There was a whopper of a battle between a sex service in Chiba and hamburger behemoth McDonald's that left the call girl business far from lovin' it.
The sex service called itself Nukudonarudo, a play on words taken from nukeru, slang Japanese for ejaculation, and Makudonarudo, the local pronunciation of McDonald's.
"We thought it'd be better to have a name with impact. It came about by coincidence because there was a McDonald's restaurant in front of us at the time we were meeting to discuss the service name," the operator of Nukudonarudo tells Shukan Gendai. "In this business, it's better to create a bit of a stir, so we didn't mind if they sued us."
Nukudonarudo also copied McDonald's menus to label its sex services. While the restaurant has a standard 0 yen charge for a smile, Nukudonarudo informed its customers they were entitled to a "sexy groan for 0 yen."
McDonald's was none too pleased to see itself associated with a call girl service.
"We confirmed in July that the name belonged to a sex service. We don't want our customers to consider the possibility that our company is associated with that business and their name hurts the brand we have worked very hard to establish," a member of McDonald's communications division tells Shukan Gendai. "We informed the company that its name breached the fair trade practices law and demanded it be changed."
Threatened with a massive lawsuit from a huge multinational, Nukudonarudo's owner lost his cojones.
"My lawyer told me that McDonald's in the United States had led the complaints against us and that compensation in a lawsuit could run into the hundreds of millions of yen. Considering we also called one of our services a 'Super Value Set,' I figured a court case probably wasn't the best idea," the owner tells Shukan Gendai. "We had no choice, so have recently changed the name. Now, we're gonna call ourselves 'Nukutteria' (after "nukeru" and Korean fast food chain Lotteria)." (By Ryann Connell)
November 7, 2006