Last night I was watching TV and stumbled across (well, sat there passively as it flickered on the screen) a rather amusing advertisement for plaque-control toothpaste. Apparently in your mouth, plaque is just a bunch of tiny dudes dressed up in puffy-looking costumes, all hanging out and having a party.
But lo! All is not well in plaque-land. Suddenly, an earthquake rumbles through and everyone panics. The plaque-people all run to the nearest gap between teeth and seatbelt themselves in to ride out the coming storm. What is it? What will happen to these slightly-cute-slightly-scary creatures?
Zoom out to the very cute woman who's about to use the special toothpaste. With the utmost in dramatic skill, she squirts the paste onto her toothbrush and begins her task.
Zoom back inside her mouth. Catastrophe! Mayhem! Morbidity! Puffy plaque-people go flying, their (apparently not UL-approved) seatbelts dissolved like nothing. Hot damn, this toothpaste really works!
Zoom back out to cute lady, grinning cutely despite the genocide she has just enacted.
Naturally I laughed, particularly tickled by the plaque people and their reaction to the coming destruction. I sat there for a moment, warmed by a geniunely entertaining commercial. It's these (far more entertaining than the usual offal that they call programming) that find me turning on the TV on occasion.
But then I realized. Inside the cute Japanese girl's mouth, the plaque-people were all gaijin.
What the hell?
So either gaijin are a tenacious and unsightly growth on the otherwise pristine surface of Japanese society ... or they just make better panic-in-the-face-of-destruction faces. You decide.
UPDATE: I just found the commercial online, you can view it at the LION website. Or just click on this link.