La France

It just occurred to me that when I was growing up my mother used a laundry product called La France. I think it was "bluing." You know, to make your whites look whiter?  Am I speaking to people with blank looks on their faces and no idea what I'm talking about this time?

Why I thought of La France is that there is something in Japan that is called La France (ra furansu). It is a fruit that is in the stores now. For all the world it looks like a Bartlet Pear until you grasp the size of it. It is enormous!



In the picture to the left is a La France with a ruler in front showing it to be at least 12 cm long. (Are you out there Ed?)  Beside it is a 500 ml carton of La France drink (1% real fruit juice!) It took me a while to figure all of this out a few years back because Japanese people tend to think if something is written in katakana - the alphabet for foreign words - it should follow that foreigners should know what it means.

By the way, the La France is like a Bartlett Pear on the inside too, with the same taste and texture.

While we're on the subject of food, I found this to be amusing. On the left we have a small package of potato salad.  In Japan you're likely to find carrot, cucumber and a bit of whole kernel corn in it, but it tastes pretty good. When I first arrived in 1999 my first taste of it was in a package of mixed sandwiches between two pieces of white bread at an after church lunch

Here we have the empty plastic tray with the lettuce leaves printed on it. I often tell people at home that almost everything is done in Japan with an eye toward aesthetics. So, rather than putting in real lettuce leaves that would just go limp and nasty in a day and everyone would throw away anyway, they print the leaves on the tray. It makes the potato salad look more attractive without the waste.