Mameshiba!

Japanese love to play with words and use double meanings for humorous effects and the cute little character goods, created by the marketing giant Dentsu, have a name that does just this. They are called ‘Mame-Shiba’ which at first glance it appears to be because they are beans, ‘mame’ in Japanese, with a dog’s face, ‘shiba’ which is a kind of Japanese dog. But there’s a bit more to it than this: The word ‘shiba’ originally meant kindling or the small twigs used to light a fire; over time this word itself came to mean ‘small’ which is the reason that shiba dogs were called this, they are the smallest breed of Japanese dog. And ‘mame’, does mean bean but also itself means small. Shiba dogs, the real ones that is, come in various sizes the smallest of which are called Mame-Shiba. Dentsu’s promotional team had the great idea of giving each of their Mame-shiba characters a different personality and each one has a different ‘mame-chishiki’, which means ‘small knowledge’ or piece of trivia. Some of them appear to be quite surreal but obviously people like them as sales of these goods reached US$ 30 million in 2008 and 2009!
Just in case you feel the urge to jump on the mameshiba band-wagon, my friend sells some of their goods on her website: http://from-japan-with-love.blogspot.com/
Here are three of my favourites: