Keeping Up With Suntory

In watching media from various countries around the world, I've learned that different cultures have their own unique approaches to advertizing and product placement. In America we're rather shameless about thrusting a can of whatever carbonated corn syrup tincture is paying for a show right into the middle of a frame, or even having an otherwise sinister villain give a speech about the wonders of a particular brand of cell phone. The French, being French, just make everything somehow relate to sex and apparently all of South America just can't get enough of bright colors and choreographed dance numbers. And then we get to Japan, the country that has made it its business for the past sixty years to take every aspect of foreign pop culture and amplify it to mockingly absurd levels. Japanese companies don't care if you know what's happening in their commercials or even if you approve of whatever nightmare they're trying to give you, just as long as you remember what product they're ostensibly trying to encourage you to buy.

The Japanese also don't care if their insane sales pitches ruin your favorite celebrity or cartoon character. They'll put ridiculous costumes on A-list movie stars and make them act like they're just another segment of an LSD-fueled circus. Somewhere along the way, bizarre cultural mutants will rise out of this melange of insane marketing and be nearly indistinguishable from the once-respectable members of the entertainment media around them. Take this cavalcade of bad trips that have been appropriated by the Suntory company.

As an American, I'm marginally aware of Suntory because of its appearance in Lost In Translation and now apparently this liquor company has branched out into other food items. This is only marginally strange, considering that American brewers have been dipping their toes into that ill-advised pool of revenue for several years now. Of course, they mostly just slap their names on things that are tangentially related to their chief product. Whiskey can actually add a nice flavor to something like barbecue sauce, so I let the middling folks over at Jack Daniels have their excursions. But Suntory now produces sandwiches and has partnered with a genetics company to create the as yet impossible blue rose, just 'cuz.

That's right, the liquor-soaked folks who have decided to sell you coffee in a plastic bottle by forcing a team of crappy postmodern cartoons to yell at one another under your logo are now also in the business of defying nature itself. To make matters more interesting (scary), Suntory is on the cusp of merging with Kirin, one of Japan's largest brewing companies. Ever since the invention of the corporation, people have been writing stories about some giant mega-corporation that will one day take over the world. Despite the pervasiveness of American business, I believe the Japanese are the only people actively trying to make such a mega-corp.

For now, I'm just going to keep my eye on the low-rent Flash cartoons Suntory has hijacked from the still scrappy but never innocent world of the Internet. I'll be updating from time to time on the latest excursions by this increasingly large, weird company.