Tragic treats

If you're going to use an image to market a product, you'd want the image to be a positive one, wouldn't you?

Well. Today I saw a bunch of candies on display. The candies come in good-sized tins, and printed on every tin was a picture of Setsuko, the young girl from the potently depressing anime flick, Grave of the Fireflies. These tins of candy, you see, closely resemble a tin that Setsuko carries with her through hardship after hardship, symbolizing (if I may be so bold as to venture) her inexhaustible and heart-breaking innocence.

The cognitive dissonance is difficult to convey if you haven't seen the movie. So, as a rough analogy, imagine seeing a red dress on sale, and imagine that it's being promoted using a shot of the Red Dress from Schindler's List.

(And I just read to the end of the GotF page I linked to above, where I read this: "when this film debuted in Japanese theaters, it was shown as a double-feature with My Neighbor Totoro!" This also makes my head hurt.)

Shortly after spotting these candies, I accompanied some friends to a nearby arcade, where we saw the coolest shooting game ever. The gameplay is much like VirtuaCop or Time Crisis, except the game machine has sensors that read the position of your body. So, if you want to duck behind the side of a cop car, you actually physically crouch down; if you want to dodge out of a doorway and take cover behind a wall, you actually physically step to the side. It was hellafun, except that I turned out to be a big fan of crouching, which more or less destroyed my legs.

Of course, none of us did particularly well at any of the games by local standards. Japanese arcade fans are crazy.

(Thanks to Won Yung for the clip. PS, Won Yung is not a ring-leader.)