Learning Day: The Scam Cookbooks of Morishige Shunsen 🌭

As you know, 1900HOTDOG is a website about food (such as hot dogs). This is a food website. So like usual, like always, I’m back with another roundup of the hottest new cookbooks. This week I went to a leading online bookseller known for its ethics and well-curated stock to review three new cookbooks for all you food website cookbook review fans: Kanye West Cookbook by Morishige Shunsen, Kate Middleton Cookbook by Morishige Shunsen, and Sailor Moon CookBook by Morishige Shunsen.

Who is Morishige Shunsen? I’ll tell you who: he is the author name on Amazon listings for 29 cookbooks. He is not online otherwise. Googling “Morishige Shunsen” leads me to a “Morishige” in the Japanese manga art world and a “Shunsen” in past Japanese fine art. Wow! Morishige Shunsen is one lucky guy to have a name made of two separate famous names. Two names a Japanese art fan could know, and combine if they wanted to. Wow: Morishige Shunsen sure is a lucky, normal, real guy, who uses Amazon dot com to sell his cookbooks. Cookbooks with full titles like Kate Middleton Cookbook: 20 Fantastic Recipes For The Family Kate Middleton Perfect Homemade.

Obviously we all agree Morishige Shunsen is real. Just like we agree I am a prolific cookbook reviewer. That statement is as real as Morishige Shunsen. However, let’s goof around with a thought experiment. Perhaps Morishige Shunsen is less of a Morishige Shunsen and more of a “Morishige Shunsen”. Less of a Scam Likely and more of a Scam Definitely. Less of a Real Guy With Japanese Heritage and more of a Guy Incognippon. Okay: thought experiment complete. Ha! That sure was a kooky idea we bandied about. We all know Morishige Shunsen does not exist online, beyond 29 Amazon listings for cookbooks, because Morishige Shunsen is about the work. Morishige Shunsen is not a showboat. Morishige Shunsen is not one of these “celebrity chefs” doing image-driven fakery like making foodie content, and running a restaurant, and existing. Morishige Shunsen is a food expert, and a corporeal form-haver, focused on the hard work of publishing cookbooks. Cookbooks like Kanye West Cookbook: Delicious And Totally Compliant Recipes Kanye West Every Day. Or his other book, Kanye West Cookbook: 20 Recipes Recreated From Your Favorite Kanye West You Will Ever Want To Make. Or his other other book, Kanye West Cookbook: 20 Fantastic Recipes For The Family Kanye West Easy To Learn The Basics.

Those are three separate Amazon dot com listings…and I’m kicking myself for not buying all three! They’re each so different!!! For example, the one I purchased has a cover photo of Kanye West. But as you see above, the second cover features A Picture Of Food. And the third cover features… hmm. It features a picture of A Different Black Guy.

You only get that breadth of covers from Morishige Shunsen. Other lesser authors settle for one approach. They either pay significant prices to license images and names, or they risk legal ramifications by stealing those images and names, or they do not use celebrity images and names at all. Morishige Shunsen serves up a smorgasbord of all three strategies. Then Morishige Shunsen tops that off with a racist face-blindness garnish. It’s the racism version of the publishing version of The Salt Bae Maneuver. That kind of flair makes Morishige Shunsen stand out. Professionally, Morishige Shunsen must stand out! Why? Morishige Shunsen is up against many other authors of Kanye West cookbooks. Why? Because Kanye West is constantly sharing and transmitting his food wisdom to self-published Internet cookbook writers. We all know the musician, designer, name changer, National Socialist, and name rememberer Kan“Ye” West spends most of his time co-crafting food recipes. If you could see his Google Calendar, you’d see nothing but events like “write up my BBQ Yumburgers” and “try serving fish WITH fries??” and “send my Rustic Rye Bread flour ratios to my personal friend Morishige Shunsen.”

That’s the “Table Of Content” for Morishige Shunsen’s Kanye West book. “Table Of Content” is a regular thing to call that. “Content”, singular, is the word Morishige Shunsen uses, for good reasons, and not because his recipes are stolen from food blogs (i.e. stolen Content). After Morishige tables his content, he goes straight into plain instructions and medium-res photos for all twenty recipes. Finally: a Kanye West cookbook that doesn’t get bogged down with any mentions of Kanye West. After those recipes, you’ll find several handy and on-purpose blank pages, followed by a robust description of where and when the book was published. That’s the format of all three books – right down to that final page, informing me that these three books were published in wildly different regions of a country he sometimes calls “USA” and other times calls “United States.” Wow: it seems like it would be hard for me to visit Morishige Shunsen! If he’s always jetting off to a new publication location, you can’t find him to thank him, let alone serve him legal paperwork.

Are these books exactly the same? No! Across all the sixty recipes in these three cookbooks, I did not find one repeat. You can see for yourself! I’ll show you Morishige Shunsen’s other Tables Of Content Singular. They’re a fascinating window into three chefs Morishige Shunsen knows deeply. As you saw above, Kanye West And/Or Other Black Guy is a broadly American chef. Morishige Shunsen teaches us that Chef Kanye West has eaten Doritos, and has heard of the concept of Mexican food. Wow: I almost feel like I’m learning too much about Kanye West! Meanwhile, the chef Sailor Moon is a character or franchise who cooks (humongous surprise incoming) Japanese cuisine.

Then we come to Kate Middleton. As you know, she is a fancy lady. After all, she is a Princess! A Princess of the country of… okay I’m looking closely at this book’s main cover images. According to Kate Middleton’s chef jacket, she is a Princess of Québec?

Well that settles it: Kate Middleton is French-Canadian. I wonder if she’ll ever become Québec’s Quéen. Also, quick thinksperiment: does Kate Middleton usually cook in Québec-themed clothing? Or is that an image from one of those make-work PR events Britain invented for their royals to do? Hmm. After a lot of thought, I’ve decided I trust Morishige Shunsen. He probably took a regular, representative picture of Le Princéss Kate Middleton du Qúébééééc, because Kate is so close with Morishige Shunsen. You can tell she had a major hand in this book, because the Table Of Content spread runs one picture of her, full-page, twice.

That’s a great picture, huh? You’d better think so. It is embedded in the background of every page of her entire cookbook:

I’m sure that’s a design choice Kate Middleton and Morishige Shunsen made together. Perhaps whilst hanging out in Kate’s duchy of Montreal, gettin’ creative with Stolen Adobe Software over a couple glasses of poutine. You can really feel Princess Kate in this cookbook – and not just because it looks like she’s trapped inside of every page. This cookbook makes a stock photo of shrimp risotto feel like Kate Middleton’s Phantom Zone. But no: she’s doing great, and loved contributing to this cookbook. Morishige Shunsen gets the best out of every collaborator. He helped the chefs Kanye West and Sailor Moon pursue a totally different style. Sure, they each wrote a twenty recipe cookbook, published in a softer-than-soft-cover, at a price of more than one U.S. dollar per recipe. Just like Kate! However, Kanye and Sailor’s books are so different. They don’t repeat a background picture of Kate Middleton. Instead, they are rich with one geometric shape, repeated over and over again, whenever there is page space Morishige Shunsen did not fill.

Such different personalities in those Kanye West and Sailor Moon cookbooks. Hey Hotdoggers: which Filler Shape Personality are you? Are you more of a Nested Blue Quadrilaterals? Or more of a Semicircles Mutually Pleasuring? Sound off in the comments!

Here’s where I start to have a few feelings all at once – and not just because we’re all digging what those semicircles are putting out there. As we’ve established, I am your longtime favorite cookbook reviewer for this food website. We all agree that’s a true thing about me, and you, and us. So as a cookbook reviewer, I’m here to celebrate the art of cookbooks. I’m not here to destroy the careers of very real cookbook writers like Morishige Shunsen. And I must admit I’ve reviewed a mere fraction of Morishige Shunsen’s oeuvre. I cherrypicked just one of his repeated collaborations with Kanye West, and Sailor Moon, and Québécois cuisinier Kate Meed-léh-tóhn. It also turns out I’m not the only one treating Morishige Shunsen this way. I found one of the few Amazon reviews for Morishige Shunsen’s range of 29 cookbooks, and it judges Morishige Shunsen by a single work:

Wow: give a guy a chance! Also: that second star is the kindest thing I’ve ever seen someone do online! Anyway: back to my failure. I painted Morishige Shunsen with a broad brush. I merely acquired three of his cookbooks. In my defense, three Morishige Shunsen cookbooks set me back $65.16 USD. That is meaningful money to me! My artist-owned podcast, which depends on listener support, and refuses to take ads from any company that’s creepy, is not exactly a Morishige Shunsen-esque money factory. I can’t afford to buy the Morishige Shunsen Omnibus, packed with however many recipes 29 cookbooks times 20 is. So I gave up on experiencing the full breadth of Morishige Shunsen. I’m stuck wondering if any recipes recur in Morishige Shunsen’s He Man Cookbook: 20 Recipes You Need To Know He Man You Will Ever Want To Make. I’ll never know which Marvel heroes Morishige Shunsen met when crafting Infinity War Cookbook: 20 Recipes You Need To Know Infinity War The Home Cook. And I’ll only ever enjoy the cover of Ink Master Cookbook: Easy Recipes For Families Ink Master Cooks, Eats, And Laughs Together. Only the richest Amazon users will gain the cooking secrets of Dave “Live Más” Navarro, and his two sidekicks he hired, and that time Morishige Shunsen snapped a photo of them cooking together wearing matching toques.

I assume Morishige Shunsen got that picture because of his social skills. Nobody is better at juggling awkward relationships. For example, we know Morishige Shunsen is the author of three Kanye West-ish cookbooks. But did you know Morishige Shunsen is also the author of Kardashian Cookbook: The Home Cook 20 Recipes To Know Kardashian Every Kitchen? As well as Kardashian Cookbook: Healthy Recipes To Enjoy Favorite Foods Kardashian Easy To Learn The Basics?! And also Kardashian Cookbook: More Than 20 Delectable Recipes Kardashian Wellness And Healing?!?! I can’t imagine the stress Morishige Shunsen has been under lately. He’s an inner-circle friend to both halves of a famous divorce. The emotional labor must be staggering. Yet Morishige Shunsen did what we’ve all come to expect from Morishige Shunsen: he showed up for his people, he made six cookbooks with them, and then he made three other cookbooks about a steampunk graphic novel called Lady Mechanika. I’ll never understand how he did that on top of comforting the whole West-Kardashian family, and writing Hunger Games Cookbook: The Home Cook 20 Recipes To Know Hunger Games Home Style Cookery, and also writing League Of Legends Cookbook: 20 Delicious Recipes To Get Started League Of Legends Inspired, Flexible Recipes.

We all agree: Morishige Shunsen is good. However, I am on the bad end of some financial hurt here. Moments before publishing this piece, I realized I needed to accept the $65.16 expense of these books, or else bill my editors/friends Brockway and Seanbaby for that sum. My dear Hotdogger: I chose a third option.

That’s right: I returned the books. I basically stole a heap of money that was my money originally. Such an act is an unforgivable betrayal in the cookbook community. So I’m afraid I must resign my post as Your Favorite Reviewer Of Professional Cookbooks. What happens to me next, I do not know. For now, I wander the lonely wilderness of finding something else to write about. Perhaps I will suffer the indignity of covering topics no one cares about. Such as baseball, or the actor Pierce Brosnan. If that hellish existence is fated, it is a fate I deserve, because I might’ve torpedoed the career of the striving, real, non-scammer Morishige Shunsen. Seriously: my Amazon return might ping somebody to look into this guy. My return would cause that if Amazon does any quality control whatsoever. Which they…don’t? Or do? I honestly don’t know. So I don’t know if the store pages I linked here will still be online when this publishes. No one can predict who will win the battle between Amazon dot com’s monolithic heartlessness and Morishige Shunsen’s relentless grift. But here’s what I do know: the passionate cooks Kanye West, Kate Middleton, and Sailor Moon Franchise will carry on cooking. They’re each best known for livening up the world’s dinner plates. And nobody knows that better than me (an iconic-yet-disgraced expert on cookbooks (which is a word that might be spelled “cook books”? With a space in the middle? Sean/Robert please give that a quick google before publishing.))

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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Mickey Lowman, who is kind of the Oral Oysters of Angela Lansbury’s Erotic Foods for the Sexual Diner.