Pocket sandwich innovator is sick and tired of being called an imitation, and furious too.
Npa might not be Japan’s most famous mascot character, perhaps because of his difficult-to-pronounce name, but you can’t really fault his design. Not only is the spokescharacter for Fuji Baking cute, he’s also an anthropomorphized version of the company’s pocket sandwiches, which it calls Snack Sandwiches.
Like most Japanese mascot characters, Npa is usually shown to have a friendly, earnest, and unassuming personality. We see that agreeable aura on display in a recent promotional video from Fuji Baking that depicts Npa as an office worker at the company. Sure, he may end up spewing egg salad into an elevator filled with his coworkers, but that was an honest accident.
Even when he’s sitting at his desk and looking at social media, it’s all in the name of market research to see how people are enjoying the different varieties of Snack Sandwich that are currently on the market.
This might be your first time hearing about Snack Sandwich, but if you’re the sort of well-cultured scholar who regularly reads SoraNews24, this probably isn’t your first time hearing about Japan’s pocket sandwiches. Fuji Baking competitor Yamazaki Baking’s Lunch Pack series is far and away the most prevalent and popular brand of pocket sandwiches in Japan, so much so that “Lunch Pack” has become practically a generic term for the sandwich type, and we ourselves often eat Lunch Packs for both personal and professional taste-testing reasons.
Lunch Pack is so ubiquitous, and has been around for so long (since 1984), that many people assume that the brand was the originator of pocket sandwiches in Japan, and with Npa not making his debut until 2016, a lot of people also assume that Snack Sandwich is one of a number of Lunch Pack imitators.
But wait a second let’s take another look at the Snack Sandwich packaging, which says…“since 1975?” And that’s not all — it also says ganso (元祖), which means “the original.”
Yes, not only are people incorrect in thinking that Snack Sandwich is a Lunch Pack imitator, every other company that they also think is imitating Lunch Pack, as well as Lunch Pack itself, is actually imitating Snack Sandwich, since it was the first to hit store shelves.
However, in a survey 87 percent of people said that they didn’t think that Snack Sandwich was Japan’s original pocket sandwich brand, and it definitely has less cachet than Lunch Pack does. So in the video, as Npa continues scrolling through online posts, he comes across ones such as “Ah, woops! I messed up and bought Snack Sandwich by mistake” and “Agh, I screwed up! Bought that lookalike Fuji Baking one instead.”
He…doesn’t take this well.
“Even though it’s the original,” screams the narrator, “87 percent of people think it’s not!” So great is Npa’s rage over this injustice that he grows to gargantuan kaiju-class size, bursting through the walls of Fuji Baking’s headquarters and firing beams of fiery indignation as he rampages across the city.
▼ “Take back the title of the original! Npa Strikes Back!”
In hindsight, the video’s narrator was a clue that things were going to go off the rails, as its provided by veteran anime voice actor Shigeru Chiba, whose credits include such less-than-even-tempered individuals as both Kefka and Profssor Hojo from the Final Fantasy franchise, Patlabor’s Shigeo Shiba, and One Piece’s Buggy.
OK, but now that Npa has blown off some steam, the frustration is out of his system, right?
Apparently not.
▼ “He will rage until 100 percent of the people know.”
In the month since the video was posted, it’s been viewed an astounding 13.69 million times, so no doubt more people know about Snack Sandwich’s pioneering status now than they did before. And Npa does seem to have calmed down enough that he looks to be back to having carefree fun on the packages for Snack Sandwich’s Halloween lineup of chestnut, apple, purple potato, and pumpkin cream fillings.
None of his Halloween costumes look particularly scary, but that’s probably just because no outfit could make him look as terrifying as his burning anger can.
Source: YouTube/フジパン公式チャンネル, Fuji Baking (1, 2)
Top image: YouTube/フジパン公式チャンネル
Insert images: Fuji Baking, YouTube/フジパン公式チャンネル, PR Times
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