Because nothing says “delicious cooking” like huge, saggy pig balls, right?

Japan loves cuteness-based marketing, and it’s pretty common for businesses to try to attract customers with friendly animal mascots. So when a tonkatsu (pork cutlet) restaurant in Japanese Twitter user @Zetton_EP’s neighborhood was thinking of ways to catch passersby’s eyes they settled on putting an anthropomorphic pig statue outside the eatery’s entrance.

Seems like a pretty solid idea, right? And with Japan’s well-known expertise in crafting cute characters, we’re sure the result is just adora-

https://twitter.com/Zetton_EP/status/1108243550423048192

Well, that’s disturbing. It’s hard to say what the scariest part is. Is it the insanely dilated pupils? The intimidating bared teeth? The smooth, shiny breasts?

Oh, wait, it’s actually easy to pinpoint the most disturbing part of the statue: the pig’s gigantic, ground-scraping testicles.

▼ If they’re not already visible, click the image below to see the pig’s testicles (note: this is the first, and hopefully last, time we’ll have to write such a sentence).

https://twitter.com/Zetton_EP/status/1108243550423048192

Feeling hungry for some pork cutlet yet? Neither are these online commenters:

“Eyes of death.”
“So much darkness in its expression.”
“You can almost hear it saying ‘…me…kill…me.’”
“To me, the expression says, ‘You got a problem, bro? Huh? You wanna go right now, bro?’”
“His face and balls are so wrinkly.”
“Funny face. Funny crotch.”

▼ The statue also inspired some crossover fan art with Japan’s water-vomiting blowfish meme.

So what happened here? Well, it appears the statue isn’t an entirely custom job. Instead, it looks like whoever made it started with a statue of a tanuki (raccoon dog), which are commonly found outside of soba noodle restaurants and shrines in Japan, and thus pretty easy to come by. These statues will, without fail, have large testicles, which are a seminal element in artistic depictions of the animals.

https://twitter.com/MattyGozz/status/1008519007345864704

Rather than build a pig statue from scratch, someone took a tanuki statue (or at least its primary components) and swapped on a new nose and ears. OK, those seem like understandable cost-cutting methods, but why leave the massive balls?

Probably because without them, the statue might not be able to stand. The statue’s testicular mass seems to stretch down as far as its feet, meaning that the balls are actually part of the figurine’s base. Chopping them off and having the statue stand only on its feet might be too small a contact patch to provide a steady base, and removing that much weight from the statue could upset its center of gravity so much as to require a complete redesign of its lower half.

And thus, Giant Ball Pig was born, with his anatomy all the more attention-commanding because of their fleshy color, since he lacks a tanuki’s modesty-boosting dark brown fur. “Well, in folktales they say tanuki are shapeshifters,” offered one commenter, trying to put a positive spin on things. “Maybe one got stuck half-way through transforming into a pig?”

Unfortunately, that makes us feel like we’d be eating tanuki cutlets instead of pork ones, so now we’ve got two reasons to go somewhere else to eat.

Source: Twitter/@Zetton_EP via Hachima Kiko
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Follow Casey on Twitter, where he’s thinking of going to a non-testicle-related restaurant for dinner.