Japanese language & culture blog

Japanese reaction to US product announcements is often interesting to observe, and yesterday’s launch of the Apple iPad 2 was a real treat in terms of funny reflections and parodies.

One feature of the new iPad is a partly magnetised casing which can accommodate a special kind of cover that folds back to create a stand, in turn waking the device up from sleep mode and cleaning the screen with its microfibre cloth.

The people of Twitter soon caught on to the fact that particularly in the blue colour, the device cover looks very similar to a bath cover that is commonly found on Japanese baths. Such covers are used for a variety of reasons, but mainly to keep the water in the bath warm as family members usually share the bath water (it’s not really used for washing but for bathing; the baths are much deeper and you don’t use soap in the bath).

The image above says 完全に一致 (kanzen ni icchi), which literally means ‘totally identical’—a phrase associated with the internet meme that is not dissimilar to the English ‘totally looks like.’ I’ve searched out a few for a bit of fun ^_^.

For a little more information in Japanese, check out Mainichi Daily’s covering of this. Equally, a Google News search for ‘bath cover’ in Japanese largely brings up articles about the iPad 2. Considering there isn’t usually much news about bath covers, perhaps this will be the case for years to come!

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