The Great Meme Detective: Inquiring Minds Want to Know
So I learned the hard way that the Google picture image search is not actually my friend. I figured that an easy way to answer the question posed by this meme would be too look up the picture, and see if I could get some results for the original product, so I did an initial picture image search, but unsurprisingly, I got results for the meme, not the actual bag of chips. The instructions I found that taught me how to do the search, said that it would work better if you crop it, so I got rid of the words up top, but that didn’t change anything either
What comes next gives you true insight into the winding ways of my mind, because instead of Googling “Japanese Doritos,” which might be the first logical step, I wondered what Wikipedia had to say? Not much, to be honest. The Lay’s page doesn’t have a sub-section for Japan, the Frito-Lay page’s Asian section also deals with the Middle East and Africa, and really doesn’t tell you much of anything. Neither does the Doritos or Pepsi Co pages. I had turned to Wikipedia in an effort to narrow down and direct what I’d thought might be a deluge of unhelpful travel blogs, but all I got was a wasted twenty minutes. I’m a trained researcher, I promise.
As it turns out, perhaps only surprising only myself, the first entry for “doritos in Japan,” was more than I could have possibly dreamed. In 2014, Brian Ashcroft wrote about “The Delicious World of Japanese Doritos,” where, amongst other bags of corn-chip goodness, we find a rather familiar image.
To answer the basic question, according to Ashcroft, the chips are black pepper and salt flavor, with added bamboo charcoal (and the chips were black in color). The next question might be, then, what does bamboo charcoal taste like, but apparently it’s a health additive. Apparently, its tasteless and is pretty much just a more specific type of activated charcoal. According to a company that wants to sell you air purifiers, bamboo activated charcoal has more surface area than regular-degular charcoal, which helps it react better to the things it’s filtering. They were kind enough to point potential customers to research suggesting that activated bamboo charcoal can help reduce previously dangerous levels of formaldehyde gas to lower than safe if it is carbonized at 1000°C.
Certainly, lots of places note that carbon is used in traditional Japanese, Chinese, and other East Asian traditions to treat several things, including upset stomach, and if you go to the emergency room for overdose or ingesting some sort of poison, they’ll give you charcoal to help absorb then pass the toxic substance (here’s a nice reader friendly summery I found). One might see how Frito-Lay Japan might add bamboo charcoal for health reasons, though I don’t know if the customer who’s willing to eat a corn chip that’s been dyed black is that all interested in the health claims, to be honest.
To my mind, the much more interesting bit of information, from Ashcroft is that the cartoon on the bag is called Taitsukun. From their English language website description, it sound like a naughtier one panel Dilbert, but it . . . well, I’m lacking appropriate comparisons, so just follow the link, okay? They are rather funny (but also slut-shame-y, heterosexist, and transphobic, hello early to mid 2000s “humor”), and like a lot comics that try to perform hyper-masculinity, they end up being amusingly homoerotic as well—something that is underlined by the insistence that the viewer “read between the lines.” We now know that Johnathan is the orange guy with glasses and Pierre is the yellow one that’s being thrown around. Their most recent merchandise was a pack of cards, and luckily for us, the website has the panel from our bag of chips translated to: “Don’t we have any other way to motivate our workers?”
From their website it looks like the chip arrived on shelves in 2006, with two varieties, and four different packaging styles. The English website is also now more than ten years out date, and English language Google results seem to be equally interested in the chip bag as the actual art. Which, I guess, is the point of the deal, at least for the creators of Taitsukun, in the first place. Cross-promotion is supposed to get the fans of one thing (Doritos) to learn about the other (Taitsukun) or vice versa. Sometimes these types of things can be seen as one side bringing up the other, but seeing as the Japanese are internationally renowned for their home-grown snacks, and the Japan is largely absent from the Frito-Lay world (on Wikipedia), I’m wondering if it’s Taitsukun that was doing the heavy lifting here, at least in Japan. Just some idle speculation to sprinkle in with your bamboo charcoal, I guess.
Because ultimately, this meme is an interesting expression of something the internet does rather well: Allow for cross-cultural exchange that is fun and interesting, but also might end up being a varying degrees of racist.
There’s a temptation in the US, but I gather other places as well, to think of Japan as this extremely weird and exotic place where social conventions are “so different” (I’ve linked memes instead of including examples of this kind of racism here, for obvious reasons). As a tumblr user called chocolate-sprite explains, for some Americans, there is a perception that Japan is a haven for weirdos and outcasts, because their most meaningful interaction with Japanese culture, typically through anime, manga, or video games, is incredibly heightened and fantastical versions of an imagined world that actual Japanese people also find exaggerated, fanciful, and niche.
But this sort of essentializing and reduction of a diverse, complex culture to “oh, you know Japan is just weird,” has a long history in Eurocentric cultures. Orientalism by Edward Said has become a classic text in liberal arts education (I had it assigned twice during undergrad), because it clearly outlines how “western” — Eurocentric — cultures’ ideas of “the East” or “the Orient” end up revolving around stereotypes of a dangerous, mysterious, often magical, and definitely less-than “other” that stands in for real-world Middle Eastern and Asian cultures. It’s not a large stretch to connect weeaboos to a cultural tradition of glorifying something while also reducing it to a parody of itself, but there’s a reading of this meme that taps into this idea as well.
This meme works, in part, because the idea that Japanese culture is unknowable and inherently “different from us,” which is a stereotype that often crosses the boarder to racism, and is just not true. The best advice on writing successful questions is to keep them rhetorical, or make them contain their own answer. I’d argue that “What the hell flavor of Dorito is this?” is one of those questions. To be fair to the meme, the Taitsukun cartoon is intentionally obscure (even Pierre and Johnathan are confused at why they’re doing what their doing), so it’s not like there’s not a lot of context clues to help those of us who don’t read Japanese out; however, it still does its part to maintain some really unhelpful stereotypes about Japan. Luckily for us, clearly, there are answers out here for those who want them—even if we complicate things for ourselves unnecessarily with picture Google Image searches.
