Tag Archives: Japan

Goddamn It, Japan, You’re Doing It Wrong: Shakey’s Pizza

Posted on January 16, 2019 | 4 comments

“Wait how could it be worse than The Pizza Little Party Pizzeria? Oh shit, it’s a BUFFET? Goddamn it, Japan.”

~AFFotD’s Food Critic

shakeys

Pizza is a lot like sex. When it’s good it’s REALLY good. And when Japan does it, um, you’re about to experience something definitely weird and probably unsettling.

Speaking of Japan, while it’s been a few years since we’ve had to complain about the culinary choices of Japan (especially when they attempt to serve American-style food), we do have a rich history of asking Japan what, exactly, do they think they’re doing. So naturally, it is our solemn duty to inform you of another classic American institution that’s been co-opted and warped in terrifying ways by our friends in the East. Yes, it’s pizza again. But this time…it’s Shakey’s pizza.

We literally haven’t thought about a Shakey’s pizza since that one South Park episode where Cartman makes one out of stem cells, but after seeing Japan’s version of Shakey’s, we could remain silent no longer. So let’s take a deep breath and shout to the heavens…

Goddamn It, Japan, You’re Doing It Wrong: Shakey’s Pizza

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A Brief Foray into How Other Countries Are Ruining Pizza

Posted on February 21, 2018 | Leave a comment

“Oh God, no, not pizza. Ruin ANYTHING ELSE but spare the pizza!”

~Your Taste Buds

 hawaiin pizza

We talk a lot about pizza around these parts, but can you blame us? Pizza is just about the perfect, when done right. But, as you no doubt know, it’s…not always done right. Now we get a lot of flack from St. Louis and Ohio Valley residents because of our article that (correctly) points out what their regional pizzas are (garbage) but we can at least take solace in knowing that, as a nation, we generally have our shit together.

Other countries, though? Not so much. Sure, we’ve previously talked about Pizza Hut’s crazy international menu items, and England’s hot dog crust pizza, but we’ve not really taken the moment to sit down and let you know how badly other countries are screwing up pizza.

And boy howdy, are they screwing up pizzas.

Granted, this article only lists isolated instances—a bad pizza idea from a country other than America does not mean that the country in question does not know how to make at least passable pizza otherwise. But still, when we see pizzas being ruined across the world, it’s our duty, as Americans, to point it out. You know, so we can feel superior, and also so we can say, “Well, sure, we have St. Louis-style pizza, but we’re not monsters.”

Because these pizzas? Yar, there be monsters.

A Brief Foray into How Other Countries Are Ruining Pizza

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Posted in America Fun Fact of the Day, Insulting Foreigners, Pizza Pizza, The Rest of Them

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Wherein AFFotD Denounced the Culinary Lies Perpetuated By the Brainless Fools Behind thetoptens.com

Posted on June 15, 2016 | Leave a comment

“Were you born without goddamn taste buds?”

~AFFotD Staffers reading The Top Tens’ list of Countries With the Worst Food

food pic

Occasionally, we have been known to read websites other than our own.  It goes against our general ego-centric, ignorance-embracing lifestyle that we’ve worked very hard to foster, but it happens. Granted, most of the time we wander to the other darker corners of the internet, we find horrific, un-American things, so we try to limit how often we stray out, because the doctors have been telling us for years that we gotta start watching our blood pressure.

Anyway, this brings us to the purpose of today’s article. In researching for our lovely borderline-xenophobic series, The World’s Saddest Cuisines, we stumbled across an article from thetoptens.com that claimed to list the 10 Countries with the worst food in the world.

We were interested. Would they include Armenia? Botswana? Oh, God, Latvia?

What we clicked was, very possibly, the most wrong a top 10 list has ever been about anything in the history of the internet.

Fuck you, thetoptens.com, we’re going to write an article about how shit you are now.

Wherein AFFotD Denounced the Culinary Lies Perpetuated By the Brainless Fools Behind thetoptens.com

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Goddamn it, Japan, You’re Doing it Wrong: Japanese McDonald’s

Posted on April 14, 2015 | 2 comments

“It’s not the worst we’ve seen…in fact it’s the best.  That’s why it’s so troubling.”

~Internal Memo to AFFotD’s ‘Goddamn it Japan, You’re Doing it Wrong’ Staff

Its actually from Richie Rich guys, trust us on this one okay

We’re going to be honest here.  When we decided to do our latest “Goddamn it, Japan, You’re Doing it Wrong” segment on McDonald’s in Japan, we were really worried.  Hell, we’ve already told you about McDonald’s in Japan was only so happy to follow Burger King off into the “black-burger-buns” abyss last year, so we anticipated a lot of terrifying concoctions.  Google’s translation of the official Japanese McDonald’s website didn’t do much more to instill any confidence in us.

what

Um.  What?

And we went through the menu items, and the limited time items, and all that Japan McDonald’s has to offer, and what we found was…strangely not as terrifying as we feared.  The Cheese Tsukimi Burger is a chicken patty, which is boring but whatever, with two slices of bacon, a fried egg, cheddar cheese, and a ketchup/mayo sauce that we’d actually eat!  Japan manage to avoid every bad impulse they had to put pineapple on their Hawaiian Burger, and instead went with a ¼ pound burger with egg, bacon, cheese, and a bun topped with grated cheese, which sounds kind of great!  In fact, Japanese McDonald’s manages to create a surprisingly varied menu where most items look pretty tasty, and with most only going into “sorta weird, but not gross weird” territories of like, a hamburger with pastrami on it, or a savory version of the apple pie filled with bacon and potato.  We’d try those out of hesitant curiosity, as opposed to what we normally cover in our articles on Japan, which is foods we’d try out of masochistic fear.

But this is Goddamn it, Japan, You’re Doing it Wrong, goddamn it.  And we have a reputation to maintain.  So yes, McDonald’s in Japan is largely interesting, and seems to be slightly more upscale than what we’re used to here in America, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have terrifying, horrific duds in their expansive menu.

Goddamn it, Japan, You’re Doing it Wrong:  Japanese McDonald’s

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The (Terrifying) Black-Bun Burgers of the World

Posted on March 19, 2015 | 3 comments

“Nope nope nope nope nope nope.”

~AFFotD Food Critic, John Goodman

black burgers oh no

Depending on what non-affotd corners of the internet you choose to spend your free time perusing, you might have heard recently about Burger King ramping up the gross factor on their food by offering a black bun, black cheese burger called the Kuro, or Black burger.  This burger re-issue (yes, they tried it before, more on that later) used squid ink and bamboo charcoal to create an all-black burger.  Black cheese, black ketchup, black soul are combined for fast food connoisseurs in Japan (because of course this is happening in Japan), leading to a whole slew of internet chatter of “lol, Japan is crazy” (which, duh) and “ew, this looks gross so I tried it oh by the way I’m also a white 24-year-old living in Japan currently while maintaining a blog about my travels.”

What we find most surprising about this burger has nothing to do with its mere existence.  When talking about Japan, nothing surprises us anymore.  No, upon doing some digging, we discovered that Japan’s Burger King does not have a monopoly on this particular brand of culinary insanity.  So, get ready to see a lot of unappetizing pictures of a type of food you once loved, because we’re going to delve into…

The (Terrifying) Black-Bun Burgers of the World

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Posted in China, Japan, Strange Foods, The Rest of Them

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The Worst Mountain Dew Flavors of All Time

Posted on January 13, 2015 | 16 comments

“I am AMPED I am AMPED woah what if they made an energy called AMP and…wait I think my heart stopped, or…MOUNTAIN DEW WOO!”

~Mountain Dew Drinker (aged 12)

 mountain dew

Mountain Dew has one of the more unique rises to popularity of any beverage that can be poured out of a tap without someone checking your ID first.  Originally invented in 1940 in Tennessee with the we’re-honestly-not-kidding-here’s-a-commercial-for-it slogan of “Ya-Hoo!  Mountain Dew.  It’ll tickle yore innards” and advertising itself to Hillbillies, it’s since gone on to be extremely popular among gamers, extreme sports fanatics, and sixth grade kids who view it as a caffeine-rich forbidden fruit, like speed that you can buy at the gas station on the way to tweeking out throughout your school day.

Mountain Dew was first developed by Barney and Ally Hartman, who made it as a mixer and named it after a Scottish and Irish slang for “moonshine.”  It was eventually bought out by PepsiCo in 1964, and the “hillbilly angle” was removed not too long after.  While you know it as a “citrus” flavored soft drink, and it lists concentrated orange juice as one of its flavors, it’s basically just sugar and caffeine with a hint of “dorm cafeteria OJ” flavor to it.

And while “the potent combination of a sugar high with a caffeine buzz” is a good enough combination to help Mountain Dew corner 80% of the citrus-flavored pop market, in our age of American ingenuity and overzealous marketing, a company can only rest comfortably on your laurels for so long selling just one kind of middle-school wake up juice, and ever since the 1980s Mountain Dew has been experimenting with a variety of flavors.  Some of them are good (looking at you, Code Red).  Some of them…well, not so much.

The Worst Mountain Dew Flavors of All Time

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Posted in Strange Foods

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Goddamn it Japan, You’re Doing it Wrong: Japanese Ice Cream Flavors

Posted on November 13, 2014 | 1 comment

“I Scream, you scream, we all scream, NO.  NO, STOP IT.  STOP IT JAPAN.  JUST, NO!”

oh ice cream faces i get it that's cute

One of our longest running segments on this site has been “Goddamn it Japan, You’re Doing it Wrong,” where we look at classic American products and foods that Japan has gone, well, batshit insane with.  Not to break the fourth wall or let you in on our writing process here (it involves, just, so much alcohol, and just a hint of xenophobia that’s probably going to age really horribly over the next five years) but we love writing these posts.  We get to talk about American foods we love (like Doritos, or Kit Kats), we get to talk about flavors of these things that we love that are so abhorrent and disgusting that we take on a tone of unearned righteous indignation, and finally, we get comments from the kind of people who get really upset when a website whose banner has a grizzly bear holding a shotgun in front of an American Flag talks shit about Japan.  We cannot stress enough how much we love it when this happens.  People get so mad, and we’re not saying that the only people who feel this way are white men who have visited Japan and “got into the culture a bit too much” ifyouknowwhatwe’resaying, but we’re totally saying that.

People write fucking novels, and we typically respond with a shrug.

affotd comment

Our favorite part of this is the “well, I’ve only been to Japan for three weeks, BUT!”

So yes, this is us basically fucking daring you guys to get offended at this segment, which might defeat the purpose, but that’s beside the point.  We’re going to talk about how Japan fucks up ice cream, and oh God, do they know how to fuck up ice cream.

Goddamn it Japan, You’re Doing it Wrong:  Japanese Ice Cream Flavors

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Goddamn it Japan, You’re Doing it Wrong: The Pizza Little Party Pizzeria

Posted on November 14, 2013 | 6 comments

“Pizza Little Party?  Oh man, let’s try to avoid jokes calling Pizza Little Party a Japanese pizza establishment, I’d be so rac…oh God, it’s real, isn’t it?”

~Johnny Roosevelt, Editor-in-Chief of AFFotD

let's summer pizza party

Before we get started, let’s take a deep breath and look at that screenshot.  Just, really soak it in.  Let it wash over you like a cool stream.  This is a thing that exists, that happened in real life, that is currently happening in real life.  Don’t let yourself forget that.                                                                       

For a website that dedicates itself to the Americanness of being American, we sure do seem to talk about Japan a lot.  You might wonder, “Why?  Why are there more articles about Japanese Doritos on this site than ones about Ben Franklin?”  Well, for starters, if you ever tried to write about Ben Franklin’s life, you immediately would come down with a severe case of 18th century syphilis, and we’ve yet to find a writer to volunteer for that (though, come to think of it, we might have a perfect candidate).  But secondly, Japan takes American ideals but then warps them in fascinating, terrifying ways, and we hope that maybe, just maybe, by showing them the craziness of their ways they might take things down a notch and start embracing a more normally (read as, “less tentacles”) American way of life.

You’re right.  It’s futile.  They’re too far gone to be saved.  Just look at how they do pizza chains.

Goddamn it Japan, You’re Doing it Wrong:  The Pizza Little Party Pizzeria

 pizza little party

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Goddamn it Japan, You’re Doing it Wrong: Cheetos

Posted on October 2, 2013 | 1 comment

“No…no….NOOOO!!!!”

~AFFotD Food Critic John Goodman

hot sauce cheetos

As we’ve established on numerous occasions, Japan approaches American-based junk food and beverages the same way Lennie approaches puppies in Of Mice and Men.  We’ve even let you know about the terrible, unspeakable things that Japan likes to do to our potato chips.  Of course, that’s just the beginning.  Japanese food sort of adheres to a subset of Rule 34.  By that we mean to say, we could type some random combination of disgusting words and it’ll exist in Japan, and be terrifying.  Don’t believe us?  Let’s see…uh, octopus soda.

…Oh dear God, what have we done?

So with that in mind, it’s time for us to take our periscope of terrifying food abominations towards Japan’s interpretation of the delicious Takis rival, Cheetos.  Which, as always, leads us to exclaim…

Goddamn it Japan, You’re Doing it Wrong: Cheetos

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Goddamn It Japan, You’re Doing It Wrong: Japanese Wendy’s

Posted on December 5, 2012 | 2 comments

“No, we can’t write about Wendy’s!  THEY’LL FIND US!”

~Johnny Roosevelt, AFFotD Editor-in-Chief

dooom

As some of our more intrepid readers might remember, AFFotD has a dark history with one particular American fast food establishment.  Yes, for a period of time every spicy chicken sandwich you ate directly helped feed the AFFotD gambling debts coffers, but it came at the cost of our souls.  Also at the cost of a few of our weaker family members, and one of our staffers house cat. Eventually, we were able to free ourselves from the corporate shilling curse, and continue to be independently drunk and American.

Of course, Wendy’s knew we couldn’t keep from talking about them forever.  And after a few hard hitting exposés about Japan’s attempts at subverting American fast food, we  discovered that Japan treated Wendy’s the same way they treat just about every goddamn fast food chain, so we figured we’d be safe of Wendy’s Necronomical influences if we talked about it, given that they were received so meekly in Japan that in 2009 they closed all 71 of their Japanese locations.  Unfortunately, this lasted less than two years, and now Wendy’s has again opened its doors to Japanese terror culture.  As of now, there are only two restaurants in the entire country, but that of course hasn’t stopped them from making nightmarish culinary creations that, despite our misgivings, force us to exclaim…

Goddamn It Japan, You’re Doing It Wrong:  Japanese Wendy’s

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