“You’re not gonna eat me because I’m not cute, right?”

Pizza Hut Japan has shown that’s it’s always ready to experiment with some outside-the-box ideas, which is how we got both a ramen pizza and a plum pizza this year. They’re not out of bold concepts yet, though, which is why they’ve now released a “landmine pizza.”

▼ “You’re not gonna eat me because I’m not cute, right?” pouts the promotional image.

Don’t worry, though, because it’s not filled with explosives. Instead, the Landmine-type Pizza gets its name from the Japanese fashion world…which may or may not be making a light bulb turn on for you, so let’s take a look at the linguistics involved. The full, in-Japanese name of this pizza is the Jirai-kei Ikasumi Yummy-ochi Pizza. Jirai is the Japanese word for “landmine,” but jirai-kei, or “landmine-type,” refers to a clothing and makeup trend in Japan that takes ordinarily bright and cute aesthetics and gives them a dark twist, with the implication that there’s a harder edge to the person wearing them than you might initially expect.

Jirai-kei fashion has a penchant for darkly-colored clothing with select patches of girlish color, and the Jirai-kei Ikasumi Yummy-ochi Pizza follows suit with a black truffle squid ink (ikasumi) sauce drizzled over shrimp and other seafood plus black olives, semi-dried tomatoes, and, of course, cheese. Oh, and mixed in with the squid ink sauce is rice, just in case the squid ink alone wasn’t going to make the Jirai-kei Ikasumi Yummy-ochi Pizza seem unusual enough for you.

▼ The “Yummy-ochi” part of the name, by the way, is a play on words with the phrase yamiochi, or “descent into darkness.”

“Recently, members of Generation Z prefer to have a dark view of the world, wearing clothing and makeup with lots of black and other dark colors.” says Pizza Hut in describing their latest creation. “We thought it would be super-interesting to express the concept of jirai-kei in the form of a pizza. Usually, it’s of the utmost importance to make a pizza look delicious, but we set out to create a mental gap between a shocking appearance that makes you think you should keep your distance, but will make you say ‘This tastes soooo good!’ once you try it.”

Pizza Hut promises that as you eat the Jirai-kei Ikasumi Yummy-ochi Pizza you’ll experience the mysterious sensation of feeling both like you’re eating a pizza and like you’re eating paella, because of the rice and seafood. It also comes with a side packet of “Descent into Darkness Smokey Cheese Sauce” for you to pour on at whatever time and in whatever quantity you want, should your taste buds somehow manage to get used to the pizza’s baseline flavor and you want to switch things up.

The Jirai-kei Ikasumi Yummy-ochi Pizza is priced at 2,480 yen (US$17.75) and is offered as a medium size only, and can also be ordered with sides of honey mustard or yangnyeom chicken for 2,970 yen, or slices of apple pie for 2,830 yen. It’s on sale now at 578 select Domino’s Japan branches and scheduled to be available until December 1, but with the caveat of “while supplies last,” so if this is a minefield you’re willing to wade into, the sooner the better.

Source, images: PR Times
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