Recently the Japanese police department has been shook by a minor scandal involving a high ranking police officer (Hiroshi Nakai in case you are wondering) and his relationship to a hostess girl and how he had given her the card key access to his offices. Now, this scandal in itself is pretty dull and nothing that really raised any real interest from my side.
However, during the press conferences held, Nakai was talking in front of a board filled with a horde of bizarre mascot characters (in case you want to see, you can find it here on youtube, around 20 sec in the fun starts) obviously the clash of cute Japanese mascot characters and a womanizing scandal is bizarre in itself, but this triggered me to go to the bottom of this sordid incident... Some quick and dirty journalistic research yielded these findings; all the mascot characters used by central and local Japanese police departments...
That the tax payers money (i.e. mine!) is diverted into developing mascot characters might be justified in some cases since it can help create interest and awareness of the police and such among the kids and people into that kinda thing in Japan. But a quick glance shows that there is considerable differences in quality in these mascots...
The real horror though is the Okinawa Police mascot and it could be briefly seen during the press conference behind Nakai and completely stole my interest away from anything that he had to say. It is with great pride, mixed with disgust, that I present to you, the only real contender to Sentokun that I have discovered here in Japan; Shiizaa-kun:
The face of this "cute character" seem to be decorated with something that unmistakeably look like turds... What the police really need to go to the bottom with is who developed this mascot and make sure that they get punished to the full extent of the law!
And if it's not criminal as it looks now, the law seriously needs some revisions to criminalize use of mascot characters like this!
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6 comments:
Wow, I first thought his face was covered with wrinkley teats.
Perhaps they have many cows in Okinawa?
Maybe Shiizaa-kun has a secret pachyderm shitty box fetish?
Wait wait wait... They used a pig for a mascot for the police department, and you're worried that it has turds on its face? :D
The outrage here would be insane. lol
You've got to really wonder about how this was ever considered "cute", and how piles of cash was spent on it. It looks like some kind of horrible mutant.
Martin - Well, with some imagination I guess it could be teats, but I still think it more looks like turds?
Penguin - Again, I have the feeling that you are getting close to the truth!
William - Is that a pig? I mean, it does look a bit Pig-ish, but it just looks freakish...
Aimless - Yep, and that's probably one of the reasons why I've never been to Okinawa!
Wow, I didnt realise there were quite so many. I've seen less than half of these. I just did a post on my site about one police mascot most of you guys probably know; Pipo-kun. http://idleidol.net/pipo-kun/ I've got a book coming out on Japanese mascots pretty soon.
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