Teens will be kids
Legal adulthood in Japan begins at the age of 18. Because of that, you’ll sometimes see products labeled with “18禁,” which is read “juhachikin” and means “not allowed for those under 18,” designating the package’s contents as inappropriate for consumption by minors. However, there will always be teens who want to push back when others try to impose limits on them. This week, in Tokyo’s Ota Ward, a group of high schoolers got their hands on some juhachikin items and decided to partake while on school grounds, and, as is often the case with teen rebellion, things ended badly. So were these kids smoking, drinking, or watching porn at school? Nope, they were eating potato chips, and it ended with more than a dozen of them needing to be taken to the hospital.
During the lunch period at Rokugo Technical High School on Tuesday, a male student brought out a bag of Juhachikin Curry potato chips. Manufactured by Ibaraki Prefecture food/snack company Isoyama Shoji, the chips are an offshoot of the company’s Juhachikin brand of instant curry, so named because it’s so spicy that Isoyama Shoji recommends it only for adult consumers. The boy shared the chips with roughly 30 other students, and before the day was over, roughly half of them ended up receiving medical attention. Soon after eating the chips, a number of the teens began to feel nauseous and experience intense burning sensations on their lips and in their stomachs. Ambulances were called, and 14 first-year students (who would be 15 or 16 years old in accordance with the Japanese school system), were taken to the hospital for further examination/treatment.
Was it a high school prank? The package design that evokes the style of Japanese adult videos and magazines, the package does also contain extensive warnings about the extreme spiciness of the product. Actually, ingesting spice beyond what your system can properly process can lead to bleeding from the stomach and vomiting blood, which can result in dangerously sudden drops in blood pressure. Since the organs don’t reach their full strength until adulthood, consuming such heavily spiced food can be legitimately dangerous for teens and children. Though labeled and marketed as “for adults only,” Juhachikin Curry chips are not, in a legal sense, prohibited from being sold to minors.
Not all Japanese potato chips are poisonous. Some taste good, if you like KFC. Yes, they have two flavors of Kentucky Fried Chicken potato chips. Ahiruneko boasts that his KFC original recipe fundamentalism has sharpened his sense of smell to the point where he can recognize the aroma of Original Recipe chicken as surely as a customs dog can detect contraband at the airport. He picked up a chip and popped it into his mouth, and sure enough, there were the special spices. You wouldn’t call the KFC Original Chicken Flavor chips “spicy,” but by comparison, they’re spicier than KFC Original Recipe chicken, so Ahiruneko doesn’t feel like the chips really taste like KFC chicken. They taste great! Ahiruneko thinks they’d go especially well with a nice cold beer. And though they don’t taste like KFC chicken, they still taste like chicken…but not Western-style fried chicken. So in the end, these are still great-tasting chips, especially if you’re craving chicken flavors.
Tastes of Japan
What do you call a fake Japanese carp fish?
A dekoi…
Did you hear about the new lawyer themed sushi restaurant that opened up the other day?
It’s called Sosumi.
What’s the Preferred Luxury Automobile of Sushi Chefs around the world?
Rolls Rice.
It’s interesting to think about the way the Japanese think of us as just the place where the Toyotas go.
August 7th Birthdays
1962 – Maggie Wheeler, 1975 – Charlize Theron, 1983 – Abbie Cornish, 1993 – Francesca Eastwood
1992 – Mike Trout, 1997 – Brett Gray, 1960 – David Duchovny, 1967 – David Mann