Salt of Hakata Commercial Parodies

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About

Salt of Hakata (Japanese: 伯方の塩, Hakata no Shio) is a table salt released by Hakata Salt Manufacturing^[1] since 1973. Its source saltwater contains a large amount of solar salt made in Mexico and Australia though it's recognized as pure Japanese sea salt by sloping salt-terrace method.

Since 2008, its long-run TV commercial movies (TVCMs) has been a popular subject for parodies on the Japanese video sharing service Nico Nico Douga (NND) due to its very impressive sound logo.

Origin

The TVCM series for that table salt, including famous sound logo of a man barking out the product name in a strong staccato manner, has been aired since 1997 and it has been familiar to almost all Japanese people. The melody for this line is taken from an enka^[2] song "Otoko Ryu" (男龍, lit. Man Dragon) by a Japanese singer Yasuo Takajo who are also barking out it in the TVCMs.

"Ha! Ka! Ta! no! Shi! O!"

Spread

The very impressive shout of "Ha! Ka! Ta! no! Shi! O!" has been sometimes parodied by Japanese comedians since before. In addition to this, this shout began to be introduced to MAD videos by NND users circa the summer of 2008.^[3] They has utilized it to cause surrealistic lulz in various kind of MADs. Besides, they sometimes slice the phrase into each notes and reconstruct into another phrases or singing voices by the "Human-Powered Vocaloid" (人力ボーカロイド) manner.

In a reflection of the popularity, an annual video series of compiling popular "Salt of Hakata" MAD videos in ranking style started in the beginning of 2009^[4] and had continued to 2011.^[5]^[6].

Hakata-san

"Hakata-san" (伯方さん) is a moe gijinka character for Salt of Hakata, who is a disgraceful person (not a girl) wearing on Mexican hat and poncho only. Hakata-san was born in the comment board in Nico Nico Pedia's article for the salt in February, 2009, and now it's a mascot of this meme and shows cute but disgraceful performances in many of videos in this series.

For more information about that particular phenomenon, please check the KYM entry for Hakata-san.

Notable Examples

Left: Space Channel 5 Parody | Right: Cirno's Perfect Math Class

Left: Vocaloid Song "Two-faced Lovers" | Right: Bad Apple!!

Left: Nico Nico Meteor Storm | Right: Attak on Titan OP Credit Parody

Search Interest

A large spike in 2004 was caused by Japan fair trade commission's administrative directive to the food labelings in Japanese major manufacturers' salt. That became a large topic in that year.