Junk from Japan

(food, that is)

There’s a ton of delicious food here in Japan, but some of the cheapest and most interesting tidbits can be found in local “combini” — not an Italian term, as it might appear, but a Japanese corruption of “convenience stores”. This stuff may not always be the healthiest or most traditional foodstuffs on offer, but the combination of appealing salty/sweet flavors, idiosyncratic packaging, and wee prices make them hard to resist. Here’s a sampling of my favorites — I’ll try to limit myself to only a few.

Okay this is amazing. It a little double pouch of mustard and ketchup; squeeze it in two, and both condiments come out side by side — ideal for drawing perfect flavor lines along a delicious corn dog.

I’m always charmed by food that does what it says. This little cake is shaped like a banana, has BANANA writ large upon it, and is made of banana-flavored cake stuffed with banana cream filling. A semiotically brilliant deconstruction of the relationship between signifier and signified.

I’m mostly entertained by this because the name makes me think of something best drunk of a pimp cup. But it’s just a line of crunchy chocolate things.

I really really REALLY wanted this snack to be actual, chocolate-covered crabs. Sadly, it’s just a perfectly ordinary cake shaped like a crab. Which begs the question, why do you want your snack cakes shaped like crabs? It’s anyone’s guess, pretty much.

Think the combinis here have nothing but packaged junk food? WRONG. They also have junk food that sits in mysterious liquid all day under heating lamps. I got this because I thought it might be a vegetable — some kind of tuber, perhaps? — but M. insists it’s an animal product. Tripe, he says, but that’s a damn big intestine, if so. My best guess is that it’s a chopped-off, marinated Cthulu tentacle. Whatever it was, it was tasty.

Plenty more where that came from, but I don’t want this page to take 800 years to load.  Stay tuned!

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 19th, 2009 at 5:58 am and is filed under food, japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.