Japanese Junk/Fast Food

What are the usual foods that are associated with Japan by westerners? I think it's fair to say normally healthy foods involving fish, high quality meat and rice or noodles. But surely no person can eat this kind of healthy food all the time and stay entirely sane. We all have our moments of artery clogging grease lust, the tongue demanding the sybaritic envelopment by the cloying oils of hedonistic satisfaction... Ahem, sorry, I seem to have distracted myself there. In any case, in Japan these urges also exist and, as I've come to expect from this wonderfully perfectionist culture, they've honed their junk food to a fine art. In fact, to call it junk food is something of a misnomer since it is generally made from good quality ingredients, albeit subsumed by the aforementioned oily delectation. Let me introduce you to a few of my favourites below, from the more delicious hot snacks and meals to some fairly odd-ball flavours of cold fillers:

I just want to recap on Mister Donut, home of the curry bread and a whole host of other delicacies. At my local branch you can get bowls of noodles, too!

Here's an interesting concept: spaghetti bolognese Pringles. The concept is executed well, the resulting flavour a little tomato laden, but also with a certain piquancy and hearty meatiness reminiscent of its namesake.

Please let me introduce you to a little money-saving friend of mine, often coming to the rescue in this, one of the most expensive cities on our planet. The shop-bought packed lunch, here we have the remains of some delicious sushi (yes, this is as common as you'd expect) and something from Mister Donut that strongly reminded me of a chicken and mushroom slice from Gregg's, that English purveyor of pastry-based delights. 

 And here, situated in Tama Zoo, we have a small clonk of vending machines (I've decided clonk is the collective noun for vending machines, because of the noise they make, other suggestions in the comments, please). Why does Celia look quite so happy? Well, the individual on the right is none other than an ice-cream vending machine, which, while existent in the UK, are much more common over here. Along of course with the cigarette and booze machine, although I haven't seen the civically mythological panties machine yet. 

Here we have some snacks for on the go, a packet of Crunky, small amorphous blobs of chocolate filled with crunchy pieces of cereal and some pizza flavoured crisps. Yes, pizza flavoured. I strongly suggest that you take a closer look below.  

Take a closer look at what must be one of the most excessively delicious crisp flavours on the planet. Can you see the dark patches flecking this crinkle cut wonder? That, good readers, is cheese. Yes, real cheese, on a crisp. Simply incredible. 

 

What you see here is a sausage on a stick wrapped in a kind of doughy fried bread. Very tasty, and available from any convenience store (alongside all their other services), although I did find the bread a little on the sweet side. On the other hand, I did enjoy the wonderfully designed dual mustard and ketchup dispensing condiment packet. I'll get a photo of that on my next snack excursion.  

This is a simply delightful invention, a mini-pancake sandwich filled with maple syrup and butter. Other fillings are available, but I'd suggest this is truly the nether regions of the canine, so stick with this one.  

Here is a successful marriage for my love of jelly and my love of coffee, well done Japan. 

Definitely not cider and tastes suspiciously like a vat of e-numbers with bubbles. Sadly no booze involved. 

This again is a slightly suspect offering. A sort of veggie burger sandwich with mayonnaise. It is on the other hand probably tastier than the other alternative, the utterly wrong looking noodle slop sandwich. I haven't had the necessary masochistic urge to try that one (yet). 

 This is a site to behold and in one fell swoop destroys any stereotypes you might have about a health-obsessed populace of virtually immortal individuals. It's a quivering tower of protein and saturated fats, a monument to coronary disease. I haven't had the will to fork out the roughly £25 asking price (again, yet).  

I discovered a little place on Enoshima in my Rough Guide called Shonan Burger, recommended for its unusual fish burgers. Unusual indeed and veritably brimming with diminutive whitebait. They pay a quite delicious salty compliment to the dense fish patty within. 

And finally the famous bizarre flavour of Kit-Kat. This one was pretty good, a strawberry cheesecake concoction, although I'm simply not convinced by alternatives such as the matcha green tea flavour.

So there you have, a melting pot of fusion snacks. I will be providing more examples of this kind of thing soon. Thanks for reading.

Japanese set lunch/dinner

I've just got time for a very quick post today, I've got many things to do and we're probably off to Kamakura tomorrow. What you can see in the picture is a Japanese set meal. These came to my rescue when I was put in fear for my financial health by the somewhat higher prices to be found in Japan. However, you can get these set meals for a very reasonable price. For example, this one was bought at a place in Shinjuku station (a main terminus in Tokyo and one of the most bewildering bowl-of-spaghetti stations I've ever been to), so not the cheapest area, and it came to about 1000 yen (£7ish). At my work you can get something similar for about 360 yen, which is roughly £2.20 (!), although it's obviously rather less mouth-watering, being from an institutional cafeteria.

In the picture above is a bowl of rice with breaded chicken covered with egg, a bowl of miso soup (a salty broth) and some pickled ginger. This is called katsudon (カツ丼).These bowls are one of my favourite kinds of set thing to buy, they're known as don or donburi (look out for this Kanji: 丼), which actually just means bowl. They are cheap and delicious and come in multitude of different varieties. They'll basically put anything on rice and sell it to you for a very reasonable price. For example, today I had what seemed to be a load of sashimi offcuts on rice for about £3 (the yen seems to be fluctuating quite a lot in price right now, so apologies for my varying estimates), and I often have gyudon (牛丼), which is thinly sliced beef and onion that sometimes includes some raw egg. These are very filling and tend to be available at almost any Japanese style eatery, including the ubiquitous ramen (ラーメン) joints where people wolf down steaming bowls of nourishing noodles often while standing, punctuating their tireless dash through life.

Do try one if you get the chance, you won't regret it.

I'll write more about Japanese convenience food soon, and apologies to anyone who reads my Japanese and finds it littered with mistakes, I'm still getting my head around the Japanese phonetic systems and the input method on my computer.  

Busy in Japan

As some readers will know I've moved to Japan in an effort to get as far east as I can before I fall off the edge of the world into some sort of long-term job. Mainly I've been too busy learning yet another language and drinking in the cornucopia of fast-paced yet intensely polite experiences Tokyo has to offer. These can be mainly summarised as cheap sushi and other delicious things (more incredible junk food than you might expect, perhaps to offset the ridiculously healthy traditional diet and thereby combat the ageing population? Just a thought for you conspiracy theorists out there.), packed trains with no people pushers, women-only carriages, friendly internationalists teaching language for free, and of course people in nutty attire. I'm so busy here that I continually fail to update this blog. However, it's recently occurred to me that I could combat this problem by writing something less than the blog equivalent of War and Peace each time I post. On that note I will be posting various mainly photo based short posts for a while, although I do have more ridiculously long things in mind for the more patient among you when I have the time. 

Let me kick off my new approach with a few food and drink reviews:

First up is the booze shelf at my local Lawson's. This is one of ubiquitous Japanese convenience stores (コンビニ, I believe, though my Japanese is still pretty shaky). Japanese as a language has a very helpful habit of simply taking western words and making them sound like something from a poorly dubbed film (probably Godzilla) using a phonetic script called Katakana. Thus convenience store is shortened to "konbini" or "konbiniensusutoa". In any case, these wondrous caves of comestibles and services are dotted around urban Japan with an almost profligate frequency. This is a godsend, since you can do almost anything short of extending your visa in these places. You can pay tax bills, buy or rent phones, buy cheap freshly ground coffee or simply peruse the bizarre and less bizarre foods and drinks. Lawson's is far from the only company that runs these places, there are also the 7 Elevens, known to all you westerners no doubt, and the Family Marts, familiar to me from my time in Japan's monolithic economically transient neighbour.

Now to cease this digression and back to the booze. It was with some excitement that I entered my local convenience store and saw an impressive array of alcoholic treats to try, many of which had promising words like "whisky" and "ale" in their titles. Every Friday I've been working my way through the Lawson's selection and so I bring you a few reviews below. As a teaser let me just say that Japan's booze is somewhat tastier than Chinese offerings, although of course somewhat pricier.

 On the left you will see a very well known Japanese brand. You may well have tried Asahi at any number of Japanese eateries or even at pubs in the UK. I doubt that you've tried Asahi Dry Black, though. I love dark ales and lagers, so I was pretty excited about this. This tastes like a dark lager, something like Budvar Dark, it lacks that creaminess of ale that makes you feel like you're consuming a liquid Sunday roast of sorts. It certainly has an edge of dark ale, though, slightly creamy and with nutty overtones (sorry, I had to), a slightly oaky flavour greets the palate with a clean finish that befits its lagery provenance. On the right you'll see a glass bottle with a rather lovely gentle painting of a Japanese mountain landscape. This is some sake I picked up at an off-licence (British English for boozeria) near my work. Sake simply means alcohol in Japanese, but if one specifies Nihon-no-sake (Japanese alcohol) then what we consider to be sake should be forthcoming. This clear drink has really been growing on me of late, it's slightly stronger than most grape wine at around 14 or 15%, it is clear in colour and has a sweetly alcoholic flavour. For some reason it tastes a lot fuller than Chinese rice wine and therefor has less of that disturbing watery edge, the flavours are delicate and gently sugary, slightly floral even. A delicious beverage that is pretty cheap in Japan.
In the middle is a typical cute picture of a cat. Inside this can is a delicious white beer. It tasted something like Hoegaarden, with floral notes and a clean finish. Tasty.

 What you see here is the lonely salary-man's friend (or, in my case, the man who doesn't want to buy a massive bottle of sake that his girlfriend will drink none of). It is a one cup sake jar, these are available at convenience stores and supermarkets all over the place, they are basically a large measure of sake that are designed to be opened and drunk in a short space of time as they are not fully resealable. This one was not bad, but certainly tasted a bit less delicately sweet than the one above. There was a more astringent alcoholic bitterness to it, although it was still a very drinkable and lightly sweet drink.

"Japanese beer". What does this phrase make you think of? Let's take an English lesson approach: what's the first adjective that comes to mind? Drinkable? Light? Refreshing? Watery? Clean? Depending on my mood I'd certainly use any of these adjectives to describe the beer on the right, a pretty standard Japanese beer and probably of the sort that you would have tried in the west. It's from the well-known Kirin company and is a clean, light lager, It doesn't have any of the edge of excreta that our cheap lagers do (I'm thinking Carling here), but seems rather to subscribe to that Japanese ethic of perfectionism in that it does light lager very well and is very tasty with a plateful of katsu or the like (more on this later), cutting through the oiliness of such deep fried Japanese treats. However, there isn't much to say about it beyond that. It tastes like beer, it tastes good cold, it is inoffensive to lovers of beer, but certainly not exciting. This stands in contrast to the beer on the left, a Japanese craft beer, something I didn't even know existed. It belongs to that other stable of Japanese consumable culture, the western thing that they apply their care and perfectionism to, think here of Japanese whisky such as Nikka and The Yamazaki, absolutely delicious scotch style whiskies in their own rights (most probably more on these later, too). Aooni is an Indian pale ale (IPA), a very popular type of beer in the world of British craft ale at the moment, particularly so with some of my friends who've even brewed it on occasion. It was therefore with some excitement that I heard the hiss of the can being opened. It does not disappoint, it is a bold IPA that delivers a strong punch of citrus with a light and refreshing after-taste. It is not a beer for those that like unchallenging (read: boring) drinks, it really has a full uncompromising flavour and is a lovely surprise next to all the Asahi-like clones out there lining Japanese bars and shops. I'd certainly recommend it, and with a price of around 280 yen (about £1.70) it's good value in Japan, which has much higher duty on beer than other alcohols, adding characteristic Japanese quirk even to their taxation.  

This is a bag (I'd eaten the donut) from Mister Donut, a firm originally founded in the US, but now headquartered in Japan. as a quick Google search will tell you. This place is fabulous, selling donuts for around 100 yen (about 70p) and upwards. The first time I went in was to search for an infamous culinary mutation. My oldest friend Dan had some time ago told me a story about his father who when visiting Japan had started to miss western sustenance and therefore ordered a donut. He bit into it, hungrily awaiting the sugary tickle of jam or custard upon his tongue, but was attacked instead by an oriental explosion of curry. Having heard this story I took it upon myself to buy one and masochistically experience this cultural collision. I was pleasantly surprised (but then I had some idea of what was coming). The surrounding bread was not sweet and the curry was delicious, a filling snack that shouldn't be thought of as a curry donut but rather curry filled bread. It does in fact translate as "curry bread" from the Japanese "kare pan" (カレーパン), another B-movie moment of Katakana. However, pan clearly comes from another western language, perhaps Portuguese as they were one of the first nations to trade regularly with Japan. On that etymological note I'll sign off to prepare to go to Harajuku and see some neo-semi-punkesque-super-goths or whatever. 

Thanks for reading! (Sorry it got a bit long again.)