The Best Advertising

If someone told me I could only watch one type of visual content for the rest of my life, it would be Japanese commercials. Hands down. You watch these spots and half the time you genuinely don’t know what’s happening, and then the last frame just hits you with a product that you had absolutely no idea existed.

There’s this obsessive YouTube channel called JPCMHD that hunts down the weirdest and funniest Japanese commercials every couple weeks and dumps them in HD. It’s basically a direct pipeline to everything my brain loves about weird, committed visual culture that doesn’t care about selling anything real.

So you’re watching AKB48 members following Keanu Reeves around, or Kyary Pamyu Pamyu doing her thing with Mario, old guys breathing fire, demons eating candy, fathers completely unraveling in a supermarket. None of it makes sense. The editing is hyperactive, the acting is all-in on nonsense, and the product being advertised feels like an afterthought.

I love Japan for this. Not in spite of the weirdness—because of it.