Japanese Food Daibouken Part 1

Matcha Azuki Mushi Keki (Green Tea Azuki Steam Cake)

Matcha is green tea, Azuki is a sweet bean and a Mushi Cake is a steam cake. The actual cake portion tastes like pound cake, you can't really tell there's green tea. The Azuki beans are sweet though, kinda like baked beans. Needless to say they ruin the whole thing. I actually didn't buy this one, Abi did and she thoroughly enjoy them.

Rating: 2/5



Calbee Olive Oil Potato Chips (Exactly what it sounds like)

Olive Oil Potato Chips. It tastes like it sounds, olive oily with very slight salt. They are pretty good.

Rating: 4/5



Tonkatsu Sando (Fried Pork Sandwich)

For the not-in-the-know "Tonkatsu" is a fried pork patty usually served with a special sauce the resembles barbeque. "Sando" is simply a shortened Japanese word for "Sandwich." Tonkatsu a Japanese thing but what makes this interesting is that they put it into a sandwich. It's more-or-less like a chicken sandwich except it's pork and on white bread. The sauce is somewhat sweet. Overall it's not bad as Tonkatsu is one of the more bearable and dare I say good Japanese dishes.

Rating: 3/5



Nori Potato Chips (Seaweed Flavored Potato Chips)

Kinda sea-salty and with Nori which has a somewhat metallic taste. It definitely smells like the ocean though and the green pieces needed to be picked out of my teeth and facial hair for the rest of the day. These are actually kinda good.

Rating: 4/5



Subway Herbdog (It's a sandwich sausage)

A Subway Sandwich that is mostly just a seasoned sausage in a sandwich bun. Not terribly nasty like American Subway, but this isn't really a sandwich either.

Rating: 3/5



Sprite 3G (Sprite Energy Drink)

This is a Sprite Energy Drink. It always comes in a aluminum bottle. The 3Gs stand for Green Tea Caffine, Garauna, and Glucose. While probably massively unhealthy it is pretty good. It tastes like Sprite with a bit of Vitamin C, a little sour. Definately the best energy drink I've ever had.

Rating: 5/5



Pepsi White (Yogurt Pepsi)

This edition's Coup de Grace is Pepsi White. A recently released and most likely limited run soda it is a combination of Pepsi and yogurt. I'm pretty sure I know exactly what happened here:

Pepsi Exec: Let's mix Pepsi and fermented milk and package it such that it looks like a bottle of semen.

*approving chatter*

Well they suckered at least one person in to buying one so it's not a total failure, and I drank the whole thing. It's odd. The flavor is most similar to Calpis, another dairy flavored soft drink. It's hard to describe, it's not very sweet but it's not completely awful either. I tried it once and it didn't kill me but I don't think I'll go back for seconds.

Rating: 2.5/5

Japanese Cars

Japan is not a land of cars. This is probably due to most of their space being occupied by other non-car things. As such is is prohibitively expensive and people are much more likely to take a train to get anywhere. However, out in the suburbia (which in Japan simply means there is at least 1 tree for every 3 blocks) they are slightly more common as people may have places to go where the trains do not directly serve.

The Japanese cars you see in America aren't really Japanese at all. The first thing one notices when looking at a real Japanese car is that they are incredibly boxy. Perhaps this is simply an under-handed business dealing with the gas companies to reduce gas mileage, or perhaps deep within the underground chamber of the Mitsubishi Motor company there is an alter with a plate-gold Scion XB and burning incense. They are also very small which is to be expected. You find sports cars every now and then, usually owned by what would be college students spending their tuition on a car that will never be able to exceed 40 MPH on the crowded, narrow streets and pay some $6.5 a for a gallon of gas. Note that a while home parking space is rare, a garage is practically unheard of. Seems like a lot of money just to blue-ball one's self.

Despite having rigorous driving tests it is pretty obvious that they don't drive all that often. While they diligently stopping in front of crosswalks they will constantly take turns at high speed around blind corners which probably results in more than a few human okonomiyakis every year. In more urban areas it is impossible to make a turn at all, while given the right away at the light you need to contend with an infinite steam of pedestrians. The procedure is to awkwardly turn into the crosswalk forcing the pedestrians to go around you and finally go once the light is red and the pedestrian light ends. You have to wonder why they chose to drive at all.

The worst people are of course the motorcyclers. Like the US they like to make the exhaust system as loud as possible, unlike the US the streets are packed with tall buildings that will reverberate and deafen anyone on the block. To make matters worse in some sort of bizzaro-world twist they like to put large subs on their bikes. So you get a twin dose of aural rape with a an exhaust system system that sounds like a jet engine blasting over a heavy ground shaking bass of some pseudo-English Japanese rap. But if this was an attempt to be cool you'd at least think they'd get a bike that didn't look so damn ugly. Again although you might see Japanese branded bikes in the US that's not what the Japanese own. Instead of small crotch-rockets their bikes they are these long, fat bikes that look like big mopeds kinda like a Harley Davidson had sex with a vespa and gave birth to a baby with Down's Syndrome. the riders wear old fashion motorcycle helmets and goggles making the whole thing a gigantic explosion of douche-dom.

The second most annoying people are the giant moving billboards. Regular "Semi" trucks in Japan are small, basically a tiny cab with a huge back storage area yet still smaller than your average SUV. Moving billboards on the other hand do not transport anything and yet are the size of actual trailer trucks. Instead they contain large speakers and will blast out loud music into the street to advertise a new song album because the best way to get people to buy music is to make sure they can't hear. Though not nearly as bad are the political wagons. These are usually a minivan with a loud speaker where they basically shout propaganda at the the public. Again all this is an ironic twist in that the Japanese love their peace and quiet and to be loud is to be rude. They will text back and forth on the trains to avoid talking but there's surprisingly nothing stopping them from yelling at people from a car with a loud speaker. There's certainly some priorities that need to be straitened out.

An Introduction to the Japanese Garbage System

One of the most confusing things aside from the trains (which aren't so bad once you get used to it) is trying to figure out the impressively complex garbage system. Japan is of course in need of space and so of course there's not a whole lot of places to put garbage. Personally I say that the Mariana Trench would suffice but I guess that wouldn't fly the international community. Instead the solution they came up with was a confusing network of bins.

Garbage is primarily sorted into 4 groups:

Moeru Gomi (Burnable Garbage) - This is paper, string and fabric type stuff. Anything you could start a fire with.

Moenai Gomi (Non-Combustible Garbage) Plastic - This groups is plastic, things like grocery bags. plastic wrap and certain bottles. Note that when I say bottles it doesn't mean all bottles, PET bottles have their own bin.

PET Bottles - These are specific types of plastic bottles with a PET logo on them. Note that there will be a smaller receptacle for the caps next to the bin.

Cans - This is for aluminum cans.

This is a little annoying but perhaps bearable. However the astute reader will notice that you can potentially find items that do not fit into any of the aforementioned bins. What about something like the metallic wrapping you get with a bag of chips? Well in this case the proper procedure is to panic and stuff it into the nearest bin when nobody is looking. There is no real solution and it's a complete judgement call.

What makes the system absolutely maddening is the lack of bins and the excessive Japanese courtesy wrapping. Trash cans are extremely hard to find and there are pretty much no public ones. This means if you happened to grab say some food at a store you will be walking around with the packaging for maybe an hour or two before you can actually throw it away. But the killer is that everything in Japan is wrapped with so much damn wrapping that it puts Christmas Day to shame.

Lets say you go to McDonalds. You get a combo. The drink is in a cup with a lid and of course a wrapped straw, the fries are in their own container, and the burger is wrapped. This is fine to prevent a lot of mess but then the drink (or drinks) will be put into a separate paper bag, as will the fries and hamburgers (separated hot/cold). Then the whole thing is put into one very large paper bag and sealed with tape. All this wrapping is mandatory but they will at least ask you if you want a receipt to save a little on paper.

*Note that dine-in restaurant goers need to take heed that drinks and food are to be deposited into separate receptacles.

So you always wind up with these huge double to quadruply wrapped things and not a place to throw the packaging away.

Despite all the extra packaging the average Japanese trash bin will be maybe half the size of it's American equivalent and to fit down the narrow streets Garbage trucks are about half the size. I think that there must be some sort of wormhole in the back of every house because I can't figure out how they do it.

Garbage collection is also expensive. There are of course extra trash pickups for large items. TVs are $30 to dispose of, ironically worth more than the set in many cases. Refrigerators are $50.

With all this recycling you'd perhaps assume that it's at least saving the environment. But then think about what the bins mean. Paper is going to be burned, not recycled and I believe it is used to power some sort of generator but that's still a lot of chemicals that are perhaps enlarging an atmospheric ozone hole that will melt the ice caps and drown the inhabitants of Japan save for a couple of hikers on Fuji-san.

Japanese Phones

Japan is a cell-phone society. Every person has a cellphone, even little children. It's somewhat interesting seeing as Japanese phone companies are more evil than Adolf Hitler riding a motorcycle full of dynamite, pockets full of puppies, into a hospital full of comatose nun orphans with a tacky vanity license plate reading "See U l8r."

First let's talk about why cellphones are so popular. Few Japanese homes have actual landlines. Japan has some of the cheapest broadband service in the world but nobody has it because to hook up a line costs a small fortune seeing as they pretty much have to run the copper wire to your home. You can see how much of a mess the system is by looking at Japanese powerlines, which cluster like the silk sewn from some giant cybernetic Tarantula and supported by these giant cancer enducing pylons. Because of this it's easier to go wireless.

Most Japanese go for contract phones because they are cheaper in the long run but you will be spending a minimum of $300 up front for the phone and almost no contracts are less than 2 years. The phone will do everything from letting you watch short range broadcast TV, scan barcodes, video chat, surf the web and any sort of IR, bluetooth or other wireless protocol; pretty much anything you can think of except make a phone call. Japanese do nothing but text. It's not the same as in America where all the trendy douche bags have to be trendy douchebags by texting their friends in class just to show off their new iPhone (which makes your e-penis at least 10 times longer). The reason is texting is cheap and unlimited and a regular phone call would bankrupt Scrooge McDuck.

For instance, I have a prepaid phone. A phone call costs me 9yen (9 cents) every 6 seconds. You do the math and you find out a local phone call to someone on the same network costs nearly a dollar per minute (I know which company executives are having a Karaoke party tonight). This of course means that texting is my only real option. In addition they never really added English predictive text so with the amount of time it would take to type out a message to my friend in Shinjuku it would probably be faster to jump on a train and tell them in person.

Note that while texting is unlimited it's only to people on the same network. Using Softbank if my friend had Docomo it would cost about 10yen (10 cents) a message. Well I guess I can only expect so much from the same assholes that charged me an extra $8 for the charger. That's like selling a car without tires.