Pizza Hut Japan has shown that’s it’s always ready to experiment with some outside-the-box ideas, which is how we got both a ramen pizza and a plum pizza this year. They’re not out of bold concepts yet, though, which is why they’ve now released a “landmine pizza.” ▼ “You’re not gonna eat me because I’m not cute, right?” pouts the promotional image.
Don’t worry, though, because it’s not filled with explosives. Instead, the landmine-type Pizza gets its name from the Japanese fashion world..
.which may or may not be making a light bulb turn on for you, so let’s take a look at the linguistics involved. The full, in-Japanese name of this pizza is the Jirai-kei Ikasumi Yummy-ochi Pizza.
Jirai is the Japanese word for “landmine,” but jirai-kei, or “landmine-type,” refers to a clothing and makeup trend in Japan that takes ordinarily bright and cute aesthetics and gives them a dark twist, with the implication that there’s a harder edge to the person wearing them than you might initially expect. Jirai-kei fashion has a penchant for darkly-colored clothing with select patches of girlish color, and the Jirai-kei Ikasumi Yummy-ochi Pizza follows suit with a black truffle squid ink ( ikasumi ) sauce drizzled over shrimp and other seafood plus black olives, semi-dried tomatoes, and, of course, cheese. Oh, and mixed in with the squid ink sauce is rice, just in case the squid ink alone wasn’t going to make the Jirai-kei Ikasumi Yummy-ochi Pizza seem unus.