Proof that what you see isn’t always what you get.

In Japan, appearances are everything, especially when it comes to the world of dining. Whether it’s a beautiful bento lunch box containing neatly placed ingredients or a Coke bottle covered in cherry blossoms, customers here are used to feasting with their eyes as well as their stomachs, with supermarkets filled with displays of beautifully packaged items.

Twitter user @mizuryu recently came across a particularly enticing product at the store called “Sushi Manju“. In Japan, manju is a popular traditional confectionery with a bun-like texture on the outside, made from flour, rice powder and buckwheat, and a sweet filling like red bean paste on the inside. 

To see something like “Sushi Manju” at the store is a particularly rare find, so when @mizuryu came across this box, which was reduced to 300 yen (US$2.73), he snapped it up immediately, saying “I got excited when I saw this, so I bought it.“

https://twitter.com/mizuryu/status/957982594116669441

With all those delicious looking morsels of sushi on the box, we’d be excited seeing this too, especially when these are meant to be little steamed sweet cakes. How did they get the cakes to look just like sushi? What would it feel like to bite into a piece of sushi, only to have the taste of a sweet bun spill out over your tastebuds instead?

It’s easy to imagine all these questions dancing around in @mizuryu‘s mind as he made his way home from the store, eager to dive into the box to feast his eyes on all the pretty sushi buns inside. However, when he got home and opened the package, this is what he found inside.

https://twitter.com/mizuryu/status/957982746730684416

Needless to say, this wasn’t what @mizuryu was expecting. Sure, they were manju steamed buns, but they looked far more ordinary than the packaging had let on. Instead of looking like the sushi on the box, they were branded with illustrations of neta fish toppings, ocha green tea cups, the word “sushi” in Japanese, and even plastic greenery found in bento packs.

Twitter users were quick to console @mizuryu after he admitted he felt swindled by his less-than-impressive impulse buy. One fellow consumer shared a photo of their own purchase, which also came filled with the promise of surprising flavours. This one was a pack of sushi rice crackers, which turned out to be ordinary rice crackers, with fish toppings simply printed on the plastic packaging.

Although  @mizuryu‘s box did come with a tiny disclaimer on the front, which read “Photo is an image”, Twitter users were on the consumer’s side, saying the discrepancy between image and contents was far too much.

Still, we’re not giving up hope on finding sushi manju that really resembles the real thing one day. After all, we’ve seen SoraNews24’s sushi soup and cream puffs filled with sushi rice cola so anything’s possible!

Source: Togech
Featured image: Twitter/@mizuryu