Given the approaching hayfever season, a boiled sweet with the name 花粉プラス はなのど飴 (lit. “Pollen Plus Nose and Throat Lozenges”) sounds like just the ticket.
However, despite the promising name, once you look closely you find you’ve been dumped flailing into a world of ambiguity. 花粉プラス turns out to reflect the fact that the sweets contain honey-bee pollen, while the use of hiragana for はな presumably allows the maker a penalty-avoiding ambiguity—is it a nose lozenge or a flower lozenge?—while allowing them to imply that it’s the former. So the product name could also be parsed ”Flower Throat Lozenges with Added Pollen”. At this point, one is inclined to think: shit, I’ve been had. The bastards.
But no, for there is yet another twist to our tale; start investigating the ingredients, and one finds that they all have supposed anti-hayfever or sinus-clearing properties. So it’s more a case of wink-wink-this-helps-your-hayfever-but-without-FDA-approval-we-can’t-say-so than it is trying to sucker the unwary with a product name that seems like it treats what ails them but doesn’t.
However, I should state here for the record that, effective or not, they taste terrible.
Bonus: each of the main ingredients gets a tagline to show what it’s there for: the honey-bee pollen is to maintain health, etc. etc. Hop extract, however, is there because it’s 話題の成分 (“the ingredient of the moment!”). Hmm. So was quicksilver, in it’s day, and we found out how far drinking that got you.
