“Gimme a break, gimme a break, break me off a piece of that… OH WHAT THE FUCK, JAPAN!?”

~America

Apart from the Chinese inventing fireworks and Arabs inventing all those boring “math” “innovations” like “the number 0,” America is responsible for inventing everything great that we have in the world. The light bulb, the internet, the George Foreman Grill, all of these essential and life-changing products were conceived and birthed here in the U S of A. Unfortunately, as soon as a product has been invented, anyone is free to tinker with it, and often in trying to improve an idea, they poison it.

Yes, we’re talking about Japan.

Specifically, it is Japan’s bastardization of American culinary treats that is both mind boggling, and terrifying. It must be stopped. So, we are beginning a new feature, discussing Japan’s terrifying alteration of American products, with…

Goddamn It Japan, You’re Doing it Wrong: The Kit Kat Bar

Okay, so maybe you’ve just now gone to Kit Kat’s Wikipedia page and, in a fit of rage that caused you to accidentally drop that summer sausage you were gnawing on, you exclaimed, “But AFFotD, you credit stealing bastards, Kit Kats were invented in England, not America.” You can say the same thing about the English language, but that doesn’t mean they’re doing it right, does it? Kit Kats might not be “created by” America, but we’re the ones who make it and sell it, and we’re the ones who have to watch helplessly as Japan destroys what we worked so hard to make deliciously famous.

For the three of you who don’t know what the term “candy” means (it’s like, sugary food, just bear with us), the Kit Kat is a chocolate-coated wafer produced by Nestlé. There are three layers of wafer on each “finger”, and the fingers are connected by a layer of chocolate, which can be snapped off individually. While it technically was invented in 1935 in York (as in, England), America invented the “Gimme a break” jingle that it’s most famous for, so by the transitive property, America invented the Kit Kat (we think that’s how the transitive property works).

Pictured above: The transitive property

Of course, as America took the reins of the Kit Kat, we decided to try to get the most money we could out of those jingle-making chocolates. So we took Kit Kat to places where they thought it would sell, and by a happy coincidence, the word “Kit Kat” happened to sound similar to the Japanese phrase “Kitto Katsu,” a term meaning “surely win” that students use to wish each other luck before exams, because Japan can’t even wish people good luck the right way.

So while we would have hoped that Japan would have been happy enough with their chocolate wafer, they instead proceeded to make over 200 different flavors of Kit Kats. For those of you who didn’t realize Kit Kats could even be flavored, well congratulations you’ve proven that you think like an American and you don’t like fucking up a good thing.

This is going to hurt us more than it hurts you, but below is a list of actual “flavors” of Kit Kats that Japan sells. They must be stopped.

Aloe Vera

Most women would recognize Aloe Vera as being a lotion that is good at soothing sunburns. Most teenage boys are aware of Aloe Vera’s topical usage for, uh, slightly more private application. Japan likes taking this particular plant and turning it into a drink, because only Japan could look at something people use to masturbate and think, “hey, maybe we can drink it too.” If Japan ever teamed up with Native Americans for a Buffalo hunt, they’d no doubt latch onto the whole “use every part of the animal” concept, but they’d probably end up taking it overboard and turning the rib cage into a sex swing, or using the tendons as part of some creepy and dangerous surgery that makes them look more Western.

This is a green Kit Kat tastes like a goddamn plant that’s primarily used to sooth your skin. If we wanted to eat something that we rub on ourselves, we’d go back to desperately licking the bottom of a Vaseline container when our family members throw away all the bottles they found in our secret booze stash again.

Soy Sauce

Listen, we appreciate the combination of salty and sweet foods as much as the next country, but at some point something’s gotta give. The Japanese Kit Kat R&D department clearly forgot that they were dealing with a product whose base ingredients were “wafers and chocolate” and decided to make their product taste like the chunk of rice you accidentally dropped into the soy sauce tray before you decide to just use your damn fingers to eat your damn sushi.

Except, apparently it doesn’t even pull that off. Unless “Soy Sauce” is a Japanese term that means “April Fool’s!” (and it’s possible), we can’t understand why the Soy Sauce Kit Kat is white, and tastes like maple syrup. Japan is even wrong when they’re purposely doing it wrong. You’re killing us here, Japan.

Yakimorokoshi (Grilled Corn)

Corn is one of the most important and widely utilized American vegetables. We slather it in salt and butter at our summer festivals, we use freaky science to turn it into sugary gloop for our soft drinks, and we raze fields of it to bring back zombie baseball players. Corn is an essential part of America’s cuisine, culture, and heritage. We turn it into chowders, fuel, or even waxy candies. But in the entire history of this nation’s corn consumption, never once has someone thought, “What if we made chocolate that tasted like grilled corn.”

Cue Japan. *ominous thunder*

Yaki morokoshi is the Japanese term for “grilled corn,” though we’re not sure why this product decided to go with a Japanese name, as opposed to the previous items on the list. Maybe it’s because they truly want to own this concept. It’s like they’re sending a ransom note to America and want us to know that they’re complacent and responsible for what they’ve done. “We have your corn, we will continue to turn it into yellow, disgusting tasting Kit Kats until you help us kill all the whales in the ocean. All of them.”

Wine

Wine is alcoholic juice that gets America drunk, so of course we love it. We even like to eat chocolate with the wines we drink, that’s pretty common. But something about wine flavored Kit Kats strikes us as unholy, sort of like when you see dogs and cats that have become friends, or when French people use a beer bong.

They try to make this product sound attractive by saying it has “a pink color and a distinct wine aftertaste.” That is possibly the least appetizing way you can describe a candy made of booze—when dealing with foods that are flavored as something they would never naturally taste like, the last thing you want to focus on is the aftertaste. This is just them politely informing us that when you eat this, your mouth is going to end up tasting like wine and ass. Great Japan, now you’re trying to ruin alcohol for us.

Sports Drink

What the fuck, Japan? What makes you think of these flavors for a chocolate wafer bar? Do you just blindfold someone and set them loose in a grocery store and make a flavor of the first thing he manages to cleanly grab? “Sport Drink Kit Kat” sounds like either a shitty college girl band, or the first semi-coherent words of a stroke victim. Do they not realize that the whole point of sports drinks is that they come in a shitload of flavors? That would be like if Pepsi released a pop that was “Juice” flavored. This is just an affront to chocolate and to sports drinks everywhere. Somewhere, an irate Michael Jordan just read about this product and added it his enemy’s list.

Apparently, it tastes like citrus and yogurt, which is not what we’d expect when we bite into something called sports drink. Then again, the mere concept of “biting” into sports drink makes our heads hurt, so we’re just going to link you to that SNL Gatorade Cookie Dough commercial.

Miso

Is Japan punking us? Did Ashton Kutcher spent several hours editing the Kit Kat “Varieties” section on Wikipedia? Hasn’t Punk’d been off the air for years? Why would he waste his time on Wikipedia based pranks? Does he have a lot of free time on the set of Two and a Half Men? Because seriously, having Japan make a “Miso” flavored Kit Kat at this point just feels like someone made a questionably racist joke. It’s white, apparently sweet and custardy, and if you open a box of it and stare in long enough you grow tentacles. At this point, cultural sensitivity be damned, Japan clearly isn’t taking itself seriously so why should we do the same? Seriously, if you asked us for ridiculous but stereotypical flavors that Japan would give their Kit Kats, we would have answered something along the lines of, “Well, I don’t know. I’d say Miso and Wasabi, but there’s no way they’d do that.”

Wasabi

Oh, fuck you Japan. Fuck you so much.