Japanese phone carrier au has launched a campaign inspired by the “wordless communication” that takes place between husband and wife, in this case through the medium of the daily bento lunchbox.
In the “aisai BENTO super surprise BENTO” commercial, the wife uses isai vivid phone to create incredibly realistic “fake” lunches to tempt her husband.
He then removes the “fake” layer (actually a smartphone) to find his real, more humble lunch beneath.
In other words, the phone’s image and video quality is so good you could mistake the screen for reality.
The wife’s imagination is apparently extraordinary, playing a joke on her husband’s visit to a hostess club, his wig-wearing colleague, and his inability to notice when she changes her nails.
Of course, to succeed you basically have to have a spare phone lying around — or otherwise the wife has to make do without a handset while her husband is away at the office.
The commercial is playing on the trope of the aisai bento, the “beloved wife lunchbox”.
Your charming spouse will make you an affectionate lunch, surprising you every day with its creativity. But if you do something bad, she can get payback through the shikaeshi bento or “revenge lunchbox”.
However, it also unwittingly reveals how conservative mainstream corporations think.
The wife’s job is to sit at home making a nice lunch for her working husband, who isn’t even aware that she is pregnant. The idea that the wife could also hold down a job is not even considered, let alone that the husband might do some cooking. The tech is cool, but the attitudes behind the promotion need some updating!
