Hokkaido Poo-Poo Bear
Have you ever experienced the suspicion that Japan is the strangest place on earth? Yes? Well, allow me to adduce the latest piece of evidence: the mighty Poo-Poo Bear. (And, yes, he is a child’s toy.)
His natural habitat is www.marimo.com/hk, but it’s a flash-based site and difficult to navigate so I thought I would make a helpful picspam to demonstrate the wonder.
I first encountered Poo-Poo via the picture above, which was posted on Engrish Funny. The text is bad enough:
OH!! DANGER ZONE HOKKAIDO
Higuma is dunging everywhere in HOKKAIDO.
WE ALL LOVE HOKKAIDO BEARS.
I am Hokkaido Poo-Poo Bear.
I was born in the north snowy part of Hokkaido.
I am more than 2m tall and weight more than 300kg.
I am the biggest living animal in Hokkaido and I am also famous for being able to to drop the biggest dung anytime, anywhere.
My body is huge as well as my excrement.
However, I can run fast and I am good at catching salmon.
I am the strongest animal in Japan.
I warn you. Beware of big round, brown heaps when you visit Hokkaido!
but the insanely delighted, dancing creature in the bottom left-hand corner made me cry tears of mirth, then begin an immediate search for whatever company was responsible for its genesis. Once I’d established that the sign wasn’t a public health warning by the Hokkaido county council, I tracked Poo-Poo Bear to his Flash-based den.
I was greeted by this:
We do? Just like that, eh? Don’t we get a voice in this?... Oh, never mind. Note the bullet-point turds, some of which are helpfully labelled “Hot!”; they lead to cartoons, videos and merchandise. Yes, merchandise. Brace yourselves.
The videos are sort of a waste of space, and the cartoons vary between quite funny, terrible and incomprehensible. There is the odd blinder, though:
COMPLETELY, Poo-Poo. I can’t for the life of me see why your girlfriend’s so het up about it.
The most logical object for sale is the fluffy Poo-Poo toy, which looks like this:
Talk about Winnie the Pooh.
And here Poo-Poo is in the wild, AKA a shop window. I’d buy him, but I’m not sure everyone else would. (Note that there’s a big sign on his homepage saying that Marimo are seeking a foreign distributor. Wonder why they might be having trouble with that?)
BUT! Sometimes the best ideas are the most counter-intuitive. Observe Marimo’s more... laterally-thought-out Poo-Poo products:
This is where I cried tears of laughter for the second time, which was possibly even more painful than the first and brought ancient_bat running to see what was happening. Poor creature, I think I scarred her for life. EXCREMENT SLIPPERS. Who wouldn’t want a pair of excrement slippers? And just to push me over the edge into total and embarrassing hilarity, they’ve put the name of the product in huge, earnest letters. DID YOU NOTICE WE’RE TRYING TO SELL YOU SOME SLIPPERS WITH POO ON THEM?... YOU DID, RIGHT, CARRY ON.
And there’s more! Personally, I can’t wait to have one of these on my sofa, even if it does look a bit painful to sit on.
And a matching doorstop. Who exactly was coming up with the ideas? Do small children need doorstops? (Brb, I’ve got to go and cackle. The little cartoons by each product are killing me.)
Personally, I think this is one of the best ideas of the lot; nobody would ever try to steal your phone.
Japan: the only place in the world (I hope) where people will try to sell you an “excrement phone strap”. (God, I love that cartoon on the right. I might make it into a second icon.)
Excrement sweeties! Who wouldn’t want to tuck into some of these? I’m relieved to note that they’re “cola flavour”; I was expecting something else for a moment.
The same, but these ones are “lucky”. What is it that makes them lucky? The fact that they come in a box? We may never know.
And an excrement wrist rest; Poo-Poo Bear is sensitive to the dangers of RSI. (Note that you can also clean your screen with it. Well. You can rub your screen with it, anyway; it doesn’t say whether it’ll be cleaner once you’ve finished.)
You don’t want to drink out of this? But why?!
OK, the “Enter At Your Own Risk” signs seems reasonable, but I’m not certain how effective the one saying “Please Come In” would be. Unless you actually wanted people to stay out.
And, finally, warning signs to hang in your rear windscreen. That’d stop people tailgating you all right; as soon as they saw the sign they’d crash into a lamppost.
That’s all, Poo-Poo fans! I hope you enjoyed this journey through one of the strangest aspects of modern consumer society... Or is it actually the only logical outcome? Anyway, thank you for reading my flight of faecal fantasy, and look forward to people asking me “What the fuck is that on your icon??” Ho-ho-ho.