The Continuing Colonel Sanders Hubbub

It happens every year, and every year I forget until it's too late, and I'm in the middle of it. Daylight Savings Time is, for me at least, a total fuckjob. n It was the Tuesday after the clocks were shifted. I knew things were going to be getting dark earlier, but I was still assuming that "earlier" meant at least a little later than it did. I was supposed to meet Morgan at her place around 5:30. It'd been a long day?my legs and back were cramped from sitting in front of the machine, so I figured, what the hell?I'll just take myself a leisurely stroll down there. So a bit after 4, I packed up my things and left. I knew it was early, but I figured I'd, y'know, just hang out someplace nearby. A bookstore, maybe, or something. Maybe a drugstore.

I had no idea that the darkness would slam down around me as soon as it did?or as quickly as it did?or that I would be in the middle of a construction site during rush hour when it happened.

Same damn thing happens every year.

Times like that?trying to get through some unbelievably heavy foot traffic in a construction site?the cane is of no use whatsoever. People either trip over it, step on it or kick it, and when that's not happening, it's getting stuck between chunks of concrete or in that orange plastic netting they fence the place in with.

It was pretty bad.

After that debacle, I knew that, suddenly, every day at work was going to be a race?much more so than usual?to get someplace safe?an apartment, a bar?before darkness fell. As I worked, it was always there behind me, hovering over my left shoulder, insisting that I take just one more glance out the window to see how the light was holding up, then another glance at the watch. It becomes a compulsion.

Sometimes when you get right down to it, life is little more than a long string of tiny obsessions. We hop from one to the next to the next. It can be pretty exhausting after a while. I knew I'd be tied up with that Daylight Savings nightmare for at least a week or two, and needed something to distract myself. Stupid distractions?especially with situations being as they are these days?can be extremely useful, I've found.

Two weeks ago, while trying to track down a reasonably priced toy Godzilla here in the city, Morgan and I discovered a Japanese toy store on the Lower East Side that featured a preponderance of Colonel Sanders iconography. Their shelves were stocked with every conceivable variety of Colonel Sanders?figurines, banks, nodders, wind-ups. We had no idea why this was?was it perhaps disturbing evidence that there was some sort of powerful, shadowy Colonel Sanders cult operating out of Japan? We just didn't know.

So after finally getting that Godzilla business out of the way a few days later, I turned my attention back to the "Colonel Sanders in Japan" enigma.

Since anything Morgan and I could come up with on our own would be sheer guesswork and crazy, unfounded speculation (did he play some sort of major role in the postwar rebuilding effort?), I sent a note to a friend of ours who'd made several trips over there and was well-versed in the subtleties of Japanese pop culture. I figured that even if she didn't know the answer offhand, she'd know where to send me.

"Boy," she wrote back later that afternoon, "I dunno nuttin about why it'd be the Col. Sanders all over the place like that... Except that they have KFC in Japan, and I think they like that food. Cause it's crispy. That's how come they think of things like 'Crispy Teens' also. They conflate 'crispy' with 'cool and hip.' So I guess by extension Col. Sanders is cool and hip on accounta his extra crispy recipes."

It was as good an explanation as anything we'd come up with so far, and I was willing to accept it. But something drove me onward, ignoring much of my other work in the pursuit. I needed to know, for some reason, and I needed to know for certain.

Two days later, after much sweating, much frustration and a great deal of piecing together small bits of information from a variety of sources (well, three at least), I finally had my answer.

I think. (Lucky for me I'm not the only one who's encountered this beguiling fast-food mystery!) The story goes a little something like this:

Kentucky Fried Chicken opened its first Japanese franchise in 1970, but was hardly what you'd call an overnight success. Most of the signs, both outside and inside the storefront operation, were still in English for some reason. People didn't know what to make of that "unusual-looking man" with the goatee and the string tie. And the now-familiar red-and-white stripe motif left most passersby convinced that the place was a barber shop.

Through time and perseverance (and a few minor cultural adjustments on the menu), KFC began to catch on. Advertising campaigns that focused on the character of Colonel Sanders, filmed against a backdrop of the rolling Kentucky countryside, helped make him a strangely popular little American icon in Japan?much like Superman, Frank Sinatra or Bender the Robot.

In fact, nowadays KFC has grown to become the second-largest American fast-food chain in the country, second only to McDonald's. They also have a certain advantage over McDonald's in that they're considered, in the minds of many consumers, to be a higher-class establishment. It's more expensive than McDonald's, but most people who go to such places tend to think the food's better. Which all leads to something I found even more strange.

Among those who celebrate it?an estimated 10 percent of the population?a big spread from KFC has become the traditional Christmas dinner throughout Japan. Isn't that something? To even get in the place that day, you need to make reservations weeks in advance. The primary reason for this may be traced back to the scarcity of turkeys in Japan. But even if they had turkeys, most Butterballs would be too large to fit into the standard Japanese oven. So what's the next logical step down, fowl-size-wise, on the evolutionary ladder? Why, chickens, of course?especially the extra-crispy variety. Some have even claimed that in Japan, KFC chickens are smaller than their American counterparts.

So every year on Christmas, KFCs across the country are mobbed by Japanese families in their Sunday finery, gnawing away on those little bones, fatty skins and tiny paper cups full of coleslaw. I'm told it's quite something to behold.

Here are a few other interesting KFC-Japan facts I wasn't previously aware of. (Oh, just shut up?I think they're interesting.)

? Most KFC outlets feature a lifesize plastic statue of the Colonel, his hands cupped in front of him in a gesture no one quite seems to understand.

? You can't get mashed potatoes at Japanese KFCs. Mashed potatoes, see, are very difficult to eat with either the fingers or with chopsticks. As a replacement, they offer fried rice balls and french fries.

? KFC-Japan's advertising campaigns around the holiday season have, at least in previous years, hinted that KFC is also the traditional American Christmas meal.

? Women comprise some 70 percent of KFC's customer base in Japan (though the men of the family are expected to call to make the Christmas reservations). As a result of this, most of the company's premiums?tote bags, etc.?are aimed at women. It doesn't exactly explain all the wind-ups and nodders, but it comes close.

These are things I was able to piece together from a recent article in the Lexington Herald-Leader, a funny little online bit by a fellow calling himself "Captain Japan" and the frightening overload of Colonel Sanders banks being sold on eBay at grotesquely inflated prices. Add it all up and what do you have? The answer to my initial question, and the fulfillment and prompt dismissal of yet one more obsession.

Well, it's close enough to an answer anyway, and one I'm perfectly willing to be satisfied with.

Okay, so maybe it wasn't the most significant question facing the world today, but dammit, it had me stumped for a while. I thought it turned out to be very interesting in the end, myself. See, it's trying to find the answers to stupid questions like this that got me into this business in the first place, and still keeps me here after all these years.

Well no, come to think of it, that's not true at all.