It’s no secret that these days, everyone’s ripping everyone else off when it comes to products. But yummy Japanese snack foods seem to be a particular target, with Korean-based company Lotte famously copying Japan’s popular “Pocky” sticks right down to their svelte packaging. And now it seems that China has got in on the act, with this knockoff version of Japan’s beloved “Koala no March” animal biscuits.

Unfortunately, these shysters didn’t even bother trying to make it look like an original product, opting instead for nonsensical Japanese writing on the packaging and grimaces of pain on the face of every cookie koala…

Koala no March, known internationally as Koala’s March, are bite-sized cookies imprinted with images of lovable koalas with a chocolate or similarly flavoured centre. They’re a popular snack for kids in Japan, and they’re also sold in the US as “Koala’s Yummies”, for some reason.

▼ Genuine Japanese Koala no March.

Wikipedia

However, the Chinese version of the snack shows a distinct lack of effort. Let’s take another look at the packaging:

While they’ve tried to get the shape of the box right, and the colour scheme is definitely the same, the “Japanese” writing doesn’t actually make any sense. The part in red reads “Jisuketto” (Jiscuit) in a weird mix of hiragana and katakana. And we’re being nice interpreting it as “Jiscuit” since the katakana part is doubly wrong and instead of the “-ketto” that should be there, it actually reads “ketsuto”. You see, a small ッ represents a pause a fraction of a second long and is not pronounced, whereas a full-sizeツis simply read “tsu”, so basically, in trying to write “bisuketto” (biscuit) in Japanese, they came up with “jisuketsuto”.

Now, let’s just ignore the Engrish part that says “Chocolate Snach”, and focus on the Japanese writing underneath the “Jiscuit” part. It reads “Kodomo no rakuen ni seppun suru” which means “Kiss in the children’s paradise.” Er…

Anyway, gibberish Chipanese aside, here’s what the cookies actually look like. Clearly, this is a case of false advertising since the koalas printed on the box look somewhat sane, whereas this thing looks like a horrifying genetic experiment gone wrong…

The snack came to light in Japan when someone received a box as a gift from a friend who had visited China and decided to tweet a few photos of it:

Naturally, the images were met with howls of laughter and plenty of ridicule:

“Jisuketsuto hahaha!”

“Kiss in the children’s paradise… and get arrested!”

“Kiss in the children’s paradise hahahhah looooool”

“Seppun hahahah!” (We should also note that “seppun” is particularly outdated Japanese, and in itself kind of amusing.)

“Since it’s China, they should have made a version called Panda’s March.” [You might be onto something there – ed.]

“Such mysterious wording, what does it all mean?”

“This looks like Google Translate to me…”

However, the recipient of the snacks reported that they tasted “normal”, so that’s something, at least…

Source: Hamusoku
Main Image: Twitter – @oymfi


Speaking of terrible translations…
tacosupremecourt“Supreme Court Beef” and other translation fails from the new Taco Bell Japan website