“How about a Girl Running Late with a Sushi Roll?” “Katsu rice balls sound like a seriously heavy breakfast.” “It looks like the actress is having a really hard time running with a rice ball stuffed in her mouth.” Reactions so far have been mixed, with comments for the videos including : This is a rather unusual type of rice ball, but it allows the video to add a pun, something Japan loves almost as much as anime and earnest schoolgirls, since katsu can also mean “victory” in Japanese, and the video is trying to establish katsu rice balls as a good luck charm for kids taking school entrance exams. The musubi are, of course, made with Niigata-grown rice, according to the video, which also says they’re katsu (pork cutlet) rice balls.
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That’s the plan, anyway, and since the Girl Running Late with a Piece of Bread trope also shows up in Japanese TV dramas, the project has also recruited actress Manami Igashira to appear as a live-action Girl Running Late with a Rice Ball in the first of a planned series of video shorts. If an anime heroine can eat a rice ball prior to crashing into her one true love, magical girl power-granting animal familiar, or whatever other fateful encounter will kick off that arc of the story, maybe viewers will think “Hey, I could eat rice for breakfast too!” We believe that repeated viewing of such scenes may be forming an image in viewers’ minds that ‘breakfast = bread,’ and causing them to be less likely to eat rice at breakfast.Īnd so Niigata has decided to fight fire with fire, or anime schoolgirls with anime schoolgirls, by launching the Girl Running Late with a Rice Ball Project.īy creating, and encouraging others to create, scenes of anime schoolgirls running to school with a musubi/onigiri (both Japanese words for rice ball) in her mouth, the prefecture can help shift perceptions. Often, the scene includes the female character falling in love as she rounds a corner. What we speak of is the “Girl Running Late with a Piece of Bread,” or the scenes in which a student, office lady, or salaryman who overslept runs while holding a piece of bread in their mouth. In Niigata Prefecture’s analysis of why, we arrived at the hypothesis that manga and anime, which are deeply engrained in Japanese culture, are influencing the situation. But while anime enthusiasts are familiar with the scene, Niigata thinks this might be turning young people off from eating rice at breakfast, as explained in the following statement: It’s a time-honored storytelling trope, quickly conveying that the character is in over their heads in their current situation, but still doing all they can to try to keep it together.
Obviously there’s no time for a leisurely sit-down breakfast, and so their go-to on-the-go morning meal is, pretty much without exception, a piece of toast, which they hold in their mouth as they run. “Oh no, I’m going to be late!” they shout, before we cut to an exterior shot of their home and they come bursting out the front door as they make a mad dash to school or the office. Watch enough anime (or Japanese dramas), and eventually there’ll be a scene where a character, generally a schoolgirl or office worker, has overslept. ▼ “Is it the fault of that anime scene?” asks the Niigata Prefectural government. Supermarkets and convenience stores are also more prevalent and open longer than they used to be, making it easier to keep your home conveniently and affordably stocked with a variety of ingredients, lessening the need for rice to make up as large a portion of any individual meal as it used to be.īut the government of Niigata has found what it thinks is another reason for lower rice consumption: anime. For one, Japan’s culinary culture has become increasingly diverse over the past few decades, with non-rice dishes that originated abroad now a common part of Japanese people’s meal mixes. There are several possible reasons for this. Niigata is Japan’s top rice-grower, and the prefectural government is concerned about Japan’s per-capita rice consumption going down. Japan’s top rice-growing prefecture designs character, releases two videos in hope of changing anime breakfast trope.
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