This Curry Rice Proves It

I spend my whole life being hit with Japanese commercials from every angle. The sky, other people’s screens, my own phone at 2 AM. None of it matters because they’re loud and they’re off in ways that somehow work, and this new Nissin curry rice commercial called Kare Meshi is so completely, unapologetically Japanese that it makes every other ad I’ve ever seen feel like a lie.

The spot doesn’t explain anything. Trampled children. A schoolgirl who suddenly notices. Rice that’s achieved some kind of consciousness or humanity or whatever’s happening there. It moves like someone had an idea at 3 AM and nobody said this is insane, which is exactly why it works.

There’s this thing Japanese advertising does where it doesn’t care if you understand it. American ads want a feeling from you—they want you invested. Japanese ads just throw colors and texture and pure nonsense at you and whatever sticks is fine. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes disturbing, usually both at once.

The thing that gets me is how intentional it all is. The production is thoughtful. The cuts are sharp. It takes itself seriously while describing humanoid rice, which is the whole trick. And then that final line just goes for it—there’s something deeply horny about it, something that has nothing to do with food, and it just sits there like a confession.

I can’t look away. I don’t want to look away. Japanese advertising broke something in me that regular ads can’t fix. Once you’ve seen a curry rice commercial that’s conceptually broken and genuinely horny at the same time, everything else just feels like someone reading from a script.