April Fool’s Day is a big deal in Japan and companies will bring out their A game when it comes to making this a memorable day of jokes and trickery.
Last year, we saw a huge number of hilarious, fictional Japanese products coming from companies like Google, but there’s always an air of “What If” in what we see.
So here’s a quick list of some of the best and some of the rest from Japan.
Google’s Party Horn
Google Japan‘s Input Piro-piro Version is a keyless keyboard that utilizes Party Horn technology to harness an entirely new way to send a text message. Using only your breath, you can control what characters appears on your smartphone’s screen and have a truly hands-free experience.
Google Japan must have put together a serious production budget for this April Fool’s Joke. The video below features a huge number of extras, props, info graphics, and even has the video’s small team visit a Party Horn manufacturing plant on Awaji Island. But it’s good for a giggle and I’d like to know how they even intended to explain turning CO2 into sunlight.
Volvo Japan’s Personal Airbag
Imagine you’re walking down the street on your phone and not exactly paying attention to where you’re going. Next thing you know, bang! You’re down on the pavement having walked into a person five times your size. Well, Volvo Japan is looking to fix that with a personal airbag that works with your smartphone to activate on impact.
Again, this is a very slick April Fool’s joke that probably required quite a bit of moola to pull off. The short 30-second commercial looks like it was shot in a hallway of a shopping mall, which probably meant shutting down that entire section of the place to shoot. Luckily too, Volvo’s cars were not part of the recent Takata airbag recall giving them a little agency to poke fun at these safety devices.
Audi’s Dashboard Rice Cooker
Audi is taking luxury to a whole new level with an exciting new backseat dining experience. With a rice cooker in the back and a number of foldable dining tables, new extras available in their Audi A8 will blow you away. Well, it might blow you away if it was real.
Yes, Audi like Volvo is taking on April Fool’s Day in a self conscious kind of way giving their luxury brand an over-luxurious twist that would make even the most extravagant of millionaires question their wealth. However, what’s not a joke is that Audi-branded Shamoji.
Burger King’s Beef Cologne
While you might think this one is a joke, customers can actually buy Burger King’s beef perfume in Japan today. For ¥5000 or around $42 (USD), Burger King customers can take home their very own Flame-Grilled scented cologne to wear, enjoy, and eventually gag over because of the smell.
According to The Verge‘s Sam Byford, the cologne smells like rubber tire skidmarks mixed as if a scooter fresh from a Macbook box crashed into a bacon factory. In other words, it doesn’t exactly smell like a hamburger, but it does make for a relatively pretty set piece among your collection of colognes.
Capcom’s Dog Ace Attorney
Ace Attorney is perhaps one of the most acclaimed video game series created by Capcom and on April Fool’s Day they announced a silly concept that could actually hold a bit of water. What if Ace Attorney had its characters replaced with cute, animated dogs?
It sounds like a crazy concept, but after looking at some videos online, I’d be down for seeing the games looking like this. Sure, they might have to actually include real dialogue in the game and turn some of the grunts into actual commands to be used in court, but this could be an example of a joke that could turn into something cool.