@fbusoni wrote:Incurable curiosity definitely feels like a burden in 2025, though, what with history regarded as what happened a few weeks ago.
I spent a good part of this afternoon crafting some prank bullsh history just for fun. My kid's 19th birthday is in a few days, and one of the things I'm sending her is a vintage brooch, along with its' "history," a hybrid concoction of truth and bald-face lies, to see if she can sort them out.
Here's the brooch.
And here's its' "history."
I could tell from the clasp type that it’s pretty old, early 20th century, and then I did a bit of digging on the design. I thought it looked rather Japanese, so I started there and that turned out to be a good instinct.
So, you know how Japan was one of our (the Allies’) enemies in WW2? Well in WW1 they were on ‘our’ side, against Germany. They didn’t play an enormous role so this isn’t widely known like the crazy stuff they did and had done to them in WW2, but it’s important regarding this brooch.
Okay so what they did in WW1 was destroy German Navy ships in the Pacific, and as a reward they got to invade and take over little German villages and commerce in little areas of Asia. Most of them just immediately surrendered to Japan but there was one major land battle, the Siege of Tsingtao, which despite some fortification, Germany lost.
One of the many spoils of this victory was a little Catholic monastery, Nie Ang Abbey which, among other things, included a bakery where the monks produced and sold a variety of German breads and treats to the German people of the village, up until the time of the siege.
Well one of the Japanese generals (I’ve lost the page where it said his name, dang it) … his father had been a baker, so he decided he would like to own this bakery (and the whole abbey), and pretty easily persuaded England to let him have it, in exchange for supplying bread to any injured soldiers during the next yada-yada-yada.
Now this general was fascinated by the German oven engineering as well as recipes, things he’d never tasted before. One of these was a hand-held treat consisting of a small flat bread, baked with fruit filling inside (Chinese lychee, dragon fruit, and then his own innovation-Japanese persimmon).
Over the upcoming decades, the general grew the tiny Nie Ang Abbey bakery into Ni-An Foods of Japan, with bakeries in several cities, a huge workforce of bakers, salespersons, delivery drivers, etc. supplying the variety of baked goods all over Japan. Since the general had had a wild Asian Golden Cat as a pet when he was a child, the company logo was one leaping and trailing a rainbow. Employees wore the little gilded brass brooches as part of their uniform.
And then of course they had promotions where a few random product packages included a brooch, much to the delight of children.
Then of course World War TWO changed everything, and among America’s spoils was the properties and recipes of Ni-An Foods, all of which were awarded to the now-well-established Kellog’s Cereal company. At first they only sold the little fruit pastries to Japan stores whose customers already knew and loved them, but when the company realized how easily they could be “popped” into an automatic bread toaster …. the ‘Pop Tart’ was born.
And so here you have, the very first Ni-An (or ‘Nyan’) cat.
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Now here is the REAL Nyan Cat (a beloved staple of my kid's childhood):
