 pink roses and a pink rose petal motif there is also swirly writing and a faux decorative label trying to make it look like a hand made present.

It also features a really baffling note proclaiming it to be a “Kit Kat Limited Edition.”
I have been doing this for a while now and I can reliably inform you that all the Kit-Kats I review on this site are limited editions. And usually they are not only released for a limited time but they are only released in limited areas/stores to boot. So what on earth is so special about these rose ones? The mind boggles at what incredible treasure Kit-Kat must have produced here to warrant such a label.

The packaging on the individual Kat (I have decided from now on this is how we’re going to refer to the singular, okay!) doesn’t disappoint either. It is bright pink and has a rose motif. Frankly if it had been anything else I would have felt betrayed.

Sadly the chocolate itself is a normal colour and not pink in the slightest. Still that tends to bode well as far as the flavour is concerned; all of the better flavours have been in the standard colours.

So how does the flavour stack up?

Well, whilst it definitely tastes differently to a normal Kit-Kat sadly I can’t really detect flavour other than chocolate. The rose element is so slight that all it really serves to do is put a slightly different edge on the chocolate. Less blandly sweet and just a bit more complicated. It works and it does taste nice but the majority of the roses in the product seem to have wound up on the packaging rather than in the biscuit.



Next up we have some Lemon Vinegar.

Hold up, vinegar?

On a biscuit!
……for the first time ever I am having second thoughts about actually eating one of these. Chocolate and vinegar is not an obvious match and surely the lemon is only going to make it even more sour and confused.

Ah I get it. Apparently lemon vinegar is some kind of delicious refreshing soft drink, at least that’s what the packaging seems to suggest. Hold on let me Google that for a moment.

Most of the results appear to be home making websites advocating how you can use lemon vinegar as a substitute cleaning substance.

Well that is very reassuring. New Kit-Kat substitute bleach flavour! Yum, it’s poison-licious.

The packet doesn’t help either. It is white and yellow. Those are the colours of bottles of bleach!

Oh thank god it is a normal chocolate colour.

And it tastes really very lemony. In fact as chocolate goes this is easily the lemoniest I have ever had. And it isn’t an after taste or a suggestion it is a big lemon hit. In fact it may be a little bit too lemony actually. The taste does tend to linger somewhat. In fact quite a lot. Wow, maybe a bit less lemony next time Nestle.

I am very glad to report that it also tastes not in the slightest bit like vinegar. Or bleach.

Usually I question what the purpose of these really strongly flavoured Kit-Kats is but this time nestle has seen fit to give me some idea. See that little chef’s hat in the top right corner. That is promising that these Kit-Kats are perfect for use in cooking, specifically for spicing up a kind of yoghurty/pudding thing. There is more info at http://cookpad.com/kitkat for anyone who is interested.



Since the lemon vinegar ones were not so bad I was a bit more comfortable trying out some of the apple vinegar ones. Particularly when after a Google search I discovered that apple vinegar is really a kind of traditional cider. I like cider and more Kit-Kats flavoured after booze would suit me down to a tee.

The packet was nice and friendly too, particularly the individual wrapper which is in pleasingly retro colours that are also the colour of apples. Offset with lovely retro typography it was all very welcoming and wholesome. I was, dare I say it, excited to try my new Kit-Kat.

Oh hell the chocolate is cream coloured. That is never a good sign.

Before I even bit into it I was overpowered by apples. This thing smells really, really strongly of apples. In fact the scent is the strongest fruit scent of any Kit-Kat since the watermelon ones. I don’t have any watermelon Kit-Kats to hand right now but I suspect the apple vinegar Kit-Kats smell more strongly of apples than the watermelon Kit-Kats smell of watermelons.

….

Do you ever write something that causes you to consider what exactly it is that you’re doing with your life?

Anyway, how do they taste?
Bloody marvellous!

There is very little recognisably Kit-Kat here. It is less sweet than Nestlé’s usual offerings and the chocolate seems creamier and not quite as cheap. IT is also really, really powerfully appley. The lemon vinegar Kit-Kats have nothing on the apple vinegar for fruity taste. These things are kings of fruity tastes. The high lords of apple flavour.

Nestle have produced a few apple Kit-Kats before now but this one wins hand down. They simply haven’t made anything that tastes this much like an apple before. And the whole line should switch to this kind of chocolate. I have no idea what they changed but it just seems slightly creamier and has a much better mouth feel.

Absolutely delicious.

There is a recipe included with these too, for a kind of apple cinnamon topping for ice-cream. I may jut have to try that and let you know how it fares.

I can now also report that the after taste is very similar to a milkshake. Not a real milkshake but a McDonalds or Burger King milkshake. Since I swore off fast food these are the things I crave most in the entire world that I cannot have. I may be trying to manufacture my apple vinegar Kit-Kats into some kind of apple vinegar Kit-Kat milkshake.

And then I can die happy.



Moving on, we have cherry “through the break”. First a note about the packaging; which is bloody horrible.

Look at the individual Kat’s wrapper! That is boring as hell, a pink wrapper with some men and “through the break” written on it.

The main wrapper doesn’t fare much better. It is overly crowded with tiny text in a horrible font and far too busy. That tiny space has to cram in the Kit-Kat logo, some headphones, the “through the break” logo, a picture of some guys, a visualisation of the Kit-Kat inside and a picture of a cherry in addition to tons of text. It is all horribly composed and far too busy. Epic fail Kit-Kat.

All the text is because it is some kind of tie-in/competition running in conjunction with a DJ and a record label. There is a code inside that one can enter to possibly win…something. Sadly my Japanese skills don’t stretch to finding out if I have won anything.

And the chocolate is pink, not a good sign.

Ahhh this is more like it Kit-Kat. The first taste is waxy and bland. There is only a very slight cherry flavour detectable. The mouth feel is horrible due to sub-par chocolate. That is the Kit-Kat we have all come to know and love here.

So we’re on firmer ground but overall this isn’t actually that bad. If you roll the Kit-Kat around your mouth then cherry notes come through really strongly at the back of the mouth. Nice sour cherry notes too. Overall though it is much more like cherry yoghurt, in that it is kind of bland and creamy with subtle cherry notes, than it is like a proper cherry. Still, I imagine that will pair quite nicely with a cup of tea. Overall then a not bad but dragged down by some simply horrible design.

Finally I have saved the best for last.

Feast your eyes on…



Ramune Kit-Kats!

I have talked briefly about ramune before on this site. For those not in the know, briefly, it is a kind of Japanese lemonade that tastes a lot like sprite. However it comes in a special bottle with a marble in the top. In Japan it has strong associations with summers, festivals, childhood and also the post-war period when it was invented.

The important thing to take away from all that is that basically Nestle have made sprite flavoured Kit-Kats!

I invited you to feast your eyes and feast is the right word because just look at that packaging. That is lovely. The lovely retro colours, the retro dot-matrix printing style and even a retro font just all scream post-war at me. The dots also serve to evoke bubbles and fizziness as much as they do a retro aesthetic. It is really eye-catching, really novel and really, well retro. I know I am abusing the word but I really do like this bag. How can one company produce something so spot on for a product and also something as fantastically ugly as the cherry wrapper.

The Kat’s individual wrapper is a nice touch too with little fizzy bubbles.

Hold on, you don’t think they actually are fizzy do you?

I mean it is ramune flavour, all bets are off here. Fruit yes, cakes or sweets yes, even soy sauce but a fizzy drink? This is new territory for Kit-Kat and I am both a little bit excited and a lot scared.

Oh god! The chocolate is blue. Not a good sign.

I don’t believe it.

I really don’t believe it.

They actually are fizzy!

And it works!

The first thing that hits you is the smell. The smell, sadly, is not of ramune at all but of “bubblegum.” By which I mean bubblegum the flavour, the mysterious flavour drinks were sometimes given when you were a kid which always prompted the existential debate of how something could be bubblegum flavoured when bubblegum has many flavours. Well it smells like that.

But it tastes exactly like ramune. Exactly, to a scary degree. I just tested it with some ramune and there is no difference in flavour.

And they’re fizzy! I suspect this is due to the presence of sherbet in the chocolate. They’re only mildly fizzy but all the same they are fizzy Kit-Kats.

This is going to be my baby cousins’ Christmas present this year. No kid can possibly resist fizzy Kit-Kats.

I can’t really objectively rate these because the novelty is so great that it becomes impossible to get past it. Everyone needs to try these because they are that damn strange.

They are also surprisingly more-ish. And that is coming from a man who just ate 5 Kit-Kats.

100th post!

100 posts everyone.

I could have whipped up some kind of impressive new banner or some sort of retrospective on the nearly 2 years that Mummyboon has been up and running but i thought that would have been boring and self congratulatory.

Instead let's talk about the one thing that really defines this site.

KIT-KATS!!!



3 new flavours to discuss today.

Tiramisu flavour

Picked up in Kyoto at the weekend as part of a trip that will definitely make it to this site eventually. Probably on Thursday.

The packaging is unusual in that it is a single regular sized finger. Usually when nestle makes a single fingered kit-kat it is slightly thicker than a regular finger. Frankly I feel that something has gone very, deeply wrong with the world of kit-kats when a regular sized single finger is considered an acceptable product. We need to be very careful here people. Give em an inch and they'll take a mile. First it was the special flavours but soon all kit-kats will be sold purely as single fingers and then civilization as we now it will collapse in an apocalypse fueled by insufficient quantities of biscuit.


.... I may have drifted a bit there.

Anyway, not been a big fan of tiramisu in general and coffee flavoured chocolate even less so I was not really looking forward to sampling the new tiramisu kit kat.

And it tastes...

Actually it tastes kind of bland at first. The initial bites are pretty tasteless, sweet but with no definite flavours. The after taste has a very strong coffee note that is very pleasant and surprisingly complex. I would even go so far as to say that it tastes of tiramisu. But it is overpowered by the sweetness. In fact this may be the sweetest kit-kat I have ever eaten.

I understand why it is packaged as a single finger now. It is so sweet that I am struggling to finish even one finger. 2 fingers would be such concentrated sweetness that it may prevent my tongue from ever tasting anything ever again.

Maccha Tiramisu

Matcha (spelled Maccha for some reason on this packet) is the strongest and bitterest of all Japanese green teas. It is never served as leaves but rather made into a powder of such an emerald hue that it calls to mind the mutagenetic ooze that turned the teenage mutant ninja turtles from ordinary reptiles into fighting ninja teens.

It is also bloody awful. Well that isn't really fair but it is terribly, terribly bitter. Much bitterer than the strongest espresso I have ever had. For this reason the Japanese usually eat a very sweet tasting snack with the tea to cut the strong flavour. Traditionally this was a daifuku, dango or wagashi but nowadays it commonly can be a kit-kat. A matcha flavoured kit-kat then completely defeats the purpose of a kit-kat.

And it is also another example of this appalling new packaging strategy. Blegh!

So, how does it taste...?

Well, like the other tiramisu offering the first bite is pretty bland and the real flavour is in the after taste. Again the after taste is nicely complex and really evokes the flavour it is meant to. Pleasantly it is significantly milder than the other tiramisu and nowhere near as sweet. Whether this is because it has less sugar or because the matcha flavour somehow cuts the sweet notes I do not know but overall I'd say this is one of nestle's better efforts.

Still annoyed about the packaging though.



Cookie Kit-Kat

One of the odder new varieties to burst onto the scene recently is the cookie kit-kat.

Whilst most varieties only change the chocolate coating and leave the wafer intact the cookie kit-kat has a different strategy. It inserts a layer of oreo like biscuit between the top layer of wafer and the chocolate.

The result...?

Pure bliss.

The oreo-esque biscuit has a much richer and bitterer chocolate flavour than the cheap nestle chocolate on the outside (or an oreo for that matter). The clash of the three different textures and the two different chocolate flavours is exciting, interesting (for your tongue at least, which needs stimulation y'know) and pure joyful chocolate ecstasy.

It's a subtle one. It's charms are not obvious but it is a massive improvement on the standard model without any of the usual drawbacks.

AND... it is one of the more common "premium" line that are slightly thicker than a regular finger and thus not an abomination unto the chocolately god "avabrew" like these horrible single finger efforts.

sden dna sddo : odds and ends

Too tired for a proper post right now faithful readers so it is odds and ends time again.

Beginning with yet more fabulous Engrish from my students.

This weeks offerings are statements written from memory that my students said to me during their interview tests.

 

“I am my grandmother”

 

“I helped cook my mother.”

"I exerted a cultural festival."

 

And finally

 

“It was doog.”

Holy Balls of Fire Batman the Earth is Exploding

For those of you who don&t follow the news in Japan (and why should you really) a Volcano has just exploded in the Nagano Prefecture.

There is a video at the link with more details.

And this is a time lapse video of the actual eruption.

I was bitterly jealous that I was missing out on Britain's worst snowstorm for 30 years but now I am excited again! I live in a country with active volcanoes.


Oh Crap.

I LIVE IN A COUNTRY WITH ACTIVE VOLCANOES!!!


(but seriously no damage whatsoever has been reported. Japanese people seem naively trusting of natural disasters but even here people tend to avoid mountains that hurl things at you periodically)

Shameless Shilling

A friend of mine living in Japan has recently launched a blog.

I'm adding it to the links roll. Go check it out if you're bored at work, some of it is funny stuff.

Would you like to see a brain in a jar?

I seem to be posting a lot of links today but here is one more about haikyo, or derelict sites in Japan. Apparently this person found a derelict doctor's surgery complete with medical instruments and a preserved brain in a jar in the middle of nowhere.

I can't decide if this is the most frightening or the most awesome thing I have ever heard. I am however intrigued by this haikyo thing and I aim to do a bit more reading up on it.

In fact whilst I'm at it here is another haikyo in a hotel.

It's fascinating that in a country with such a premium on space that this can happen.

Tomorrow; forget it baby, it's China Town.

We have the technology, we can rebuild it, odder and endier than before.

Hooray! Two posts in one week, I’m finally getting this baby back on track. In fact I’ve got a massive stack of stuff to write about now and plenty of free time at work to knock out some posts so we should finally be ahead of the game again.

Woo hoo!

Anyway today I just want to go over a few miscellaneous odds and ends that have been gathering up and need to be addressed.


New School



No photos as, well, it isn’t very interesting looking, but I have recently moved to a new school, Higashiochiai.

In contrast to my last placing out in the middle of nowhere Higashiochiai is smack dab in the centre of the kobe metropolis. Well, not quite, but it is decidedly urban. And whereas Iwaoka was an hour’s journey everyday Higashiochiai is less than half the time away. This is a massive boon to my free time and has granted me an extra half an hour in bed in the morning. Bliss! And no snakes either.

However I’m now in a decidedly weird situation. I will probably be moved from this school at the end of March and it is already nearly the end of January. I have barely 2 months left at Higashiochiai before I will be shipped out yet again to meet new teachers, get to know students and generally adjust. This means I’m kind of in limbo. Sure I work here but I feel like all of my efforts here are pointless. I don’t really have enough time to properly get to know anyone, students or teachers and I certainly don’t have enough time to train students up to my expectations of them in lessons.

Still everyone seems nice enough so far so I guess I’ll just enjoy it while I’m here and worry about the future later.



Sweet Potato Kit-Kats




I have been as lax with my kit-kat reviewing as I have with the blog in general but I intend to let this error persist no further. Already I have skipped over informing you people of the important evolutions of strawberry cheesecake and blueberry cheesecake kit-kats, cookie kit-kats and anko kit-kats. Maybe one day they shall return to stores and I can educate you as to their deliciousness or lack of delciousness. Alas, that is a dream for the future.

For now let’s talk about sweet potatoes.

Sweet potatoes are very popular in Japan. In fact potatoes of all kinds are fairly popular but particularly potatoes that are traditionally grown in Japanese soil, of which swete potato is one. In fact there are a wide variety of sweet potatoes native to Japan ranging from the purple skinned but orange centred imo to the wholly purple beni imo.

Sweet potatoes can be used a both a savoury option, in nabe (a kind of stew), roasted, boild or baked on its own or pressed into rice and as a sweet option, made into a dessert called daigaku-imo, sliced, fried and sugared or used as a starch in wagashi (tea ceremony sweets). There are even varieties of shochu made of it. And now there is a kit-kat version.

And it is delicious! Incredibly delicious. In fact it may be my favourite variety of kit-kat. The taste is incredibly nuanced and complicated for kit-kat. It's mostly a kind of caramel flavour but a very rich caramel with nutty, earthy notes coming through too.

And it tastes, not even slightly, like a sweet potato.

Delicious though.


Umeshu

You may re-call from this post all those many months ago that I was making some umeshu.

Well here it is.



As you can see it has gone down in height by quite a significant amount. This is because I have been drinking it, not because of the ume absoribing the water or anything like that. The colour has obviously changed to a more recognizable ume tone and the ume have shrunk.



My how they’ve shrunk, and now they look like little brains. Tiny brains in a jar. I’ve always wanted to own some brains in a jar, now I can fantasise that I do.

The taste is, actually a little bit disappointing. It’s definitely umeshu but it isn’t as sharp as I usually like my umeshu and furthermore it is very, very sweet. To the point of almost being sticky. I aim to try again next year with much less sugar in the mixture.

I also aim to brew it for a whole year. We cracked open the jar around about Christmastime after a period of more than 6 months but I am now informed that a ful years wait is needed to make a fully mature umeshu.

I should point out that my girlfriend was very happy with it though, even if it is a little bit sweet for me.

Mushrooms

Until the next spring my attempt at making umeshu has drawn to a close but now I have a new project to divert me.



Growing shiitake mushrooms.

My wonderful girlfriend got me a grow your own mushroom kit for Christmas. After dithering with the Japanese instructions for a while I eventually figured out what to do and have been cultivating a patch of mushrooms in the same cupboard the umeshu used to live in.

My first mushroom was constrained by the shape of the bag and had begun growing before I had even opened up the kit. It went a bit strange shortly after I set up the kit properly and turned all watery and…odd. So I ripped it off.

Presently I am growing 1 single solitary but unbelievably massive mushroom. The biggest shiitake I have ever seen. I am going to eat it for my tea tonight in fact in the hopes that if I cut it off it will stimulate all the other spores to start growing.

I will keep you updated on further mushroom news.

Finally I like to end any odds and ends post with a video showcasing the madness that is my adopted land.



This is a trailer for the upcoming live action version of the yatterman anime. Yatterman is about a pair of super hero mechanics riding a giant robot dog who fight a trio of super villains who also have various robots, and a 3 person tandem (tridem?) The show is mostly about the villains and the comic relief they offer. In tone it feels like hannah-barbera filtered through Japan. And now they are making a live action movie. I have high hopes for this.

Sometimes I laugh and I laugh and everyone in the teachers room looks at me funny.

Okay, I concede I am not quite living up to my New Year resolution.



Still, let’s see if I can improve things from this point on; starting with an old favourite, amusing stuff my students have written recently.



I have recently begun working at a new school (again, gah!) and one of the first things the teachers at my new school did was dump a load of work on me that my new students had written over the winter break.



This was a comedy goldmine.



Apparently at my new school the teachers had been very good at introducing the students to some higher level vocabulary. Words like pleasure, one (in the sense of oneself or one does), restless, etc, etc. However the students weren’t quite so hot on how to properly conjugate these new words, leading to such examples as…



Well, see for yourself.



“I will pleasure me in winter vacation.”



“I will pleasure in winter vacation. I want come early.”



“I want to go to Okinawa because I want to raid a banana.”



“My dream is ueding dtheina. Becoues I think many peapol smailing get home. They’re get married to happy. They’re never happy mamols plezant for them.”



“I exerted a cultural festival.”



“I like my bedroom because it is very restless.” (he meant messy)



“”2nd term was great! There was field day, culture day and eisteddfod.”



Cue conversation between me and the Japanese teacher of English.



Me: What do you think eisteddfod means, I can’t think what English word it could be.



JTE: Hmmm. No, idea. I’ll read the Japanese version they wrote.

Okay apparently they mean music festival.



Me: How did they get eisteddfod from music festival? Does it sound similar in Japanese?



JTE: No, let me check my dictionary.



Me: What does it say.



JTE: Apparently it’s an arts festival in Wales.



Me: What! Wales!



(cue gales of laughter for ages)



There were two other entries that are absolutely heartbreaking too.



For example, one girl was talking about the Akashi suspension bridge and wrote:





“When I saw it, I was happy, for the first time.”



Now obviously she meant “when I saw it for the first time I was happy.” But even so

don’t you just wanna give her a hug?



The other heartbreaking one was in answer to the question. “How was your second

term?”



“What!!! How was it!!! It was terrible. Oh my god!!! I studied very hard but I love the

comic books too much. When my mother came in she yelled at me and took the comic

book. The next day, my mother took all the comic books. I was very sad. I didn’t get a

good grade.”



Awwww. Rest assured I gave you a good grade fellow comic fan.

Unplanned Video Filler

Sorry guys but both my camera and my SD card are elsewhere as I type this so I have little recourse but to do a quicky video post.

Real posts to resume next week gang.




I'll start us off with this marvellous tribute to Super Mario Bros rendered through Japanese puppetry. With roots in bunraku,a style of puppet theatre, modenr Japanese puppetry probably provides the most spectacular special effects that can actually be done on a stage. Recreating something as abstract and cartoony as the world of Super Mario in real life is an amazing artistic achievement.

Funny as hell too.





Excel Saga is a "Quack Experimental Anime." Basically a surreal comedy series that satirises anime tropes and in which anything can happen. The series is loosely about the ideological organisation ACROSS, a severely understaffed super villain outfit that aims to eventually conquer the world but for now is focused on just conquering F city F prefecture. the staff consists of Excel, a hyper-fast talking, energetic but hopeless idiot and Hyatt, a naive alien girl who dies every episode (beating kenny to the punch by a few years). There's also a mad paedophile scientist, a poor doomed dog called menchi and many other hilarious characters.

The theme tune's lyrics were apparently written by the director on the train ride to the recording studio to record the theme and bear no relation to the plot whatsoever. Good sight gags though.



The end theme is rather brilliantly sung by Menchi.

The title of the song is "and so you are going to eat me."



In contrast to Menchi's eventual fate, to be eaten by Excel as an emergency food supply, Chi, the star of "Chi's Sweet Home" gets, well, a sweet home. This anime, about a stray cat adopted by a family and told from the cat's point of view is without question the cutest anime ever made and possibly the cutest thing on the planet.

I should note that the subtitles on this version are not especially good as they editorialise far too much to make the English seem more natural. However it is the only embeddable version of the song that I could find.

Better post on Saturday I promise.

Low Content Mode

Hey guys, sorry to say but it looks like I'll be entering low content mode for the foreseeable future. The combination of upcoming work regarding Christmas an insane amount of work to do at school and my invalid girlfriend who needs nursing this week (not quite, she just had a wisdom tooth out) means that I likely won&t have any proper posts up until after Christmas.

I'll try to have stuff up but don't expect anything major.

And on that note I leave you with the following fine example of Engrish I've been saving for just such an occasion.

I'm Not Here and Yet I'm Still Posting

Look gang, some posts together in a reasonably timely manner, however did this happen.

Well I’ll let you in on a little secret. Blogger now has a feature that lets you date stamp a post so it won’t appear until the relevant desired date, this, combined with my complete lack of anything to do at work recently, means I’ve been able to build up a kind of buffer of posts. Sorry for the gap in posting but heading into August and September we should be back on track again.

In fact due to the magic of technology this post is going up as I am actually in Tokyo! Control yourselves people, I know you’re excited but you can’t possibly be more excited than I. After all, I’m the one off there.

I intend to travel in style, yes that’s right, not the proletarian delights of the shinkansen for me, oh no, I shall be traveling by the night bus; a 7 hour overnight journey in cramped environs. Fortunately I have with me all the entertainment I could possibly need in the form of “Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2”. A computer game that is in part responsible for the lack of posting last month. Damn catchy games.

In Tokyo I’ll be hitting up such sights as the Tokyo Tower, Asakusa Shrine, The National Museum, Tsukiji Fish Market and Hea-jinja and exploring such diverse districts as Shibuya, Akihabara, Ginza, Odaiba and even a jaunt to Yokohama.

So expect many, many photos and stuff from Tokyo in the coming weeks.

Until then here is some random filler.



This is an enormous whale hanging inside a building in Umeda. Underneath it is a baby whale. Its true purpose is mysterious and possibly sinister.



I could really go for some pudding right now.

And following up from last week’s Tenjin no Matsuri we have more pictures of fireworks.



These were let off in Kobe for, really no apparent reason, other than it being summer and really do you need any more excuse than that to light up the sky.

I have seen more spectacular fireworks in Osaka (not at the Tenjin matsuri but rather at a dedicated fireworks event) but these come a very close second. I watched them with friends from Port Island, an artificial island in Kobe Harbour which overlooks Harborland. The combination of the bright lights of Kobe, the spectacularly lit up Port Tower and Ferris wheel in Harborland and the fireworks was especially lovely.

Finally here is some weird stuff I found in my local combini.

Japan loves seasonal food and no food better embodies this than the kit-kat. Summer is upon us and so the summer kit-kat flavour has arrived and this year it is.



Watermelon and Salt.

As weird as Watermelon chocolate sounds in the first place (not weird in a bad way just a hard to imagine way) it is the addition of salt that really pushes this into the truly bizarre.

As for the taste test? Well it’s nice actually; in fact it’s one of my favourite Japanese specialty flavours. The salt is actually quite a nice touch cutting the sweetness of the rest of it which is much, much sweeter than a regular kit-kat for some reason. The watermelon flavour is subtle but nice. I don’t really associate chocolate with summer so I doubt I shall be stocking up on this but this is a really, really nice kit-kat.



At the same combini I also spotted this, the coffee history of Kobe. This is another thing you find a lot of in Japan. Non-local products marketed as if they are local. There is no coffee grown in Kobe and as far as I know no real link to coffee in the city’s history. Although it was one of the first ports that was allowed to train with the outside world so I’m sure most coffee in Japan did pass through Kobe at some point. This product joins Kobe wine, Kobe cheesecake and Kobe pudding as an odd kind of but not quite foreign product that people who visit Kobe can give to relatives.

It is not bad coffee.

Doing Some Follow Up

Some of the things I have talked about recently on Mummyboon have cropped up again in the news in short order so I figured I’d take the opportunity to follow up on them.



The saga of the mega-monkeys (or metabo-monkeys*) continues as the keeper updates us all on how their diet is going. Apparently it has been 2 months since they were put on a healthier diet of grains, vegetables and small fish and less bananas and sweet potatoes. The caloric intake of the monkeys ahs been cut by as much as 60% and signs and barriers have been erected to stop people throwing food to the monkeys. The keeper claims that there has been a noticeable improvement in the health of the monkeys but it certainly isn’t evident from the above photo.

That might be because some people are STILL feeding the monkeys! In fact the keeper is still finding candy wrappers and peanut shells in the monkey area (it isn’t a zoo but a park so the monkeys aren’t in cages). This is despite the high profile media attention the fat monkeys have been receiving and the fact that they clearly have obesity problems. I honestly cannot believe some people. They are either incredibly naive not to realise that the signs and warnings are in place for what is quite a serious health problem or are some kind of sadist that is actually trying to kill the monkeys. Knowing the general character of Japanese people I’m actually going to vote for the former.

*This is another great Japanese news story recently. The government have been trying to increase the Japanese peoples’ awareness of the health risks or obesity by renaming obesity/being fat as being “metabo.” Their hope is that “metabo” doesn’t have the negative connotations of obesity so people will be more confident seeking out medical attention from their doctor. They’ve published a fact sheet telling people when they qualify as being “metabo” and they hope that the “metabo” members of the population will feel less stigmatized and will seek medical attention earlier and with less fear. I have only two real thoughts about this. Firstly, that this is easily one of the stupidest things I have ever heard of any government doing and secondly that I have no idea why the Japanese government feels the need to create such a program when it has one of the healthiest populations on the planet.



Also it seems that the BBC has bought the rights to air "Tunnels"; the Japanese TV show that features the “human tetris” short I mentioned last month.

I reckon that this is probably going to be part of some “Tarrant on TV” style clip show making fun of Japanese TV (as is only right and proper. The international media gets Japan horribly wrong a lot of the time but Japanese TV deserves everything it gets) however I would be thrilled if the BBC are planning to produce their own version of human tetris.

Hrmmm, bit short. Tell you what, let's talk about a uniquely Japanese phenomenon.

Everybody loves a good TV theme tune. Many's the time I've had discussions with my friends about what the best them tunes of all time are and we've spent happy hours humming them away. However, with a few rare exceptions TV theme tunes remain as just that and rarely does a good tune cross over and become a genuine pop hit.

Not so in Japan. Most of the theme tunes for popular anime and dramas are done by established pop acts and the theme tune becomes a chart song, even an album track usually. In fact, some TV shows thrive purely on the strength of a really good song. Anime themes are everywhere in the pop culture of Japan. As song choices in computer games, as karaoke songs, as adverts, as number 1 hits and indeed as the theme tune to anime shows.

So here are a few of my personal favourite anime themes.



Let's start with my all time favourite and the only one I have ever been known to sing at karaoke. "Flying in the Sky" from G-Gundam. My undying love for the sheer unbridled creative stupidity of G-Gundam has been mentioned a couple of times on this blog. Yes, this is the show with the giant robot fish.



However my love for the theme tune is entirely un-ironic. This is the best cartoon theme tune the world has ever known. It's epic, ballsy, soaring and unbelievably 80's. And most importantly it features Japanese people (or drunken gaijin) screaming "Flying in the Sky", "Shining Finger" and "Bright you now" with pure unbridled joy in their hearts.

If this song doesn't make you happy then you and I can't be friends anymore.



Another popular karaoke song with my friends and the opening theme tune to "Full Metal Alchemist." This is by the brilliantly named "Porno Graffiti" which I once thought my students were pronouncing as pornography. This has an insanely catchy tune and some of the most esoteric lyrics I have ever heard.



One of the many opening themes that Naruto has had and my personal favourite. The song is a bit shouty but it fits the character really, really well and I'm a big fan of the guitar work.

In contrast here is the first opening theme for Naruto. I can never decide if I like this song or not. It sounds sort of vaguely Billy Joel-ish but sung really badly.

Then he says "I waana rocks, rocks to the chest" and I burst out laughing.



From Cowboy Bebop. I hate Jazz and even I have to concede that this is amazing.



I am not hugely familiar with Fist of the North Star and this theme is not particularly inspiring (at least not until the Japanese Shirley Bassey kicks in and then it briefly turns into Led Zepplin) but I do know that it is incredibly fun to yell "You Wa Shock!"



This is only an anime on a really thin technicality (it was a French/Japanese co-production) but it squeaks by being bloody awesome. I opted for the longer song in favour of the actual opening theme with the proper lyrics. Why? Because more Ulysses 31 is always a good thing.

I guarantee that at some stage tomorrow you will yell either "uly-ey-ey-eysees" "bright you now" or "you wa shock!"