Saturday, February 20, 2010

edamame Kit Kat bars

My friend Mizuho brought us many gifts today -- some delicious homemade tonkatsu sushi rolls (the fried pork bits were wrapped in shiso leaf-yum!), a variety of soft drinks in wacky cans, a box of Belgian waffles, and some edamame-flavored Kit Kat bars. They are the same creme wafers but coated in something pale green, which I can only describe as "like white chocolate with a hint of something else."

Also flavors sold somewhere in Japan at one time or another: pickled plum, bubblegum, wasabi, cucumber, apple, maple syrup, caramel salt, sakura (cherry blossom), yuzu (sweet lemon citrus) and azuki (sweet red bean).

I lifted this straight off wikipedia (so of course it must all be true):

In recent years, Kit Kats have become very popular in Japan, a phenomenon attributed to the coincidental similarity between the bar's name and the Japanese phrase kitto katsu, which roughly translates to "You will surely win!" This has reportedly led to parents and children buying them for school examination days as a sort of good luck charm.

However, transliteration is not always in Nestlé's favour -
kitto katto (where 'katto' is taken to be a katakana transliteration of the English verb 'cut') is understood to bestow Kit Kat with the less positive significance of "you will surely miss the cut". As such, gifts of a single Kit Kat are a running joke for senior high school students taking the University Entrance Examinations in some areas...

Further building on the teen market, Nestlé created a music label in 2005 and bundled Kit Kats with CDs, which has propelled the Kit Kat to become the #1 selling biscuit in Japan...

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