Weird Japanese Snack #6

This one has been fairly long in coming. I got this one on my usual Monday morning (thanks Terry). Again, not Japanese but Korean. They're no slouches when it comes to challenging snack foods themselves. I really had to wait for the mood for octopus flavored potato crisps to come along. It came along yesterday afternoon and stayed for about 17 seconds.




Immediately upon opening the bag you get a whiff of the ocean. A whiff of the ocean on a breezeless, hot summer day. With lots of seaweed on the beach......



This is gonna be harder than I thought. They shaped the potato based crisps into crude semblances of an octopus, I think. Actually, it looks more like a Pepperidge Farm Goldfish, the snack that smiles back, rather than a Korean ocotopus flavored snack chip, the chip that takes you aback....

So I actually ate one. Just one. That was all I needed. While not overpowering it was not good. I have to tell you, I have tasted this taste before. I frequently use raw squid as bait when I fish. Sometimes I eat things while I'm fishing. Sometimes that thing is potato chips. Sometimes, in the spirit of "Hey, you got chocolate in my peanut butter!", the two collide when I don't clean my hands. It's not good.....not good......

To close this out, I have to tell you quickly about a phenomenon in Japan. It's called the "Korean Wave." It's starting to fade now, but a few years ago a Korean soap opera called Winter Sonata became a smash hit in Japan, mostly with middle-aged women. The show's star, Kim Bae Jong, plays the kind of decent, dutiful, Confucian ideal man that Japanese women can't seem to find in Japan anymore. At any rate, he's a huge star in Japan now and recently he and his co-star in Winter Sonata, it's a love story of course, appeared at the Tokyo Dome and sort of role played their on-screen characters to a live audience. You can see the demographic in the video. It's pretty hilarious. I kept it together until the part with, well, I won't spoil it. You can watch it here.