Japanese-Korean Pink Pigs

Today it was time to clean out the spam bucket, which usually has about the entertainment value as regular cat litter maintainance activities. Buried amongst the many male performance tuning packs etc. was however what appeared from the characters to be a Korean spam, but it also contained a lot of ASCII text which on cursory examination appears to be in Japanese with multiple references to pink pigs.

(There now follows a dissection of this mail which is probably only of interest to afficionados of the Japanese language, and also pictures of a pink pig).

The title of the mail is (광고) NTV(CH4).... kankoku drama PARI-NO GOHIBITO!!; which translates to: [unknown Korean characters] NTV(CH4) Korean Soap Opera "The GOHIBITO of PARIS". Hmm. "GOHIBITO" is not in my dictionary. A longer text follows:

channeru 4 ban honjits houei saremasida..... kankoku drama PARI-NO GOHIBITO!! kousiki pink buta chokinbako oh goshowkai idasimas!! parino goibito gousiki chokinbako, drama poster 5mai-set ... 3,500yen

Speakers of Japanese will recognise this text as being of that language, but with an odd syntax and strangely misspelt (or mistranscribed), with t becoming d, and k g. At a guess both GOHIBITO and goibito are referring to koibito (恋人, lover), which would seem to fit, leaving us with: Broadcast on Channel Nr. 4 today: the Korean Soap Opera 'The Lovers of Paris'! Allow us to introduce the official pink pig savings box! The official "Lovers of Paris" savings box and 5-pack set series poster for 3,500 Yen.

Not being very up to date with the latest offerings from Korean Television I was relieved to find that the spam included a link, which lead to a rather spammy site with Korean navigation and a framed Japanese shopping site providing further information on pink piggy banks and their relationship to Paris and its lovers. I believe however that this series of stills, shamelessly lifted from the site in question, will satisfy your curiosity just as much as it did mine.

Update: evidently I'm not the only one who finds this particular mail somewhat unusual... http://kumataro.exblog.jp/2329755/