The omiyage industry in Japan is ridiculous. Millions of cookies and cakes are created every year so people in Japan can feel less guilty about taking time off. Check out this list of 銘菓 (めいか) – “famous confections” – on Wikipedia. In what is basically a desperate cash grab, these companies will do almost anything to stand out. One of my personal favorite omiyage has a unique name – ごまたまご:

As the name suggests, it’s an egg with sesame-flavored filling:

It’s pretty tasty, but more notable for the name which also happens to be a palindrome, a 回文 (かいぶん) in Japanese.

Other Japanese palindromes? トマト. まさこさま. And 世の中ね、顔か、お金か、なのよ.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 18th, 2009 at 7:12 am and is filed under wordplay. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.