Commercials – A Geek in Japan

I someone tells you that making a CM about “A new pasta sauce made with Gaddidae fish rod (“Tarako” in Japanese) for a company called Kewpied Corporation”, would you think that you could became one of the most popular person in the country? That’s exactly what happened some months ago to this two 11 and 13 years old girls.

Note: from now on I will refer to “tarako” as “cod roe” since cod is one of the most common species inside the Gaddidae family.

I was walking around Tokyo streets when I realized that I was whistling an strange song that had came to my mind in a mysterious way. Later the same day, near a pachinko I listened the song I had been whistling a while ago. My curiosity drove me near the pachinko where I saw this in a big screen:

A big WTF! and thousands of questions came to my mind. Is this a CM? What the hell are they selling with this CM? Who are those two girls? WTF are those little read potatoes with a happy face? Some days later I was listening “Tarako, tarako, tarako” everwhere, it was the one of the main converstation themes among my coworkers, it became a BIG nightmare!

I have no idea if Kewpie is selling a lot of pasta with cod roe sauce but the two girls how performed that strange dance in the CM that where totally unknown at the moment they already have two CDs, they are invited to many TV shows and we could say that they are pretty famous in Japan right now.

Did you guessed what are the huge red hats that the girls are wearing in the first video? Those hats are cod roe is tarako! And those little cute things jumping and dancing are also code roe!

This plush is a best seller in Japan. Is a tarako plush know as “tarako kewpie”. At my work place there are five of these including different variations.

That’s real tarako. I find it pretty amazing how they created a mascot and song from this thing.