Nissin Kare Meshi and the Theology of Japanese Advertising

My personal theology holds that the afterlife is a room full of screens running Japanese advertising on a loop. I’ve stopped trying to decide if that makes it heaven or hell.

Nissin—the company that invented Cup Noodles and therefore occupies a permanent place in the diet of everyone who’s ever been broke, a student, or both—released an ad for their Kare Meshi curry rice product that crystallizes everything I love about Japanese commercial filmmaking. There are children being trampled. There are schoolgirls with expressions of polite academic interest. There are grains of rice that appear to be dancing. The whole thing moves at the pace of a fever and lands somewhere between advertisement and short experimental film, which is exactly where Japanese advertising is most comfortable.

It operates on a logic with no Western equivalent. The product barely matters. What matters is the emotional temperature of the 30 seconds—the color, the density, the precise calibration of wrongness. Nissin has always understood this. Their campaigns have featured samurai, stop-motion universes, and now trampled children who may or may not be aware they’re selling curry rice. Kare Meshi makes me want to eat rice and question my assumptions in roughly equal measure, which is more than most advertising manages.