Amateur kickboxer, travel enthusiast, entertainer and video producer Iriel (Takahiro Iri) recently posted an amusing series of three videos on his TikTok account which show him entering a train station and swiping food instead of a smartcard over the scanner of the automatic ticket gate.

In each case, the person holding the camera follows him through the gate, at which point Iriel drops the punch line in the form of a Japanese pun.

For those of you who live in Japan or have visited the Tokyo area and know some Japanese, you may already be in on the joke, but if you're still guessing, we'll fill you in:

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Watermelon

A contactless rechargeable smartcard issued by JR East, Suica, written in English, and pronounced the way it looks, is the most convenient way to pay for your train fare in the Kanto, Niigata and Sendai areas. It can also be used as electronic money. It also happens to be the word for watermelon, written スイカ or in kanji 西瓜.

In the comments of the TikTok video, it is suggested that Iriel was hiding a Suica card in his hand at the base of the watermelon to achieve this trick.

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Vinegared Squid

Here is another pun on the Suica card, this time in the form of a popular dagashi 駄菓子 (penny snack) called Yocchan Su-ika 酢いか (literally, "Yocchan's vinegared squid"). You can buy these skewered squid snacks individually at dagashi shops or buy whole containers, which is what Iriel has obviously done. His Suica card is probably inside the container or attached to the side.

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Ice Cream Sandwich

The last video may not make sense if you're expecting another Suica pun, but if you've ever been to the Nagoya area, you may have seen their version of the Suica card, called manaka. That's what Iriel pulls out of the ice cream sandwich he's munching on.

The joke is that these sandwiches are known as monaka 最中 in Japanese, which sounds very similar to the smartcard. (The ice cream monaka is a modern version of the traditional non-ice cream monaka, a Japanese sweet made of azuki bean jam filling sandwiched between two thin crisp wafers made from mochi).

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If you want to catch more of Iriel's antics, check out his accounts on TikTok or Instagram.