Arnold Zwicky's Blog

From Chris Ambidge on Facebook, this image of the Japanese cartoon character Tarepanda:

The character Tarepanda ‘floppy panda’ has come up on this blog before, in this posting.

From Wikipedia:

Tarepanda … is a cute panda character owned by the company San-X… The term “tare” … means “lazy” or “droopy” in Japanese.

… [The company] introduced Tarepanda stickers in 1995.

… Tarepanda is a character that moves by rolling over, with a record speed of 2.75 m/h. Tarepanda’s favorite food is mochi

Now, about mochi:

Mochi … is Japanese rice cake made of mochigome, a short-grain japonica glutinous rice. The rice is pounded into paste and molded into the desired shape. In Japan it is traditionally made in a ceremony called mochitsuki. While also eaten year-round, mochi is a traditional food for the Japanese New Year and is commonly sold and eaten during that time.

… Small balls of ice cream are wrapped inside a mochi covering to make mochi ice cream. In Japan this is manufactured by the conglomerate Lotte under the name Yukimi Daifuku, “snow-viewing daifuku”. In the United States the grocery chains Trader Joe’s, H Mart, Lotte, and Mollie Stone’s sell mochi ice cream in flavors of chocolate, mango, coconut, green tea, coffee, red bean, vanilla,

(Mochi also features in savory rather than sweet dishes — soups, for instance. But I know it in the sweet context.)

This entry was posted on November 3, 2013 at 10:37 am and is filed under Language and food, Linguistics in the comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.