Takanori Nishikawa’s home prefecture supermarket has a whole line of Christmas cakes named after his songs, but do they look the part?
The following is a Christmas cake tale from our Japanese-language reporter Ikuna Kamezawa.
I’d heard that Takanori Nishikawa, the famous J-rock musician who performs under the stage name T.M. Revolution and was born in Shiga, is a sort of tourism ambassador for the prefecture, and he does a lot to promote the area, but he’s even more involved than I’d expected! With such a big star supporting them, I feel like Shiga is in a really good spot right now.
For example, there’s a Shiga supermarket chain called Heiwado that Nishikawa is a general manager of, and they’re selling a Christmas cake that he produced called White Breath, which is also the name of one of T.M. Revolution’s songs.
▼ “White Breath”
I bought one of the cakes on a whim, and it ended up being so much fun that I just had to tell you all about it!
Anyway, Heiwado’s Christmas cakes have me really fired up about the chain this winter, so let’s take a look at the whole lineup.
Each one shares its name with a hit T.M. Revolution song, like “Burning X’mas,” “Thunderbird,” or “Heart of Sword-Before the Dawn.” All three of those are only available for pick-up inside Heiwado stores. If you don’t live in or near Shiga, it’s really hard to get your hands on them.
But thankfully some of the others, like “Hot Limit,” “Wild Rush,” “Level 4,” and “White Breath” can be shipped frozen. So after thinking it over for a long time…
…I ordered the White Breath cake. You know, because it’s winter.
“White Breath” was released by T.M. Revolution in 1997 and sold a million copies. It’s a song that’s burned into the memories of anyone who was around back then, in the middle of the Heiwa era. It was a fun time.
This was the first time for me to order a cake for delivery through the mail. I was impressed by how nice it looked!
OK, let’s zoom in closer on the White Breath cake.
First, since “White Breath” is a winter song, the overall impression of the cake is very “White Breath”-y. The way it looks really brings to mind lyrics from the song like “The season is getting colder,” “Such a cold time,” and “It must be because it’s winter.”
And this chocolate cottage? Totally makes me think of the lyric “At a lodge in the middle of a blizzard.” The swirls of whipped cream remind me of “Watch your step on the moving sidewalk.” And the round shape of the macarons? They look like zeros, sort of like the line “The limit is off at 12:00 a.m.”
So for me, the more I look at the cake, the more it reminds me of the song, but I already knew it was a “White Breath” cake when I bought it. Would other people be able to notice the theme if they didn’t know about it beforehand?
So I asked some of my coworkers, starting with Ahiruneko, who was the guy in the office that day who I think is most likely to be a T.M. Revolution fan. All I told him was, “This cake is based on a famous song,” and then I asked him to guess which one. He said “I have no idea,” so I figured I had to give him a hint, so I added “It’s a million-selling hit that came out in 1997, and was on the Kohaku New Year’s Eve music television program that year too.”
And then…
…everyone else in the office jumped in, saying “Let me try to guess too!”
That’s right…a lot of them were in their teens when “White Breath” came out. P.K. Sanjun in particular, standing up on his chair, looked like he was dying to say “I know it! I know which song it is!”
“It’s ‘White Love,’ isn’t it?” P.K. shouted.
▼ “White Love”
“White Love,” the song from idol group Speed? No, that’s not it at all!
…or at least, that was my first reaction. Actually, though “White Love” came out in 1997 too, and it also was part of the Kohaku show that year. It even released within a week of when “White Breath” came out. They’re both “white” songs, so I can’t actually say that P.K.’s guess was all that off the mark.
So I gave them another hint, telling them that the song the cake is based on is sung by a male vocalist (Speed was a group of four girls). Someone guessed “Winter, again” by Glay (but that came out in 1999)…
…and someone else said “Shiroi Koibitotachi” (which means “white lovers”) by Keisuke Kuwata (2001).
In the end, it was P.K. who finally figured out it was a “White Breath” cake, but we all had a lot of fun taking a trip down memory lane and remembering hit winter songs from that era!
Getting back to the cake itself, the White Breath usually costs 4,212 yen (US$28), but they were running an online sale so I got it for 3,790 yen (unfortunately, online sales for this year have now ended).
The cake uses Mio Shizuku strawberries, a variety grown locally in Shiga, which are made into a gelee which is mixed with white chocolate mousse and goes inside the sponge cake.
“White chocolate mousse” had me worriedly bracing for a very sweet flavor, but I was happy to find that my prediction was wrong, and the taste was light and refreshing (I’m a person who doesn’t like super sweet deserts). The strawberry gelee turned out to actually be the sweetest part of the cake, and for this level of quality, it’s well worth the price they charge for the White Breath.
Related: Heiwado
Photos © SoraNews24
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