Law Clerk on Gilligan's Island
Chapter 16- Karl
Meet Karl. Karl is Japanese, and, as best we can tell, a farmer. For now, let's ignore the remarkable, and potentially copyright infringing similarities between Karl and "Bluto" from the old Popeye cartoons, and focus on more positive matters.
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I first got acquainted with Karl during Kendall's
going away party, way back in Chapter 7. Among the
snack foods tendered by party participants was a neon green bag, practically screaming out
in Japanese characters. Down in the lower left corner, a bemused, bearded cartoon figure
wearing a dashing white cravat stood next to . . . well, he stood next to a frog holding
up a plate of cheese. Having been down the Asian food aisle in the supermarket here, and having seen things that look like giant octopus tentacles in blister packaging, or millions of tiny dried tadpoles, heads intact, stuffed in a ziplock bag, I'm pretty wary about chowing down on Japanese snacks until I know what they are, and I was not about to risk biting into some cheese-filled frog or whatever was inside this one. |
Fortunately, Stephanie's cousin Bruce was visiting from Manila. Bruce speaks some Japanese, and managed to ferret out what was inside. "This symbol is . . . hmm . . .'cam. . .'," he struggled, "um . . . 'camembert'?" Scanning the rest of the bag, Bruce came to a verdict. "They're like cheese puffs or something," he declared.
And so they were. Tearing open the bag released a cloud of pungent, artificial cheese scent. Inside the shiny foil bag was a passel of puffed, pale yellow curls. Warily popping one in my mouth, I discovered that they were essentially the Japanese equivalent of Cheez Doodles-- corn puffs dusted with artificial "cheez" powder. (Let's face it, "cheese" flavored snacks don't taste like a hunk of cheddar. They taste like salt and chemicals. It seems only fair, out of respect for the dairy industry, to spell it "cheez" instead.) More light and airy than their American counterparts, these little paisleys didn't overpower you with their powdered payload, but were content to let the a little of the corn flavor peek through. I wolfed down my share that night, and polished off one of the leftover bags for breakfast the next morning.
A couple of months later, while buying up some snacks to gobble for quick energy after a day of mountain biking, I grabbed another bag of those little cheez-flavored carbohydrate bombs off the shelf of the local gas station. Jeanne, one of my friends on the bike trip, noticed the bag on the car seat, and gleefully squealed "You got Karl!"
| As it turns out, Karl is a pretty popular guy in Japan,
where Jeanne had spent a few years teaching English. As she happily explained,
"Karl" is the name of both the product and it's mascot, the scarf-wearing
farmer. It's a very well-known snack in Japan, like Doritos or Pringles in the
U.S.. The name is a sort of pun-- "Karl," in Japanese, sounds a little bit
like "curl"-- i.e. the curled shaped of the puffs.
Ian, Jeanne's husband, who also spent time teaching English in Japan, came
over. "Karl! All right!" he said. So we sat around for a while, munching on Karl, and talking about the contents of the bag. The big white letters in the middle are apparently the symbols for the sounds "ka" and "ru" in Japanese. (As Jeanne explained, the Japanese language doesn't really have the same "r" or "l" sounds that English has. Instead, the "r" part of the name gets pronounced almost like a soft "d," while the "l" sound gets swallowed up by extending the "oo" sound of the "ru" syllable. Try it out loud-- somewhere between "cah-doo" or "cah-roo." I was so fascinated with the sound of it, I spent hours repeating it over and over again.) Ian went on to explain the rest of the bag. At the top, next to Meiji, the manufacturer's name, are some letters that Ian pronounced as "cone snackoo"-- "corn snack," while the inscription in the yellow box sounds like "cheezu ahjee"-- that is, "cheese flavored." |
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Then things started to get a little weird.
Jeanne flipped over the bag and started reading the flood of Japanese characters on the
back. "This is the 'Karl Family'," she explained, pointing to a cartoon of
a veritable inter-species Rainbow Coalition on the back, "and it says they've been
happy together for over 30 years." I tried to imagine how Karl's life as a farmer was
enhanced by hanging around with bears, turtles, monkeys, and that friend-of-farmers, the
rabbit. But I was especially curious about Karl's relationship with the fat little kid in the picture. Were they father and son? Mentor and protege? Husband and (erp!) wife? Was Karl some sort of terrorist, holding the kid hostage on a corn farm out in the hinterlands of Osaka? And if he did have a son, why was Karl spending all his time with the frog? (On other packages, the frog is bringing Karl flowers, or wearing a turban, or sipping some sort of broth, and so on, while Karl usually looks on stoically. The kid is never anywhere to be found. Maybe Karl packed him off to boarding school.) |
Despite the potential Mansonesqe weirdness of the Karl family, I had to admit that they made a damn good snack. Then Ian explained that there were many Karl flavors. He ticked off a list of a couple, but as soon as I heard "curry" flavor, I was hooked. Imagine these heavenly little curls infused with hints of saffron and tamarind. It would be like taking your tastebuds for stroll through the Punjab. Most of the stores in Palau sold Karl, and when Ian explained that the broth-sipping frog bag was curry flavored, I knew I had seen it somewhere before. I deputized Stephanie, and we began a cross-Palau search for curry flavored cah-roo.
A few months later, having been unsuccessful in locating the exotic treat, Ian informed us that he had seen some curry flavored Karl in a second-tier grocery store downtown. "It doesn't look like the regular Karl bag," he said, but it didn't matter to me. Steph and I headed off to the somewhat funky-smelling store, and located our prize.
| Ian was right. It wasn't the regular Karl
bag at all. Sure, it was clearly the same product-- I didn't have to be able to read
Japanese to know that I was looking at genuine Meiji-brand cah-roo cone snackoo. But
all the charm of the Karl I knew and loved was missing. Karl the farmer and the
weirdly anthropomorphic frog had been replaced by what appeared to be a big bowl of dog
food, which I assume was curry. And on the back, instead of the odd lineup of the
Karl Family, all we got were some extreme close-ups of a couple of ears of corn. But
hey, it was only $ .77, so I snapped up a bag. And I grabbed an adjacent bag of the
regular Karl, just to be on the safe side. Steph snatched the bag of curry Karl out of the cashier's hand as soon as I had handed over the cash to pay for it, and savagely ripped it open, gobbling a handful of the curls inside. "How is it?" I asked. |
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"I hope you like curry," said Steph, with somewhat of a grimace on her face.
No question, it was curry flavored. Maybe even too curry flavored. Unlike the cheez-flavored ones, which, given the degree of their resemblance to actual cheese, bordered on false advertising, the curry Karl tasted like someone had dumped a bowl of curry right into the bag. I ate a few handfuls, but eventually conceded defeat and surrendered the bag to Stephanie, who had come to decide that she had actually gotten used to the unique taste. I instead availed myself of the old standby.
We ate silently for a few minutes, shoveling handfuls of the stuff in our mouths, and pondering the profusion of incomprehensible symbols on the back of the bags. Suddenly, Stephanie breaks the silence with a question.
"When was yours made?" she asks.
I look around to the bottom corner of my bag. Next to the Japanese characters is a line that reads "1999.7.20."
"Um. . .," I say, "July 20, 1999." But it's only April 1999 now. "No wait, that doesn't make sense," I say. " I guess that's when they expire. What about yours?"
| Without a word, she turns her bag towards me: |  |
My jaw drops, giving Stephanie a fine view of some partially chewed Karl. The curry flavored ones expired more than 2 years ago.
In Palau, one learns that expiration dates on food are about as meaningful as movie ratings. A good third of what you find on the shelves here, including just about any dairy product, is past its expiration date. Surangel's supermarket, one of the known offenders, has a sign posted on the dairy case that reads:
You may notice that the expiration dates on some of the products here have already passed. This is a result of the time it takes to ship products to Palau from the United States and other parts of the world. Many products are near their expiration date when shipped, and arrive here already beyond that date. We believe that these products can still be used up to a month beyond the date shown on the package. We leave them here in the chill for our customers who want to enjoy these and who would not otherwise be able to buy these products in Palau even if the expiration date is slightly past. Should you purchase something and find that its consistency or texture does not meet your expectations, you may return it for a full refund.
Translation: "Yeah, we know they're expired. But you want cottage cheese so much, we're convinced you'll eat it until it turns hairy."
That's a sort of strange attitude for a grocery store to take, or at least a strange thing to say out loud, rather than merely think. But Surangel's seems to get a perverse little kick out of reminding you how far they can push you. At the end of one of the aisles in Surangel's are a couple of small shelves that hold items discounted by 50%-- usually expired potato chips, cans with missing labels (I gave a "can of mystery" to Steph for her birthday. Speculating about its contents has given us untold amusement), dented tins of tuna, and so on. For a while, we found these things to be a great bargain.
Surangel's then took it to the next level. One day, a handwritten sign was taped to one of the shelves: "For animal consumption only; not for human use." I wasn't sure what sort of animal you'd feed half-price bottles of suntan lotion to, but there they were, right next to the sign. I guarantee you, they could post a sign that said that the items on the shelf had been stored in a leaky nuclear reactor, then rolled in animal dung, and we'd still snap them up because they're a bargain. Things like expiration dates just don't seem to matter as much here as they do back home.
So it should come as no surprise that we ate the rest of the curry Karl.
POSTSCRIPT: Connoisseurs of snack foods, Japanese-speakers, and cartoon frog fetishists will certainly enjoy the official Karl webiste, www.meiji.co.jp/karl. Or order your very own bag of Karl from japanesesnacks.com. Yummy.
This chapter uploaded on April 12, 1999
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