Usually I'm a great supporter of the variety of "Japanese taste" Western food products available. When someone warns, "Are you sure you want to order the pasta? It's Japanese taste..." they usually mean the dish involves a lot of seaweed and/or roe, which I am fine with. And I love finding new and ever-more-strange soft-serve flavors, like hooji-cha (roasted green tea), kuri (chestnut) and even ikasumi (squid ink).

But as with gene experimentation, flavor experimentation runs the risk of producing monsters, mistakes of nature, three-headed babies born with flippers and a full set of teeth.

In other words: wasabi white chocolate.

Wasabi is good with sashimi. It is good in little smudges on sushi. It is good mixed in salmon ochazuke, hot tea poured over rice with bits of fish or vegetables. It is not good in white chocolate or (I hear) ice cream or -- I'm going to go out on a limb here -- anything answering to the name "dessert." Do you hear me, Japan? Keep churning out your azuki-bean parfaits topped with cornflakes, your satsumaimo (sweet potato) pastries, your myriad of jellies. I swear, I'll eat them all. But only if you stop with the wasabi sweets. And the beef, crab and fish sweets while you're at it. Consider it an act of international goodwill.

And one more question, Japan: any suggestions for what to do with 15 pieces of uneaten wasabi white chocolate? I don't even want to inflict this taste on the Japanese.