Confessions of a Grade School Role Model

Pikachu and Godzilla are only a barely-registered beginning to Japan's extraordinary list of native monsters.  Bakemono, literally "transforming things," are a varied phylum of creatures dating back centuries in Japanese folklore.  They are generally divided into three classes:  oni, the horned, fanged demons and ogres who guard the gates of Buddhist hells; yurei, the vengeance-hungry spirits of the dead; and youkai, the "bewitching apparitions" who are sometimes scary, but more often just amusing and bizarre.

Youkai are by far the most fun group of monsters.  Here are some of my favorite:

Ittan Momen is a three-meter long length of white cotton cloth.  It enjoys flying around, and occasionally will alight and attach itself to random passers-by.  When frightened or upset,  Ittan Momen may suffocate and strangle people; when it is happy, it will sometimes let itself be worn.

Kappa is a green bird-like creature with a turtle shell and a concave-topped head.  It is alternately malevolent or mischievous, and it might suck your innards out through your anus, or it might just blow up your skirt.  The kappa is easily diverted, and many have escaped him by tossing him a cucumber, his favorite food (hence the cucumber sushi roll called kappa-maki).  He can also be extremely polite and bound by tradition. If you meet him and can maintain the composure to bow, he must bow back, thus spilling the life-giving water he keeps in the depression atop his head, and forcing him to run off to refill, while you make your escape.  If I have any survival advice for those going to Japan, it would be this: always bow to kappas.

The kasa obake is one of the class of tsukumogami obake, everyday objects which gain life through long-term use.  Some believe that objects come to life upon their 100th birthday, perhaps one reason why there are so few thrift stores in Japan.  The kasa obake is an animated paper umbrella, with one huge eye and a large lolling tongue.  It has a single leg instead of a handle, the foot clad in a wooden geta, which clacks as it hops around.  Kasa obake aren't particularly dangerous, just disconcerting, and in fact they are quite playful, especially on rainy days.  Another common type of tsukumogami is the chochin obake, a floating paper lantern, with a horrible ripped-paper grin.

Kera-kera Onna just wants to make you laugh.  She has a comically overly-large head, loves making silly faces and wearing showy costumes, and wanders the land looking for people to cheer up.

Konaki-Jiji is a big baby.  Or at least he looks like one, until you pick him up.  He lies roadside and plays the abandoned infant, crying until someone picks him up.  Once he is safely cradled, he rapidly grows immensely heavy.  When his unsuspecting victim drops him, he immediately vanishes, leaving the person stunned.  Those who are able to carry him despite his weight are sometimes rewarded with wishes.

Kuchisake-Onna's story is tragic.  She was once a famously beautiful woman, until a jealous suitor hideously disfigured her face, carving a Joker-like smile ear-to-ear across her mouth.  Now she wanders streets in a surgical mask, especially on foggy nights, asking passers-by whether they find her beautiful.  Usually, the moment she removes her mask to ask the question, people will run away.  She will chase the unfortunate victim, and carve their face to resemble hers. Sometimes an escape can be made by throwing her fruit to eat, which she loves.

Mujina look just like people, but they have no faces.  They know exactly how creepy that looks, and they take delight in scaring the bejeezus out of humans by assuming the shape of familiar figures but for the one detail.  You may think that's your waiter you're flagging down, or that traffic cop who's been trailing you for miles, but look again.

Nando-Baba lives in abandoned storage rooms.  She's quite happy with that arrangement, and is peaceful unless disturbed.  If she is bothered accidentally, she may try to scare you away.  The lesson is to never, ever try to clean out your closets.

Nurikabe is a wall of invisibility, who gets its kicks causing people to get lost.  He may wait at one end of a pathway, making you think you've gone as far as you can.  Sometimes, he might even absorb you into him, although usually it's just temporary.  Nurikabe may also provide an interesting excuse for why you were late to work.

By day, a rokurokubi seems to be an elegant, beautiful woman, tending toward self-indulgence and pleasure.  By night, she is a life-sucking monster, seeking her usually male prey by extending her snake-like length.  It does no good to ask a woman if this is her tendency, because often she herself does not even know.

Sunakake-Baba isn't such a bad old woman, she just likes to stand near roads and fling sand at people.  She thinks it's funny.

Tansu-Baba is another quirky old woman, she lives in abandoned chests of drawers. It's a lonely life in there, and occasionally she will pull people in for a chat, letting them go when she's had her fill of their company.  No one really knows what she chats about, as most people have only a very fuzzy recollection of the event upon their release. 

For more bakemono, go here.  For an interesting analysis and history of bakemono, go here.

I check into the hospital tomorrow morning, for a procedure that will not be performed until Monday.  This is normal in Japan.  They said, "Thursday and Friday, so you can talk to the anaesthesiologist and surgeon, and Saturday and Sunday, because it's the weekend."  They saw no reason to explain further, and I long ago gave up asking too many questions here.

Tonight, I have to pack.  You have to take a lot of things with you when you go to stay in a hospital in Japan.  Chopsticks, a drinking cup, toiletries, slippers, coins for the laundry, and your own pajamas and bedding unless you decide to rent them from the hospital.  I own no pajamas I wouldn't be embarrassed to be seen in publicly, the pajama drawer is where my old T-shirts go just before they die, so I'll be renting.  If my rental pajamas are cut to the usual Japanese dimensions, I'll be spending the next week and a half with my forearms and ankles bare too.

Usually, families do much of the hospital nursing in Japan.  Patients are responsible for their own laundry, changes of bedding, and trash disposal, and meals are taken in a cafeteria rather than in bed.  Presumably, a patient can expect a family member to be with them throughout their stay, sometimes even sleeping on the premises.  What happens when the patient's family is, say, on a different calendar date and 6000 miles away, is the question I will be investigating this next week.  By this time two weeks from now, I expect to have doubled my lifetime's total number of consumed books, and possibly to have finally mastered the art of the origami crane.

The bilingual edition of The Inscrutable Japanese by Japanese author Kagawa Hiroshi, in a section entitled "Strange Japanese Social Phenomena," discusses the question, "Why do Japanese women act so cute?"  The explanation given is an interesting one.  Kagawa writes,

"This is another aspect of women in Japan that Westerners have a hard time accepting.

"Full-grown adult Japanese women sometimes speak and act like children.  They often decorate their apartments with stuffed animals, or burst out into hysterics in public...

"But why do Japanese men seem to want cute, child-like women?  In the parade of advertisements and comics, these images stand out over the images of strong,  independent female beauty.

"The source of such images may lie in the Japanese school system.  In order to get into a good university, Japanese children must study extremely hard.  Parents support these children materially and emotionally, and the entire family cooperates to help them improve their grades in school.

"Children born and raised in this post-war era of prosperity were generally overprotected kids who focused on getting good grades.  These children have now become the majority of the adult population.  However, many kids who did well in school and survived 'examination hell' to get into good universities remain emotionally immature as adults.  This tendency is especially common among men, and they usually want a child-like woman rather than a woman who is more emotionally mature than they are."

So this generation of Japanese men, in order to be able to give 100% in school, were given everything else,  and never really learned to take care of themselves.  Their growing-up experience did not include decision-making, or disappointment, or self-reliance, or the responsibility of chores.  They missed out on the painful integral adolescent experience of defining oneself apart from one's family, of staking out one's own priorities, and of exploring one's own limits, strengths, and weaknesses.  From a Western standpoint, these men never really grew up at all, and it is natural they would seek partners at a similar stage, someone to depend on them, as immature as they are themselves.

I suspect the infantilization of Japanese women has a longer history than given here, and that its reasons may be more complex.  Japanese relationships in general tend to be codependent, insular, and hierarchical compared with those of Western societies, and those tendencies too may lead to emotional immaturity and a certain degree of role-playing, which were doubtlessly present long before the war. Japan's is hardly the only culture that likes its women a bit naive, but here the tendency is especially noticeable. 

Certainly these stereotypes do not describe everyone.  I know nearly as many people who could not be described by these ideas as who could, yet it's still an interesting and fairly prevalent phenomenon.

The genders in Japan are distinctly marked.  Women tend to walk differently here -- toes turned in, to men's turned out.  Women talk differently -- there is a whole set of separate vocabulary for the sexes, not to mention intonation.  The ideal woman's voice is one not much different from that of a six-year old, and one can often hear a woman's true deeper voice crack through in places between the careful intonations of her falsetto.  They even clap differently -- women in television audiences often applaud with splayed fingers, like the kindergarteners I know with still-developing motor skills.

Men and women sit differently.  A kindergarten principal once asked me to stop sitting on the floor cross-legged, because it was a bad example to the girls.  Kindergarteners, when sitting on the floor, are instructed which sitting position to take, depending on the situation: "Okaasan" (mother) position, "Otoosan" (father) position, and so on.  In formal situations, all children must sit as the mother (sitting with the feet folded under, and usually painful after just a few minutes, even for Japanese), but under no circumstances should a child or female sit like the father (cross-legged, and far more comfortable), as this position is reserved for adult males.  Children and women sit the same.  These rules are so ingrained that by the age of four, children know to make fun of me when I don't follow them.

Every society has its own ideas about femininity, masculinity, childhood, and adulthood.  In Japan though, it is hard to draw a line between the expectations of the feminine and of the child.  For marketing purposes, the two demographics seem almost to be counted as one.  "Kawaii," or "cute," lists near the top of most Japanese women's vocabularies, whereas in America, I'd rarely heard the word said by anyone over the age of twelve.  Kawaii is an adult woman's fluffy sequined shoes, the zoo of stuffed animals hooked to her designer purse, her cartoon monkey cell phone, her pigtails with heart-shaped barettes, the Winnie the Pooh toy her 35-year old boyfriend won for her at the game center on a date, the Hello Kitty suite at the local love hotel where they later retired, or a romantic trip to Mickey Mouse's Tokyo theme park for adults, Disney Sea.  A Japanese acquaintance in her 30s who recently married received Mickey and Minnie bride-and-groom stuffed toys from six different friends as wedding presents.  Hello Kitty kitchenware, irons, and vacuum cleaners for Japanese housewives are no more diffucult to find than the "Easy Bake Ovens" enjoyed by elementary school-aged girls in the West. 

The line between woman and girl in Japan is blurred almost to the point of indistinction.  Women wear heels on their shoes, but so do many little girls.  Girls carry stuffed animals and giggle, but so do women.   The phenomena have certainly done wonders for the international Lolita industries, and made Japan's schoolgirls famous worldwide.  The consequences for both women and girls seem severe.  Girls are openly sexualized to the point of predictable stereotype, anime copies girls copy anime, which can't be helpful in allowing them to grow into healthy, well-adjusted women.  And women seen as girls must face great obstacles when they must deal with the difficulties and desires of adults.  Ill-equipped to deal with adulthood, many Japanese women find themselves in situations they feel unable to change.  The Japanese divorce rate may be famously low, but the rate of happy, satisfied, emotionally-fulfilled women may be very low too.  The idea of a Peter Pan existence, being stuck forever in childhood, is appealing in a romantic, escapist way, yet I can't help but think of all one would miss out on too in such a life, and what a shame that would be.

It's been a while since I've seen an African-American.  There are very few in Japan.  There are probably more Africans than African-Americans, especially in big cities like Tokyo and Osaka.    Hip-hop culture is popular with Japanese teenagers though, and I've a couple times encountered Africans working in hip-hop clothing stores, pretending to be African-Americans, because I suppose that group has a bit more pop culture retail pulling-power here.   They have greeted me as I walked by with stereotypical hip-hop greetings, "Yo, wussup," but with a vaguely French accent.  It sounds a bit off, but quite charming.

I love Japan because of things like this last Saturday night. I visited old friends in another city and ended up at a punk rock show in a tiny smokey club. At the post-show beer-drinking and meat-eating party at a cheap local restaurant, I listened to the mohawked, leather-clad members of hardcore punk rock bands discuss at length and with real enthusiasm the regional differences in preparation of the breaded-pork-cutlet-and-rice dishes in the town we were in, compared with in the town one band had come from, just three hours away. I don't exactly recall the content of Saturday late night conversations I've had in Texas, but I am sure they were nothing like that.

It has been postulated by the sort of people that postulate things, that the character of Americans is partly shaped by an abundance of space. Those first European immigrant settlers and the starry-eyed explorers and frontiersmen who mapped out United States lands and became United States heroes learned their ambition, imagination, and self-reliance, but also their greed, wastefulness, and covetousness, from the unprecedented swaths of land that surrounded them on all sides.

If American character was influenced by its abundance of space, then Japanese character must be affected by the lack of it. I realize this as I sit now in the middle of Typhoon 23, Japan's tenth typhoon of the year.

In America, a common way to deal with a problem is to move. Sometimes moving is a luxury affording a respite from a mature head-on dealing with an issue -- the end of a relationship, an escape from a smothering relative, boredom. Sometimes, moving is necessary -- evacuating the site of a natural disaster, for instance, or following a valued job. Still, moving in America is really no big deal. We have plenty of space, and it's gradually all becoming more and more the same.

It's different in Japan. You're on a small, isolated, spottily habitable island the size of California. Disaster has struck. Where exactly do you think you're going to run to? And how?

Distance in America can be measured in days; in Japan it's by minutes and hours. When a hurricane hits Florida, the highways are deadlocked up to Georgia, or some other state where the storm is less likely to follow. When a typhoon hits Japan, it affects the whole country. The airports are closed, and the best anyone can do is scurry around in circles all under the same storm system, trying to stay indoors and away from the beach, which is rarely more than 100 miles away. Often the only option is resignation.

Resignation forms part of the core Japanese value of "gaman." To have gaman is to endure without complaint, to suffer quietly even in the worst of circumstances. The difficulty of this attitude is well-known, and those who succeed in it are appreciated and respected. Someone in a difficult situation may be told to "ganbatte," an interesting combination of "good luck," "do your best," and "way to go," but mostly "suck it up."

In the West, to show gaman is to risk the scorn of a self-martyr, and the person displaying it may be told, "grow some balls," or even "why don't you just move?"

Hurricane footage on TV generally shows lots of abandoned homes, damage estimates, and shelter dwellers crying or raising their fists at God. People watching on their home sets may sympathize, or they may wonder aloud why those people just didn't drive to Alabama. There may be little sympathy for the people who refused to evacuate altogether, they just sat in their homes and took it, people may say. Each household's survival is largely their own responsibility, and they can take it or leave it, people may think.

Typhoon footage tends to show people nobly wading to the train station, courageously trying to stay upright with their umbrellas intact as they ford a crosswalk, probably with the signal, waiting patiently in orderly crowds for cancelled trains and airplanes, suffering quietly. There is nowhere to run to in a small island nation, so they sit in their homes, looking with resignation at this year's crops and neighbors' fences blowing down the street, because there is simply nothing else to do, as it has always been.

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Interestingly, Japan's suffering of a record 10 typhoons this year -- the usual number is 2 or 3 -- is likely due to a consequence of a Western misperception of an infinite amount of space: global warming.

Both for extra money, and the priceless opportunity to talk to people over the age of 5 now and then, I teach a couple English classes to adults each week at night. This evening, we discussed superstitions; I told them some from my country, and they shared some from theirs. Here are a few from Japan:

The number 4 is very unlucky; its kanji is pronounced the same as the one for death. Just as in America, you won't find many buildings with 13th floors, Japan avoids the number 4 in things like hospital room numbers, parking lots, and other places.

8 is a good number.

If you lie down immediately after eating, you will turn into a cow.

When lightning strikes, you should cover your belly button.

If a funeral car passes, you should hide your thumbs. Most effective is to tuck them into your fists.

If you whistle at night, a snake will come.

You should not cut your fingernails at night, or you will not be able to be with your parents on their deathbeds.

Do not sleep with your head towards the North. That's how they lay the dead.

Similarly, a kimono or yukata should always be worn left side over right side. Right over left is how the dead are dressed.

If you are a shopowner, leaving a small pile of salt in front of your store will attract customers.

A moving truck carrying the furniture of a just-married couple must never drive backwards. Drivers of these trucks often carry cash to give to oncoming cars they might meet in narrow roads to encourage others to do any necessary reversing.

Never say words like "break" or "cut" or "separate" at a wedding, not even if you're talking about the cake, or the ribbon, or an egg, or the cheese.

Never leave your chopsticks sticking out of your rice. And definitely don't pass food directly from your own chopsticks to someone else's, because that's how bones of cremated bodies are passed at funerals.

If you find a snake's skin on the ground, you will become rich.

Wishes can be made on shooting stars.

View from Gifu Castle

The highest point in my city is Mt. Kinka, elevation 329 meters. At its top sits tiny Gifu Castle, a 1950s reconstruction of the 16th century original, once a residence of famous feudal lord Nobunaga Oda. A castle of some sort has sat atop Mt. Kinka since at least the 12th century, and from almost anywhere in the city, you can see it.

It's wonderful to have a castle in my city -- by day, no matter how many wrong turns I take, it always points my way back downtown, and by night, when dark Mt. Kinka itself melts into the nightsky background, the floodlit castle seems to hover whimsically above the city. A lot of the castle's likeability though is that I know these days it's inhabited only by a friendly elderly tour guide or two and the nice old woman who sits in the ticket booth and gives me free postcards, rather than say, a powerful warmongering god-like feudal lord and the soldiers who protect him with their lives.

Hundreds of years ago, the ancestors of my neighbors lived their lives at the foot and mercy of this mountaintop castle. Not only could they see the castle everywhere they went, especially in the absence of skyscrapers and pachinko parlor lights, but surely they must have felt that it could see them too. Some days I feel that myself, and even knowing it's only those old tour guides and the postcard lady up there, it gives me pause. When I'm running late to work, I'll swear it stares down at me reproachfully in my car. Everywhere I go, that castle can see me. Imagine if the White House, FBI headquarters, and Pentagon were all built at the top of some high hill in the center of your town; I wonder if that's what it felt like.

I've spent a lot of time lately in a Japanese hospital. I'll not get into why and only assure you not to worry. It has, if nothing else though, been yet another enlightening cultural experience. I've been lucky enough so far not to have spent too much time in American hospitals. A playground accident here, a scooter wreck there, but about average, and without much basis for comparison. Even without much hospital experience though, a lot about Japanese hospitals, well, strikes me.

Japanese people spend on average a whole lot more time in hospitals than Americans. A major reason for this may have to do with expense. In 1995, under the National Health Insurance plan, "high-cost medical care" was anything that exceeded approximately $600 in one household in one month. An American patient could easily run up that kind of bill in a single day, before prescriptions. I've walked out of doctor's offices here for $30 uninsured, while I doubt an American doctor would even look under the door at me for under $100. Still, it's not just the money at work here, it must be something else too.

When an American gets sick, particularly a poor or middle class one, chances are he staggers over to the local supermarket pharmacy and gets the strongest thing he can that will still allow him to drive to work in the morning. When a Japanese person gets sick, even just a cold, he goes to the hospital. The first time an adult Japanese student told me he had gone to the hospital for a cold, I assumed I had just hit a language barrier. In fact, I hadn't.

From the Japan Health Handbook (1995), some interesting statistics (circa 1990) on hospital stays in Japan vs. the U.S.:
Average hospital stay: Japan 37 days; U.S. 6.4.
For normal childbirth: Japan 8.3 days; U.S. 2.9
Diabetes: Japan 53.4 days; U.S. 7.1
Asthma: Japan 31.5 days; U.S. 4.5
Cancer: Japan 57.1 days; U.S. 9.2

The book also says the average Japanese makes 14 visits to the doctor each year, compared with an American at less than 5. There are several possible reasons: affordability, accessibility to preventative medicine, and the fact that doctors in Japan generally only give enough medicine for 3 or 4 days, with several follow-up visits required to monitor medicine and illness. This may help account for why Japanese have one of the highest life expectancy rates in the world, but it also means they spend an awful lot of time in waiting rooms.

What struck me most about Japanese hospitals is the expectation placed on patients to handle much of their own bureaucratic processing, communication, and care. A general hospital includes dozens of separate departments -- internal medicine, opthamology, pediatrics, gynecology, X-ray and testing labs, and so on, each of which seems to operate autonomously from the others. If a patient's case requires the consultation of different departments, he must communicate between these departments himself. A patient goes, say, to general medicine, and is told he needs blood work. He is handed a map of the building, goes to the appropriate department, gets the blood tests, and waits for the results. These results are given to him on printouts or in a folder, and he then must take the results himself back to the original requesting department. The doctor looks over the results, gives him some sort of general diagnosis, and recommends he consult another department. The patient contacts that department, arranges the appointment, and then repeats to the second doctor, as best he can, the diagnosis the first doctor gave him. God help you if you're not up on your medical lingo, and good luck if you're a sublingual foreigner. If you're a sublingual foreigner with no medical knowledge, well let's just hope you've got a good interpreter with a day off from work.

If you are planning a long-term hospital stay in Japan, the Japan Health Handbook recommends you bring the following: a watch, because medicine for the entire day is often handed out in the morning, and it is up to the patient to take dosages at the appropriate times; pajamas, robe, and towels, because these are not provided by the hospital; your own glass, cutlery, and chopsticks for the same reason; a laundry bag and clothes pins, because you will be responsible for doing your own laundry in one of the coin-op machines somewhere on the premises; something to boil water in if you want anything hot to drink, and preferably a thermos bottle from home; plastic bags because you'll need to separate your own burnables and recyclables; cash because you have to pay before you're discharged; if you're having chest or abdominal surgery, you'll need to make and bring along your own cotton sheeting binders for holding on the dressing; and don't forget gifts for the staff. It is more or less expected that you will also have a relative staying with you your entire visit; most hospitals don't issue name bracelets or I.D. cards, because it is assumed there will be someone there to say your name whenever it is needed. Bathing is done Japanese style -- shower outside the tub, then soak in the tub after you're clean. Don't pull the plug when you're done though, because the sick person after you will use the same water.

Weeks- or months-long waits for tests or operations is not unusual. Hours spent in waiting rooms is common -- appointments are not given for specific times, but for spaces in blocks: a certain number of patients will be seen in a several hours' block-worth of time, and one of those patients will be you. Often your name is called (and if you're a foreigner it's probably also butchered, so listen closely), and you are only ushered into yet another waiting room, to wait again, and then maybe again. Each new department you're sent to involves an elevator ride and a new wait, and even to pay at the end, you have to take a number, usually a couple sets of ten after the one lit on the board. Every hospital visit is a half-day venture, and yet still people go, and frequently.

Second opinions are generally not sought in Japan. If you do decide to consult another doctor, it must be done in utmost secrecy and under great taboo, lest the first doctor think he failed to inspire utter confidence. For some hospitals, a letter of introduction from a private or business contact is first required, and seeking a second opinion may further shame that contact. If despite all this, you still seek out another doctor, and that doctor for some reason rejects you, better hope the first one doesn't find out, or you're really in trouble.

Many doctors split their time between several hospitals, so your chances of seeing the same doctor twice are slim. Some hospitals only have specialists in certain areas one or a few days a week. It is rare to have any consultation with a doctor last longer than 3 minutes. The longer your case lasts, the trickier it gets to recite all previously found facts and hypotheses to each new doctor you see. For some reason, the question, "Couldn't you just ask the last doctor I saw?" might get you a funny look.

A sobering note from the Japan Health Handbook (p. 27):

The word "hospital" denotes a wide variety of institutions, not all of which may match your expectations of a high-tech, sterile environment. In Japan, the outer appearance of a medical facility is not necessarily an indication of the care you receive -- some of the most prestigious hospitals have rundown-looking buildings and shabby furniture. Many institutions don't seem to have money left over from their limited funds to give their facilities a facelift. On the inside, too, Japan's crowded living and working conditions are reflected in the equimpment and supplies stored in the hallways and large communal wards. Don't confuse clutter with uncleanliness, but if you see dirty instruments, dust under the examining tables, and personnel in stained uniforms, it may be time to look for another hospital.

While I've never been in a Japanese hospital I would call outright unhygienic, America does clearly put a lot more emphasis on the aesthetics of a sterile medical environment than Japan. I've not seen anything so bad as to feel threatened, but without getting into it too much, the examining rooms I've been in here do tend to hold much more obvious signs of their previous occupants than I've seen in the States. Like blood.

Hospital experiences are nearly always bad, or at least painful. Hospital experiences in a foreign country though, with difficult medical lingo in a language of which you barely understand even the basics, in a strong family-centered culture where you have no family of your own, in a place with considerable differences in history, opinion, and approach to medicine than the one you came from, is something which... well, something about making me stronger. And I'll leave it at that.

The ￥100 shop (dollar store) near my apartment stopped carrying my favorite candy, a packet of lemondrop-flavored gummy circles that I'm supposed to believe are vitamins. That's how candy is here, it only stays around for a season, so it's foolish to get attached. Luckily, it took my fickle heart only moments to move on-- to "Bears Choco." I didn't take the time to sound out the words on the box, but it looked a bit like M&Ms, so I threw one in my basket. The package was a weird triangular tube, and featured a curious collage of fruits, pastel balls, and a flying disembodied pink teddy bear head, pretty average for a Japanese candy.

I got stuck in traffic coming home, so I opened the box. Peanuts M&M-sized balls in pleasing decorator colors -- hues of seagrass, wild fuschia, misty jade, celestial blue -- not a green or pink or blue or yellow in the box. Thin crunchy candy shell, like an M&M, layer of milk chocolate, and then whoo!, something gummy. I swallowed suspiciously and fished out another. This time I ate the candy carefully, like when I was little and weirdly obsessed with preserving the whole inner peanut intact. Making sure no other drivers were watching, I pulled the gummy thing out of my mouth. I turned on the light. There was a whole, very tiny, very detailed gummy bear head, in the middle of my candy. Who else would ever look in there? I read the box when I got home, and there it was in Japanese with exclamation points, "Gummy bear inside chocolate!" "Juicy strawberry gummy!" But why? It's like putting matchbox cars in Cocoa puffs, statuettes in a grape!

I've had better candy, but this is why I love it. It actually encourages people to put candy in their mouths, suck on it a while, and then pull it back out and look at it! Maybe even show it to their friends! And this as its greatest selling point, right there on the box! Gross!