A little bit of design: Sapporo Lager Beer

Sapporo have put out a few retro beer can designs this year, along with what (I think) is a different kind of lager beer than the standard black label they put out at the moment. The last one I saw was alright, but this new one is a really nice piece of design:


Needless to say that this would be my beer of choice all the time if it were widely available in this can. Not that I put design before flavour or anything... And as a last throw away line, I do much prefer drinking beer from 330ml cans than from the 500ml cans that are standard for beer in the UK.

Recent Homeware Purchases

I mean, ok I bought a whole bunch of things for my new appartment that were more important than these, but where's the fun in reading about my second hand washing machine or my eco-friendly fridge?

Don't try to answer that. There is no fun.

Although I suppose the fact that I got "eco-points" from the government that apparently might net me some kind of gift voucher if I ever work out how to redeem them is quite nice.

Anyway, I didn't even want wire coathangers, but the plastic ones were so ugly, and then I noticed this little piece of sales hyperbole:


Slightly convenient? Oh Daiso, why do you undersell yourself so? There was a time when you could've used one of these to steal a car! Not just to bend into weird shapes and hang shoes on. TV Antenna? Poking things?


Oh this? This is just my ceramic kitchen knife. Shit yeah! Finally we're outgrowing metal and moving onto future polymer... something... Anyway it's meant to never get dull, be easy to clean and sharp to boot! Well, yes sharp enough that the first time I was using it I thought "Wow, this is pretty sharp!" and promptly sliced into my finger. Hence the plaster in that picture.

Oh! Ha ha! That's some kind of irony right?

Using a ceramic knife really does feel like I belong to some kind of advanced sci-fi civilisation where items are made from some durable white futuro-plastic and everyone wears pastel tunics and refers to each other by an inordinately long string of titles.

"What are you doing Pro-Arch-Senator-General Williams?"

"Merely slicing a tomato Semi-Vice-Brigadeer-Marquis Hapsburg. See how effortless it is?"

This seasons model: Meiji Choco-Banana-Au-Lait

From the same people that brought you the awesome Lemogre and Acerola and Lemon packaging I wrote about before:


Choco-Banana-Au-Lait. It's pretty nice for a milk drink, and I approve of the infinite regression / bunny-girl crossover they've gone with.


In weather news we seem to have entered a "Bonus Winter Stage" where the weather reverts to the same sporadic snow, freezing winds, and death-trap streets that we had back in December. I'm cool with it, y'know I love the snow, but if I'm really honest... it's been winter here now for at least four months. Spring will probably be pretty nice.

Kiss to Pizza

I ordered pizza from the delivery company Strawberry Cones last night. Aside from the fact that it seems to be a pizza company with an ice cream company's name, it was pretty good. The worrying thing was on packaging for the side order:


The chilling concept that the children might write a formal letter to their parents which clearly, and insultingly, states that they love pizza more than Mom and Dad. In fact read it again:


Ad copy, or excerpt from a sibling suicide pact note? I'm not saying anything... I'm just saying.

Also there's this:


Which... yeah.

A Bagful of Sticks and Carrots

I figure that, being pragmatic, one of the main uses of this blog should be to give people an inside view of what living in Japan is like. I mean, coz clearly there's not enough blogs and sites doing that already.

Ahem.

(The ahem is meant to indicate that the preceding statement was sarcast... oh never mind)

So here's something you get from day to day life in Japan: shop assistants love bagging and wrapping things up for you. I'm pretty sure I've gone into this before, but my mind is fried this week, so humour me. Seriously, much more than in the UK, and to a farcically impractical degree. I have a pretty good understanding with the donut shop I buy coffee at now, whereby they know me and just give me the coffee, in my hand, and I walk out the door. At first though it was coffee, in a paper bag, in a plastic bag, and then it tips over as soon as you pick the plastic bag up. I like the new deal.

This can be tied into Japan's phenomenal service culture of course, but it's really, really wasteful when the supermarkets are always giving you more plastic bags than you need, or bagging your groceries for you into far too many bags. Wasteful... until yesterday that is!

As of October 1st, both of the Supermarkets I go to regularly have stopped giving out free plastic bags! Not only that, they are using both the stick (5 yen per bag) and the carrot (1 yen off your shopping if you bring your own bag) to incentivise their customers. Seriously, I'm astonished and delighted, but now I have no idea what I'm going to use as bin bags at home coz those medium sized Daiei bags were just the beans.

I guess I'll take one for Mother Earth.

Back to the Juice Boxes

Variant packaging for a new flavour of juice? Oh Japan... you didn't.


It's sky-writing! Good grief that's awesome. For my original post on the original juice box go here. Thankfully the Grapefruit & Lemon is much better than the Acerola & Lemon:


Mmmmm, designy.

Japanese Packaging – So Seductive, So Sinful

Last summer I developed something of a crush on the squeezed lemon drink “Lemogre”. Put aside that the name inspires visions of citrus-trolls crushing other fruits underfoot and despoiling orchards, it was a delicious crushed lemon drink with lots of pulp too. I liked it so much I hollowed out its carcass and it’s my pencil pot now.


This year, Lemogre’s back and it’s having its ass handed to it by a far weedier Acerola & Lemon beverage.

That’s some lovely design right there, shame the drink tastes how I imagine a saline drip does.

This year’s Lemogre package is somewhat more shoddily illustrated, with a “hot manga chick”. She does however seem to be screaming insanely in one speech bubble.

“ Yheeeei!!” Is the sound I imagine a hell-harpy makes as it’s trying to claw your eyes out. Elsewhere on the packaging we learn that “Lemogre is Squeeeezed!!”

The point here being that Japanese consumables come in some wonderfully realised packaging, both in graphic design and ease of use. The downside of this being that there’s always far too much packaging, and the wastage is horrifying. A bag of cookies where the cookies are protected by a plastic tray, and further INDIVIDUALLY wrapped in more plastic? A coffee, stabilised by a card frame inside a paper bag inside a plastic bag? Are you going to toilet paper Mother Natures tree too, or are you done now?