For more on this topic, see The Colonel Comes to Japan, a 30 minute video with a fairly scholarly treatment of KFC's expansion to Japan in the 1970s. It is par

For more on this topic, see The Colonel Comes to Japan, a 30 minute video with a fairly scholarly treatment of KFC's expansion to Japan in the 1970s. It is part academic study and part compulsively watchable television. The single best anecdote among many is how the statute of the Colonel, which is outside every KFC in Japan, came to become associated with the brand here. Apparently when the guy in charge of KFC Japan was put in charge of the unit, HQ didn't really think a poor Asian country merited any marketing support, but they let him use anything they had in storage. Somebody had produced several hundred Colonel statues but they were deemed too ridiculous to use. "So I said 'I'll take all of them.'" "And did you know they would be a hit with Japanese people?" "No clue, but something is better than nothing." (Also worth mentioning: the guy's right hand man, who was Japanese, gets into an argument with him over whether selling KFC as "aristocratic American elegance" to Japanese people is exploitative, since, quote the American executive, "We sell fried chicken to poor people." "Maybe you do over there, but we won't over here." Topics in the discussion included cultural appropriation, memories of the war and associated famines, and the desire of an emerging economic superpower to consume things associated with wealth, like meat.) The easiest way to find the video is probably your local library or university library, as it was made in the early 1980s.