If you’ve seen Burger King’s ads with their mascot and that creepy “King” mask, you know that they’re no stranger to weirdness. Combine that with Japan — the world’s leading exporter of pure, unadulterated WTF — and true weirdness is the result.
Burger chains with international reach often create local versions of their sandwiches. Burger King’s latest version is the Kuro Ninja burger — kuro is Japanese for black — which features a black bun created by mixing bamboo charcoal with the flour and “black ketchup”, a concoction of regular ketchup, garlic and squid ink. The burger also features a big hunk of bacon.
If the bacon in the promo photo above reminds you of someone sticking out their tongue, that’s intentional. The mascot for the burger is a ninja — the feared shadow warriors of legend and a lot of painfully bad Sho Kosugi movies from the ’80s — sticking out his tongue.
The marketing equation that Burger King seems to be following for the Kuro Ninja is as follows:
If any readers have tried a Kuro Ninja burger, let us know in the comments!