Looking for the limits of Chiikawa and friends.

Since Japan has an insatiable appetite for cuteness, it’s only natural that the country is always searching for ways to make food cute. That search recently brought us to a way to incorporate the cast of anime/manga Chiikawa into our meals and snacks of, well, essentially anything.

While poking around the official Chiikawa online store, we came across the Chiikawa Edible Stickers set, which gets you a sheet of illustrations of Chiikawa and friends made of thin strips of starch and agar. While they don’t add any noticeable flavor or substantial texture, they do give food a sizable cuteness boost, and so we were eager to try them out ourselves.

Though they’re currently sold out on the official shop, we managed to find some on Amazon Japan here, priced at 270 yen (US$1.85) per sheet of 13 stickers.

Sliding out the sheet, we were greeted by several stars of the main cast, including Chiikawa, Hachiware, Usagi, Momonga, and Kuri-Manju. With so many options to choose from, we decided to try using the Chiikawa Edible Stickers with a variety of different foods in order to test the limits of their cuteness-enhancing powers. We settled on a top-down approach, starting with foods that are already inherently cute, then working our way down to less-cute foods until they stopped making us go “Awwwww!” when Chiikawa stickers are applied to them.

● Round 1: Sanshoku dango

This traditional Japanese sweet of a trio of mochi dumplings doesn’t really need any help being cute, as the bright colors and playful atmosphere of eating them straight from the skewer is enough to put a smile on our faces already. But would applying the Chiikawa stickers send their cuteness soaring to an even higher level?

Yes.

Yes it would.

We’re honestly amazed at how professional the results look. You’ll want to make sure your hands are clean and dry when placing the stickers, and use a delicate touch, but get it right and they’ll transform a pack of ordinary from-the-supermarket dango into something amusement park snack bars would probably charge you three or four hundred yen a stick for.

● Round 2: Warabimochi

Next up, the jiggliest of traditional Japanese desserts, warabimochi.

For our test, we picked out a pack of bite-sized spherical mochi pieces. Since warabimochi doesn’t have much flavor by itself, the pack included kinako (roasted soybean powder) and kuromitsu (brown sugar syrup) to dip/cover them in, but we added the stickers first.

Once again, there was a major addition of adorability, with the stickers looking like they were quivering in joyous excitement.

Applying the extras seasonings does dampen the visual contrast, though, so you’ll want to use them sparingly, or at least be strategic as to which angle you dip from.

● Round 3: Tamagoyaki

Shifting from sweet to savory, we come to tamagoyaki, the Japanese-style fried egg omelet.

This gave us our first broad, flat canvas to work with, but applying the facial-feature-only stickers worked great, making it look like Chiikawa and the others had morphed into egg form.

▼ Seriously, if they made plushie keychains/straps that looked like this, they’d probably sell a ton of them.

● Round 4: Konnyaku

OK, now it’s time to really start challenging Chiikawa as we introduce konnyaku to the test. A type of yam-based gelatin, konnyaku is healthy and low-calorie, but as a gray/beige block, it’s not exactly cute…

…or at least it’s not exactly cute until you put some Chiikawa stickers on it.

With konnyaku having a drabber hue than the more vivid tamagoyaki, there’s sort of a humorous undercurrent to the cuteness here, with your brain telling you this probably shouldn’t be cute, but somehow still is.

Simmilar to warabimochi, konnyaku doesn’t have much flavor on its own. One way to eat it is with miso, so we slathered some on, which turned out to be a very wise plan because it made it look like we’d covered our Chiikawa konnyaku up with a cozy blanket.

● Round 5: Shishamo

OK, now it’s time for the final trial, shishamo, or as they’re called in English…

…smelt.

Yep, these are straight-up small fish that are served with the heads still on. Even by Japanese standards, it’s an old-school dish, something particularly popular with older generations. So how well will it mesh with Chiikawa aesthetics?

Hmm…

OK, Chiikawa, that’s enough for today. It looks like we’ve reached the limit of foods that you can make cute. Between the undulating nature of the fish’s flesh and the visual unevenness of the scaly pattern and color imparted during grilling, it’s hard for the character artwork to stand out. Since the linework doesn’t pop, it seems to fade in and out depending on if you’re directly looking at it, which kind of makes it look like the fish is haunted.

For everything with more inherent cuteness than a grilled fish, though, Chiikawa Edible Stickers definitely create a cute dining experience, and one you don’t even have to go to McDonald’s for.

Photos ©SoraNews24
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