I love going to konbini whenever I'm in Japan but do yourself a favour and don't go to one for every meal. If you want a bento or some small dishes, there are lots of good and affordable ones at the grocery stores and department stores. They even discount them by quite a lot near closing time. Check the basement or top floors of the major train stations as well.
There's lots of good restaurants as well all over the place and even at the top floor of many Yodabashi (a giant electronics chain). Don't be afraid of places that don't have any English signage, you can usually request an English menu or see if they can just recommend you a good dish if you're adventurous.
If you're hopping onboard the Shinkansen (bullet train), grab yourself an ekiben at the station before you go, lots of delicious regional dishes to try out!
The Japanese writing system uses three different character sets. Loan words are generally always written using one of these three sets, "katakana". Learning how to properly read and write Japanese will take years, but I highly encourage anyone visiting to at least learn how to read the 48 katakana (entirely phonetic). It's relatively low effort for the value it adds to your trip. Many of the Japanese loan words are of English origin, meaning you'll effectively be able to read some Japanese and understand it which can be very satisfying, useful, and hilarious.
I agree, I thought learning spoken phrases would be the way to go when I first visited, and it certainly helped with the basic stuff like restaurants and saying please/thankyou.
But knowing how to read the alphabets would have helped a lot more, because there are so many very understandable things sitting right infront of you if only you knew how to read the characters. コンビニエンス seems impenetrable if you don't know the alphabet, but it's just the adapted word for "Convenience": Konbiniensu.
Duolingo copped a lot of flack here in a recent thread, but it was great for initially learning the alphabets, it took nearly no time to memorize Katakana and Hiragana. If you don't know the alphabet you can't even begin to try and learn the language in situ, so that's step one and a huge help when travelling.
Minor nit: the kana are not alphabets, they're syllabaries. Each character represents a complete syllable (except ン/ん) as opposed to representing a consonant or vowel sound.
They are really straight-forward to learn as, unlike in English, they don't have di and trigraphs and extremely few pronunciation exceptions. Learning the characters can be done in an afternoon, though of course being able to read them quickly will take quite a bit of practice.
I tried to learn Japanese by sheer force of effort and managed to make "do-eet-su" stick in my mind to mean "German". It was years later that the penny dropped and i realized it was just "Deutsch" transliterated.
To stay within the food sphere, how about "kapsalon"[0] in Poland? Popular fast food created in the Netherlands in 2003. "kapsalon" is Dutch for "hairdressing salon". Etymologically, it can be tracked to a man who always asked for "the usual for the hair dresser".
Polish workers took the name home and it's now not an uncommon sight in Poland [1], amongst other places.
P.S. Don't eat it. It is disgustingly fat and unhealthy...
Nothing really disgusting about it, it’s just a pile of fries, meat, cheese and salad. Not much worse than the average Shawarma in healthiness, probably better.
My mind was blown when I realized the same had been done with the Japanese word "mamachari" — that is, a popular bicycle for women that allow them to carry a child and grocery bag.
And now we in the US have stupid restaurants like Poke Land which would be pocket land, but they thought it related to Pokémon. And it's just a shitty overpriced FoTM.
So now we have double-borrowed words. By the time it gets back to Japan it will be something like Land-Land and will mean something different again like monsters.
I don’t know the specific place you’re referring to, but at least all the restaurants I know of with Poke in the name are referring to Hawaiian Poke [1]. Although it’s influenced by Japanese cuisine, it has absolutely nothing to do with Pokémon.
I think, the first time you are in Japan, you can absolutely go to the conbini for a meal.
Compared to what you get outside of Japan it’ll be fantastic.
Once you start eating out at other places you won’t be able to go back to conbini food anymore (especially once you realize the price is basically the same).
It’s also not a bad idea for your first meal in Japan, as unless something has changed, recently, they have the only ATMs that work with foreign cards - you’re outta luck getting cash anywhere else.
The first time I went to a 7/11 in Japan was on my first trip there with my wife (who is Japanese). We got in late and wanted a quick bite to eat... there was a 7/11 next to the hotel and she said "Let's go there!" I scoffed and said that I wanted edible food and she said, just come!
So we went and wow, what a difference from American 7/11's, they actually had fresh fruit and vegetables and the boxed sushi rivals what we can get at our nearby sushi restaurant back home. The rice balls are packaged so the Nori is encased in plastic and stays crispy until you open the package... and the Oden by the register looks unappetizing but is actually quite good. And all very reasonably priced.... and the 7/11's had no problem with our American credit card, unlike many small restaurants that only accept cash... fortunately, the 7/11 also has an ATM that works with most major networks. (some of these no-credit-card restaurants will accept a prepaid stored value card like Passmo or Suica)
We took the food back to the hotel and realized that we forgot to pick up drinks, fortunately, the hotel had a handy beer vending machine on every floor... mmmm...Suntory Premium Malt... even the canned highballs (whiskey+club soda) are good.
We had to cancel our trip to Japan in 2020 due to COVID, and looks like 2021 is out too, hopefully we can return in 2022.
Not to be pedantic, but that is an oxymoron. A pizza can either be freshly prepared or prepared beforehand and frozen in. I think the distinction is important because whilst fresh pizzas are reasonably healthy, deep freeze pizzas are chock full of preservatives and thus aren’t.
I went on a business trip to Japan in the early 2000's. On our second night, we had Shabu-Shabu, and didn't realize just how much it was doing to cost. It ended up being about $600 for four of us. In order to stay remotely in budget, we got almost every other meal from a local 7-11, and it was surprisingly good food.
Recently someone asked me what I liked most about living in Japan. I thought for a minute, and then answered “convenience stores”.
It was a bit of a joke answer - there are plenty of other things I could say, but I didn’t really want to get into the cultural differences between Japan and the United States or anything like that.
But there is some truth to it, too. Convenience stores in Japan are better than the US in just about every way. And I visit them so frequently (twice today, for example) that they really do have a pretty significant impact on my life.
Usually I go in with a specific purpose in mind and I can be in and out in under a minute. But other times I’ll go in with a more vague idea of what I want (“snacks for a road trip” or “booze”) and I’m always surprised and delighted to find something new and interesting on the shelf.
An example of something interesting that my son picked out today is this “colorful ice cream shop” snack [1]. It comes with various trays and powders that you mix with water to make “ice cream” (it’s not actually frozen, though) - complete with 3 flavors of ice cream, chocolate sauce, sprinkles, and 4 cones that you shape yourself and cook in the microwave. I was expecting my son to choose a lollipop or something, but this turned out to be surprisingly fun and tasty.
The USA 7-Eleven chain is a subsidiary of Seven & I Holdings!
This is because in the early 1990's, the American 7-Eleven was facing bankruptcy. The Japanese one wasn't, and acquired them to bail them out.
So if you walk into a 7-Eleven in the USA, you are in a Japanese 7-Eleven, albeit one that continues to be run in the American style. Just like a Panasonic microwave oven in North America looks nothing like a Japanese microwave oven.
That is indeed a fancy building, but the product selection is poor. Notice how all the shown food is prepacked low shelf life snacks.
Japan's domestics convivence stores strength is in their supply chains. They will keep a single shop stocked with over a thousand products, many with short self lifes and low in-store stock. Thus the stores survive on daily restock. The bento and sandwich collection will stocked once a day in most locations, multiple times for busy downtown locations.
All of the short shelf life products are store label products made by child-companies of the owning mega-corp.
7-11 is owned by 7 & i holdings, which also owns Ito Yokado. FamliyMart is owned by Itochu (hence their prime chicken, as itochu owns the chiken farms). Lawson is owned by Mitsubishi Co.
A fun example to drive home the vertical integration: FamilyMart's uniforms are made by another company owned by Itochu. The kombini are in effect the tip of the icebergs of various mega-corps.
I live in Hsinchu, about 20 minutes from this 7-11. This is probably the only nice looking one in the city and not an average. 99.9% of 7-11s in Taiwan are consistently as ugly as 7-11s in North America. When I visited Tokyo, the convenience store experience is shockingly good. In Taiwan, I actually much prefer Hi-Life or Family Mart over 7-11. 7-11 in Taiwan is still better than the ones from back home but Japan has ruined convenience stores for me. I wish Lawson would come to Taiwan.
On a side note: paying for a bill or picking up a parcel at a convenience store is great.. until you are the one waiting in line behind someone doing both.
While I prefer Family Mart in Taiwan. I really don't find much difference between 7-11 in Japan vs Taiwan, both are great. But Singapore, oh man 7-11 in Singapore is terrible compared to Taiwan/Japan. Still better than anything in the west tho!
> But Singapore, oh man 7-11 in Singapore is terrible compared to Taiwan/Japan.
7-Eleven in Singapore is operated by a Hong Kong conglomerate that also has the licence(?) to operate in Hong Kong and China [1].
If we're just talking about convenience food, IMO 7-Eleven still has a better selection than its other competitor, Cheers [2], which is owned and operated by Singapore's government-controlled trade union confederation [3].
I'm trying to think when I've ever gone into cheers... They seem so rare... I definitely cannot comment on cheers as I just think of ever going into one.
Yes. It's the same throughout East Asia excepting China.
I lived in Taiwan for several years and 7-11, Family Mart, et al. pretty much are the one-stop-shop that the internet tries to be here in America. But it does it far better.
* You can pay all your bills at them
* You can get train and plane tickets at them
* You can receive packages at them
* You can eat decent food at them 24x7
* You can get alcohol 24x7 (if you live on the West Coast USA this isn't so obvious - many states highly restrict alcohol sales hours and selection)
* You can get any of these usually only a block or three walking distance from anywhere you might live in any city or town - they are ubiquitous and truly convenient
I remember I used to get the pasta all the time and then the last time I went back to Japan I tried it again and it was one of those "why did I ever like this?" moments. May of the options at the convenience store aren't bad but "top-notch" is a little absurd.
top notch dinner lol. you can eat lunch very well in Japan for usually cheaper than in convenience stores. its not like there is a lack of options indeed.
I picked up some ice cream there once, probably the best ice cream I've ever eaten. It was completely unflavoured ice cream -- not vanilla -- and really amazing and subtle. Since then I've searched for other "just milk" ice creams, like Fior di Latte and so on, but they usually end up overpoweringly sweet and none have come close to that amazingly simple one in Japan from a small town Lawson's.
Unfortunately it was probably a limited run regional item and I don't expect I'd be able to find it again, even if I went back to the very same Lawson's.
A part of me thinks the article title should have been "When in Japan, forget..." (I realise it's in the context of the Olympics).
Konbinis are great and I miss them from when I lived there. The food is... convenient... and extremely tasty but I wouldn't like to live day-to-day off it.
Better to go to one of the many, many restaurants and ramen joints that are throughout the whole of Japan if you feel like a bite to eat whilst out and about.
Especially local eateries in small towns - they can be hidden gems. We once went to a local cafe and I ordered a rice and chicken katsu curry dish which when it arrived could have fed three people the serving was that huge. It was also delicious. ;)
I like to joke that if you place correctly angled mirrors in 7-11s in Thailand (or just seven as they call it), a single beam of light shined at the first one should be able to traverse the whole country. I am only half joking though - they really have that many.
There's a small village on a top of a mountain in Northern Thailand called Santi Khiri. Most Thai probably never have heard of its name or known of its existence (it has a very interesting history related to Kuomintang). There was no buses or whatsoever.
Between my condo and my mall (a five-minute walk in Khlong San) there are two Sewen, one on each side of the street, and then of course the very first shop in the mall is… Sewen.
Ha. It's always a milestone in an expat's life in thailand when they just give in and start saying "seven" too. It took me about a year.
I have 5 within a 5-minute walk of my condo in Ploenchit, and if that isn't enough, there's 2 large vending machines too. It's actually kind of shocking to see them closed during the lockdown.
Part of what makes Konbini so integrated into Japanese life is their official capacity. You can send packages, pay your utility bills and print city documents
Dunno why you’re being downvoted, I found the Japanese system of e-commerce payments interesting. It’s the norm there to go pay for your stuff in a konbini, with cash or whatever - and of course they can accept deliveries too.
It's interesting, but ultimately bad. You can do all of these things in a konbini because Japan's technology is so far behind the times.
Need a pay a bill? They don't have a web presence. You can't put many of them on auto-pay, and if you can, it's through a bank transfer, which incurs a fee. Most of them will not accept credit cards, even at the konbini.
Hey, they have really amazing copy machines at the konbini! Ah, right, because you have to print everything. They can fax things from the copiers! Yep, because you often are required to fax things.
You have to pay to have the konbinis accept deliveries, and it's only for people who can't accept deliveries at their building because they work all the time, and their building doesn't have lockers. It's kind of a regressive tax on the poor.
I love the konbinis and when I leave Japan I'm going to miss them, but a lot of their convenience stems from businesses offering low-tech services to fill technology gaps that other countries have solved with good technology.
I must be weird because my home isn’t a courier drop off location.
Also I don’t own a printer. I live in a small flat/apartment (similar to many Japanese) and I don’t want to dedicate space to a device that I would use 3 times a year.
Good puff piece, but here’s a great counter on a 7-Eleven franchisee in Japan taking a day off to care for his wife with cancer, so to punish him they built a corporate owned 7-Eleven in his parking lot.
It’s not really specific to Tokyo or even Japan but true for most major Asian cities that 7-11 convenience stores actually have decent food (hot, savoury, decent tasting).
Taking a step back the reason in my opinion is that the standards for hot, good tasting foods is in general higher in Asian cultures compared to many other western countries. Munching on a cold sandwich just isn’t traditionally seen as a proper meal in Asia.
America must have terrible food in 7-11 if they can reach this level of hyperbole, and the sandwiches are awful, like most western food in Japan they’re not really western food at all, just something in the shape of the original but made to be as soft as Japanese rice. The coffee is good though, and very cheap!
I don’t have 7-11s in my state but C-store food is the lowest tier food you could buy. Hotdogs or taquitos on rollers. Some have cafes where you can order pizza, biscuits, and small sandwiches but I’m convinced McDonalds is healthier. I’d rather eat chips or a breakfast bar. Personally I never eat that kind of food because I see how nasty it looks. The pizza slices look microwaved.
There is a chain that has amazing tacos. I’m pretty sure the low quality meat is just packed with sodium to make it edible.
Quick Trip and Race Track are the nicest ones in my area but still have questionable warm food I avoid. The BPs have the taco place but I forgot what it’s called.
A family owned gas station near me had really good homemade breakfast foods. The gas station closed so they ended up opening a breakfast store down the street, long lines everyday.
They started showing up here (Phoenix area) like 5 years ago. The dominant market player (Circle K) looked far less clean and appetizing by comparison, so we tend to go there by preference now.
The food is almost low-end-takeaway quality. The soft pretzels and milkshakes are nice, and the pizza will do in a pinch (particularly if you're the only one who wants it and get an individual-sized one)
In my experience, the pizza there is low-end chain quality, but unlike ordering delivery, you end up getting one $10 pizza instead of the family descending into squabbles over toppings and ordering three pies, mozzerella sticks, wings, and spending the better part of a Franklin.
One of the big pandemic-era family experiences has been getting a pizza there, dividing it up and eating it in the car. (the box is perforated so it can be torn into rudimentary plates)
the fact that an american reporter think konbini meals are "top notch" tells as much about the quality of food in japan as about the quality of food in the US
It's a meme by this point, and lazy bloggers keep going back to it.
My wife and I went to Japan, and while the convenience store food was good and there were lots of options, it still wasn't up to restaurant food quality. I was actually disappointed after hearing people rave about it for years before we went.
OTOH, some of our best memories were from restaurants that rarely get foreigners, or not at all. I knew just enough Japanese to get my point across, and watched their faces light up when they realized I spoke any Japanese at all was always fun and heart-warming.
My favorite story: We went to a small restaurant in a mall. Aqua City mall, IIRC. (May have been Diver City mall, though.) When my wife ordered something off the menu, the waitress held her hands together and then stretched them out horizontally and said, "Eee-aa". She repeated that a couple times, and I realized she was saying "Eel" in English. I turned my wife wife and said, "Unagi. It's got unagi in it." My wife nodded and we turned back and the waitress had a very shocked look on her face that we'd understand the word "unagi" and used it over "eel".
Now, that's a pretty common word in the US if you eat much sushi now, but it was still a lot of fun to see her shock.
It's a distinct memory that stayed with me when visiting Japan for the first time. One of the first places I went after the train from Narita to my Shinjuku hotel was a 7/11 to use the ATM and pickup local currency. When I walked in, I walked back out because I assumed I went in the wrong door. No, it was in fact a 7/11. I ended up buying some small meal and coffee (with a barista preparing it) because I was so shocked that it looked like a decent quality, albeit small, grocery store, so I wanted to give it a try.
The coffee was just great no matter where you go. The food was ok, it wasn't anything I'd go out of my way to have but was so much better than anything you'd find in a US convenience store. I wanted to sample it but didn't want to waste my food adventure too much on convenience store food.
I've been to Tokyo 7-Elevens, but the 7-Elevens in China are just as good if not better. There's so much fresh food and healthy snacks. When I was in Beijing, we usually got breakfast from the 7-Eleven across from the hotel each morning.
Taiwan's 7-11s go much further than selling great snacks and drinks. You can buy high-speed train tickets, drop off packages, and file certain types of official paperwork. Once I bought professional baseball tickets there.
I'm addicted to the relatively new coffee machines. You get a made-to-order coffee for the price of a vending machine coffee. And now that Suntory owns Jim Beam, you can buy bourbon in every conbini to fortify your coffee.
Family Mart has the best fried chicken ("famichiki").
We once used google translate to tell us the different flavors of rice balls and were shocked when one came up as "spicy child". Japanese friends explained that this was actually mentaiko or spicy fish eggs.
Finally, I resisted the oden by the cash register for years but finally ate it when we were stuck at a bus stop with a long line. Delicious.
Pretty amazing that someone can rave so much about konbinis and not mention that next to their fridge of cold drinks they will inevitably have an equally large or larger fridge of cheap booze, sold at all hours.
But has a curfew on sales right? Or are you saying it's state dependent and - err.. Illinois? - is more lax?
Every supermarket, convenience store, petrol station, etc. sells beer, wine, whisky, vodka, whatever, around the clock here. So I just meant that that's not 'wow Japan', (I'm in the UK, but it's true of most of Europe too IME) it's 'wow outside America' - or 'my state' etc. depending per first paragraph.
Yes, alcohol sales are set by the individual state (and sometimes county) in the US. Here in North Carolina, you can buy beer & wine in a restaurant, supermarket, movie theater, etc. (subject to licensing and state Blue Laws [0] governing times when they can be sold), but hard liquor is sold in a state-run Alcohol Beverage Control [1] store. When you hear the phrase "Dry County" that's a county which does not allow alcohol sales at all [2]. Today, North Carolina has just one dry county - Graham, near the Tennessee border.
So if you live near a state border it's not uncommon to do your alcohol shopping in the adjacent state if the laws and taxes there are more lax. But there can be personal-consumption transportation limits, which if you exceed you can be charged with bootlegging [3].
Story time: There is a discount liquor store in South Carolina just across the state line, south of the city of Charlotte. Many years ago the North Carolina ABC department sent an agent to sit in their parking lot and radio the license plates of cars that had large alcohol purchases to fellow agents waiting along the highway. Those agents would pull those cars over and charge the drivers with bootlegging. The South Carolina highway patrol took offense to this impingement on their authority and sent a couple officers to discuss matters with the ABC agent, and explain to him how he did not have jurisdiction in their state, and to please go home now.
Related, check out small asian markets in the US. There are at least 2 relatively big ones near where I am now.
They have some high-quality food, cheap food, and food you won’t find anywhere else. In particular I go for tofu skins (sheets which are a lot like tofu but much firmer). They don’t have things in traditional convenience stores, really only asian foods. But you won’t find these foods at supermarkets.
In Quebec we have "Couche-Tard" and it's just overpriced 'depanneur' oftentimes even with worse selection. In general ready to eat dishes is not a thing for some reason. Canada is way behind even compared with UK where ready to eat dishes from "Tesco Express". I still don't know why is the situation like that. Regulations?
Ito-Yokado bought out 7-11, they were previously running the Japanese franchise, they also run supermarkets in Japan. But yes, the US 7-11s are now owned by a Japanese company.
That may explain some of the recent improvements in quality in the stores I've noticed.
It's not a lot, but a few items like having fresh ground coffee is a welcome sight when traveling as opposed to warmers of coffee prepared by someone who doesn't care that likely have been sitting for hours.
Japanese convenience stores have been a mined-out topic for _years_. Where is the coverage of the rest of Asia? Taiwanese convenience stores are actually more impressive imo, with a dizzying array of additional services. In China, the convenience store industry was already booming in recent years, with a diverse mix of foreign and domestic brands, and it has been growing even faster thanks to covid. Which sounds like an actually newsworthy topic, rather than the hundredth article about Japan. I have absolutely nothing against Japan but it is disappointing how it's the only East Asian country whose culture Americans care to look at.
Other Asian countries have starting to compete in the area, notably South Korea and China, but Chinese movies have always been chock full of propaganda. It's unbearable to me. And the Party mandates all humor should be "praising" (positive) in nature.
Taiwan probably has more going for it than just high quality electronics, but China is successful in bullying anyone that mentions Taiwan as a separate country. I heard Taiwan does remarkably well to suppress covid19, for instance.
>>>I have absolutely nothing against Japan but it is disappointing how it's the only East Asian country whose culture Americans care to look at.
I think it's a secondary effect of anime & manga creating a bunch of weebs that then proceed to wanna geek out about all things Japanese, all the time. The rest of Asia hasn't managed to produce the same sort of pop-culture inertia.
What a strange comment. There's nothing stopping you from posting something that isn't about Japan you know.
FWIW I've visited convenience stores in Taiwan. They're not much different to what I've seen in Japan - in fact they both sell many of the same products.
I suppose I wasn't clear, but I am referring to media coverage. What's weird is how people continue to view East Asia as some exotic strange place. We're all human and we should be promoting more cultural understanding. I'd love to have the power to affect that through my posts but I don't. I am not a member of the media! This article is published by the LA Times, which has enormous reach. Reach I think is wasted on yet another post on Japanese convenience stores (seriously, go look at how many of these there have been)
just the fact that Taiwan compares is almost certainly less known to Americans than the contents of this piece
There's lots of good restaurants as well all over the place and even at the top floor of many Yodabashi (a giant electronics chain). Don't be afraid of places that don't have any English signage, you can usually request an English menu or see if they can just recommend you a good dish if you're adventurous.
If you're hopping onboard the Shinkansen (bullet train), grab yourself an ekiben at the station before you go, lots of delicious regional dishes to try out!