Variety Friday: Nijiya Japanese Market (San Jose)

I've been resisting the urge to write about local Asian/Japanese markets because I know that most of my readers cannot access the same places that I can. Of course, that was true when I lived in Japan as well, and it didn't stop me from writing about such places there. My mind is a strange and inconsistent place at times.

Nijiya is a small chain of markets that almost exclusively carries Japanese items with the odd American item thrown in to fill a niche. There are ten of them, and all but one are located in California. I am fortunate in that two are relatively close and two others are within a reasonable driving distance. Each is a little different and seems to cater to slightly varying tastes among their consumers.

The prices at Nijiya are more expensive than those in Japan, of course. This is to be expected since imports are always costlier than domestic items. When I lived in Japan, imports from other countries cost more there as well. Generally, the prices I see there are in line with the retail prices (not the common sale prices, which are lower than retail) in Tokyo, plus perhaps 10%-20% in some cases. One example of this is the bags of mini KitKats. They are $6-7 at Nijiya (unless on sale or special), and the retail price in Japan is 500 yen and you can get them on sale for as little as 250 yen if you're lucky (and if they're near the end of their life cycle).

The snack selection is always my main interest at Nijiya, of course, though they do carry a wide variety of other items like personal care goods, cooking items, fresh fruit and vegetables, and canned and jarred items. There is also a frozen section (which includes taiyaki and imagawayaki and Japanese frozen treats like ice pops and ice cream) and some "fresh" items like "roll cake" (Swiss cake roll), steam cake, and cream puffs. The more reasonably priced (close to Japanese prices) items tend to be made by Japanese companies (like Shirakiku) for the U.S. market rather than imported from Japan.

Each of the Nijiya branches is a different size. The one that I visit most often is in Mountain View and they have hand-made cream puffs (chou cream) and often have tiny little samples in plastic cups. They also carry a selection of manju made fresh at a confectioner. They also usually carry a lot of souvenir boxes of cookies, sembei, and Japanese sweets (often appropriate for the season) at prices that are too rich for my blood.

The smallest one that I occasionally visit is in Japan Town in San Jose. Due to their size limits, their selection tends to be more limited. The reason that I've decided to write a bit about Nijiya is that I had an opportunity to speak with the woman in charge of ordering snacks at the San Jose branch and was able to ask her a few questions. The woman's name was Maki, and she was very accommodating with requests. She also didn't freak out when I was taking pictures of the displays. In fact, that was how she started talking to me. She said it was the first time she'd seen someone shopping with a camera and that's when I told her that I had this blog.

Maki speaks Japanese fluently and has a Japanese name, but she looks like a grey-eyed, pale-skinned, light-brown-haired "foreigner". She looks more like she grew up in Germany or Minnesota despite her name. She told me that her grandmother was Japanese and that is how she got the Japanese name. Her appearance has caused her some issues on the job. She said that sometimes Japanese customers will come in and approach one of the Asian-looking employees expecting them to speak Japanese. When these employees, who are of Philippine or Chinese descent, summon her to handle the customer's requests, the customers say, "no, no, no!" They hear with their eyes, not their ears.

I asked Maki some questions about the selection at Nijiya. Obviously, they order what sells the most and I asked her why they didn't carry Tirol Premium chocolates anymore as the last time I got one there as in late 2012. She said they just didn't sell. My guess is that most people did not know what they were as they don't have enough press to be popular and well-known by American consumers. Since they are sometimes interesting flavors, and sell for about 50 cents (such a cheap little morsel), I was disappointed to hear that. She asked if I'd want to buy an entire box, but the truth is that I can't really promise that. I don't know if she can order them just so I can pick up a few, but it'd be nice if she could.

I was interested in what sort of snacks sold the best there and, unsurprisingly, it is green tea KitKats. She said that young kids came in and asked for them. They are good, mind you, but the selection of KitKats is so boring these days, especially considering the only flavors I tend to see are "adult sweetness" versions - usually white, semi-sweet, green tea, and strawberry. Since I am interested in trying the baked KitKats, I asked Maki about those and she said she's trying hard to order them in, but there are hang-ups with bringing in any new product. The main issue she said is that there are sometimes additives or chemicals which are not allowed in the U.S. I found this surprising because American candy seems to have more artificial crap in it than Japanese stuff (especially dyes). However, I'm sure each country has its list of acceptable and unacceptable ingredients.

Finally, I asked Maki what flavors she liked best. She wanted me to clarify if I wanted to know about sweet or savory and I asked for both. Her favorite savory variety is yuzu koshoo and I was delighted because that is one of my biggest loves as well. She pointed out some Calbee chips that were yuzu koshoo which I had missed, though, there was only one bag left. Maki said there were more in the back, but she didn't have room to put them out yet.

As for her favorite sweet snack, she pointed to the Earl Grey MeltyKiss/blend. Though I can't say it's my favorite sweet, I did review it favorably and am generally a big fan of the MeltyKiss/Blend line. It's far superior to the more popular Pocky and KitKat options.

If you're in the area, I'd highly recommend stopping by the Nijiya markets. They've got a great selection of items and, though they are more expensive than you'd get in Tokyo, they're still massively cheaper than a plane ride there. ;-) To follow what is new and interesting, you can connect with them via Facebook. The page for the San Jose branch is here. If you visit, say "hi" to Maki. 

Variety Friday: Food Waste

Last week, I reviewed a package of rice crackers that I bought at a discount store. As my regular readers may recall, I did not review it favorably. It cost me about 80 cents, and I may or may not finish the package. Chances are that I will do so, albeit slowly. I'll probably find a way to "doctor" the crackers with some other spice (likely some flavored popcorn salt) in order to make them more enjoyable.

Why would I go to all of this trouble for some sub-par rice crackers? The reason is that I grew up poor and was taught that one did not waste food. I grew up poor enough that there were times when I was hungry and fished through the cabinet for food and came up with uncooked spaghetti noodles to eat. I remember chowing down on them (and finding them rather difficult to eat) because whatever was available otherwise was not something at that age that I could figure out what to do with. There may have been other food in the house, but I was too young to cook it.

I do not mean to indicate that my family starved or anything, but there were ebbs and flows to our food supply based on how far back the next paycheck had been received. Of course, this was at a time when food was not nearly as cheaply available nor was there as much shelf stable or ready to eat food around as there is now. Food was not something we just had around in abundant supply or threw away blithely and, at least the latter, is not something I would do now.

Getting back to those rice crackers though, I thought about them again not because 2/3 of the package is still waiting to be eaten, but because of the umpteen number of articles that I read about food waste in America. Reports say that "Americans" waste up to 40% of their food. I've heard about food waste many times, but I never scratched the surface on how this statistic is arrived at. Thinking about my less than tasty rice crackers sheds some light on this, as did a little research.

First, let's think about shops like "Big! Lots" in the U.S. and comparable stores in Japan. I can only speak about these two countries because I've lived for over 20 years in each and don't have similar experiences in other places. In Tokyo, there were very few shops that sold food that wasn't especially popular at reduced rates. The closest I came to them was Okashi no Machioka and Okashi no Marche. Even those shops didn't sell only discounted snacks or food. They also sold newer things. I think this is because Japanese people are a lot less open to buying old food than Americans as they value quality over price.*

In the U.S., I've encountered numerous outlets selling food and other items at a discount. Some are beyond their sell-by dates and others are just simply not great products overall. Those Peakal rice crackers that I reviewed are the sort of thing that no one would buy twice. Their ultimate fate, beyond the discount stores that slash their prices, is to become a part of food waste statistics when even "Big! Lots" can't sell them for less than a dollar to the least discerning of customers (which tells you about how picky I am).

I peeled back the label on the 40% food waste number and found that it is not necessarily dubious in and of itself, but that the idea that "Americans" waste so much food is a suspect conclusion. The statistics are derived not based on individual behavior, but on the amount of food available and the amount of food consumed in the U.S. They look at farming, imports, etc. and then calculate what we need to eat based on the number of people and the average number of calories consumed for that number of people. They calculate waste based on what doesn't need to be eaten. It's all a big guess - an educated one - but a guess nonetheless.

If you look under the surface of this, what you're seeing is not that people are tossing out food willy-nilly, but rather that Americans are being offered more food than they need so it is not being consumed. I'm sure that a piece of that is new food products that don't sell by their expiration date and it gets tossed out. Some of it is also based on the ebb and flow of crop levels based on weather and market conditions. This year, kale may be "hot" so the supply of it is largely consumed, but spinach is not because of an unfortunate incident with food poisoning so a lot of what is grown isn't purchased by major manufacturers like "Green Giant" as they don't want to package a lot of frozen spinach that won't be bought by wary consumers.

The picture is often presented as Americans blithely buying and wasting precious food, but that is not what the actual evidence supports. I read a detailed report on how food waste breaks down and the section on "household" food waste - that is, waste that comes from our actual habits - asserts that the average American wastes 25% of edible food. They only tell you at the very end of a lengthy report on why this happens (poor food planning, impulse buying, over-preparation, ignorance of sell-by and expiration dates, etc.) that their number is based not on actual research but "anecdotal evidence". If it's "anecdotal", it's not actually "evidence".

I do believe that people waste food and I even believe that Americans may waste more food than some other cultures, but if we're going to rely on anecdotes, I'm going to tell you that I waste almost no food at all. The fact that I review snacks and a lot of them are not great means that I should be the sort of person who ends up tossing out a lot of things because they suck, but I try hard not to do that.

One of the ways I avoid throwing away edible food is by finding someone who will eat what I will not. My husband's graduate school is often the recipient of sweets or salted snacks that I don't like. They'll grab anything that you put on the kitchen table at the school and eat it up, especially if it's junk food. I also try to find a way to make a bad snack work by mixing it with something else, warming it up, or cooling it down. Bad Pocky is made better by refrigerating it. Bad mochi is made better by microwaving it. Bad salty snacks can be seasoned or used with dips. Sometimes, I can crumble them up and use them as a coating for other food like chicken or fish.

If I'm going to continue with anecdotes, since that apparently is a valid way of reaching conclusions about American food habits when you publish official papers on such things, I can say that I've been the happy recipient numerous times of food other people didn't want. When a friend of ours moved, we inherited her frozen broccoli and tilapia as well as things like coconut sugar and gluten-free flour. I've also gotten overripe bananas and the food from an overflowing garden from relatives and I've used every bit of it. When our milk approaches its expiration date, I make it into cottage cheese (this is very easy - just boil and add an acid like vinegar or lemon juice - instant and cheap curds). I do not waste food except when it is the most vile concoction or has some serious safety issue.

I should note that I live in a relatively affluent area. The people giving me food are middle class and upper middle class people who are doing it so the food doesn't go to waste because they are mindful about this issue. This isn't the behavior of poor people who grew up as I did, so I think it is important not to conclude that only those who grew up with the occasional empty food cubbard are going to some efforts not to waste food. At least some affluent people think about food waste and avoiding it, tooo.

What I believe is the case is that there are some people who are wasting food, but that the majority of waste is on the supply side and out of the hands of individuals. I think other countries, for various reasons, aren't being sold more than they need. Since America is a consumerist country with a lot of money to throw around, companies want to put things in front of us with the hopes that we'll like them and buy them. Sometimes, they're giving us Sriracha and people go nuts buying it up. Sometimes, they give us Peakal cheese rice crackers and it heads for a landfill. As individuals, I'm not sure we deserve to be tagged as such enormous wasters of food. It may be that "America" sees a lot of food that goes to waste, but that "Americans" aren't necessarily being as excessively wasteful as statistics might indicate.

*Note: I make no value judgment when I assert this. I think there is nothing noble in valuing quality over price nor anything elitist about it either. It is simply an assertion of a reality and I do not see it as better or worse than any other priority.

Variety Friday: "Communication Chocolate"

Sometimes I see YouTube videos of commercials from decades ago and I wonder where on earth those came from. It's especially curious when I see things from the 1970s because there were so many commercials and so few VCRs at the time. Some of those videos, clearly, were transferred over from old video tapes. You can tell by the quality. Did someone just find some old videos lying around of TV shows and they decided to capture them? Who does that sort of thing?

Well, ironically, I recently got my hands on some old videos that my husband made in 1986. Besides his presence on the tapes, there is also a little cameo from his sister who had just celebrated a birthday. My future brother-in-law had sent his sibling some things from Japan as gifts, including quite a few chocolate bars called "Communication Chocolate".

From that video, I was able to get captures of these bars, each of which has a phrase in English written on the front and a very typical list of ingredients in Japanese on the back. At one point, my future husband asked his sister to turn the bar around so I could, indeed, see the Japanese writing on the back. Despite the fact that these look very much like they were made for a country in which English is natively spoken, I assure you that they are 100% Japanese.

One of the questions that my future sister-in-law had about these was why are the messages written in English. I know from long experience in Japan that most Japanese people don't care about the meaning of the words, but are focusing on the design. That being said, I think most of these are sufficiently simple phrases that they could be understood by most people who had completed high school. She also speculated about whether or not the phrases were explained in Japanese on the back. From what I could read through fuzzy video, the back only talked about the chocolate itself.

There is even a little bit of a "review" of these bars on the video. My husband's sister wondered if the chocolate was going to be bad because the focus appeared to be on the packaging. She sampled the almond crunch bar and said that it was good though a little different from American chocolate.

The question about what the purpose of these bars was also came up, particularly in regard to the bar pictured above this post. This bar in particular made the circumstances for buying them clear. This bar would be given to someone who wanted help with work or some other task. It may sound like a cry for help, but it's actually pretty easy to see someone giving one to a teacher, a coworker, or a friend as part of a request for a favor. Of course, several of these bars are designed to be given to potential or current romantic partners.

I tried to find something more modern that was like these bars, but came up empty. If you've seen an updated version around, let me know who the manufacturer is. One piece of information that I did not get from the video was what confectioner produced them. I hope you enjoyed seeing 27-year-old chocolate bars from Japan! This is probably the only place you're likely to see them... unless someone else has home video of a similar gift. 

Variety Friday: Japanese Easter

Images from Fujiya's web site except where noted

I think many Japanese people have an inkling about the roots of Christmas. Though they don't really think much about it, I believe many know it's related to Christian beliefs and may even have been taught in high school that it relates to celebrating the birth of Jesus. Some of my students told me that they were given the basic details some time back when they were kids, but I doubt anyone ever gave them the inside scoop on Easter.

"Colorful Egg Tart". It's not an egg tart, but a tart with a couple of confectionary eggs. 

The concept of Easter is based on a bit more mysticism than Christmas. It's all well and good to talk about babies being born. It's another to speak of the brutality of being crucified and being resurrected. It's not exactly the stuff of the "happy fun life" that you see in Japan. They've got their own mysticism and beliefs already. They don't need more.

A bunny cake with strawberry ears, obviously.

That being said, they can always use more commercial opportunities. Christmas has been folded in so nicely that they have their own traditions for it. Halloween has been gaining a foothold over the past couple of decades and they are closing in on having their own ways of celebrating it. I'm guessing that it ultimately will end up as a situation where children get treats from participating businesses. That's what was happening in my neighborhood when I left Japan. 

Peko "sweet egg" with some pretty pedestrian treats (hard candy, lollipops, chocolate). 

Easter is a whole, fresh, wide world of opportunity, and it's quite a doozy. The pastel colors, the happy Easter bunny, cute chicks, and sweets of all sorts. There's not much to dislike about Easter, except for that pesky serious stuff that actually underlies the whole deal, but that can be swept under the rug. It's not like much of the West isn't doing that as well.

 

Mont blanc, which is cake with a cream filling and chestnut cream on top.

As someone who has been paying attention to food and food marketing in Japan for quite awhile, and who has seen a lot of change over the 23 years I spent in Japan, it's interesting to take note of which companies are latching onto the potential of Easter and which ones are ignoring it. Chocolate makers like Meiji and Morinaga don't appear to be doing much at all to capitalize on the holiday. Confectioners and those who sell freshly made sweets are embracing it. 

Easter Variety Box, ice cream on the half "shell"

Besides Fujiya, Baskin Robbins Japan has been selling special Easter ice cream products for the last several years. In 2012, they were selling plastic eggs full of ice cream. In addition to bringing those back, they're also selling the "sundaes" pictured below and a fruit drink which has little to do with Easter, but is a seasonal offering nonetheless. 

Image from Baskin Robbins Japan. 

I wonder if Easter may not have caught on in Japan because it coincides with spring celebrations. It's not like the Japanese don't have plenty of good times on their own with the changing of the season with cherry blossom viewing and all. They even have their own flavors and foods associated with the season. Frankly, some part of me is a little sad to see the crassness of the holiday make its way into Japan. I'm in no way a cultural purist, but I do know that, despite all of the designer bags and conspicuous consumption there, it's not nearly as consumerist as it could potentially be when it comes to holidays. These sort of imported holidays seem like heading down a path toward a much higher level of such types of celebrations, and I don't really see that as a good thing. 

Variety Friday: The McDonald's 60-second campaign

There are a lot of characteristics which, in general, define the Japanese psyche. One of them is their appreciation and value of aesthetics. Often, it is the case that how something looks plays a major role in whether or not it will be purchased. I even complained about how sweets in Japan often look great, but taste less appealing because of this experience. This focus on aesthetics is why you get a lot of wrapping on some purchases and clerks will glacially slowly and painstakingly place things in bags and boxes for you.

There's also a certain expectation among the Japanese that they will get what they see. All of that plastic food outside of shops tends to be amazingly accurate representations of what you are served. Granted, McDonald's is not a "restaurant" in any true sense of the word, but even fast food in Japan tends to look similar to what is in pictures. Perhaps it's all a bit flatter and grayer, but it's not a sloppy mess. Things have apparently changed.

Another fairly well known attribute is patience. Japanese people line up and wait in long queues without pushing, shoving, or complaining. It's not that they are never in a hurry, but rather that they understand that sometimes there's no choice but to wait and the overwhelming majority do so with good grace and stoicism, if not gentle good humor.

Given these fairly well known and oft-displayed characteristics, I have to ask, "what was McDonald's Japan thinking" when they came up with the 60-second campaign. They even put a timer on the counter to allow customers to track the speed of delivery of their order in order to up the capacity to monitor employees. For those who haven't read about it, as of January 4, the golden arches in Japan promised to make your burger in a minute or less or they'd give you a coupon for a free burger (and everyone gets a free brewed coffee coupon). The internet is abuzz with stories of sloppy results and complaints from customers who would rather have things right than fast. 

Before anyone thinks this is a transference of American-style shoddy service to Japan, I'd like to point out that the Japanese run their own show in this regard. One of the reasons why it has been so successful despite offering Western-style cuisine is that the head honchos tend to do a pretty good job when it comes to tapering menu choices and marketing toward Japanese people. They retool the shakes so they are less sweet but fattier. They offer limited edition seasonal menu items that fit the ebb and flow of tastes in Japan (like sakura shakes in spring). The people in charge are not dumb. They know their market and generally make good choices. So, what is this all about?

Though I cannot know, I have some suspicions and they are based on the growth strategies that McDonald's Japan is emphasizing. One of their goals for the coming year is to create a "gold standard" for drive-through service and to optimize profits by focusing on larger operations. While I cannot know for certain, it's not too great of a leap in logic to believe that faster service is a part of both of these plans. McDonald's has been and plans to continue to strategically close smaller places and focus on larger ones. If you were going into such a big fast food joint and saw a long line, wouldn't you be more inclined to wait during your limited lunch hour if you had confidence that each customer could be served in a minute? You could literally count how long you'd have to wait. The same goes for the drive-through service. 

I think this campaign was about two things, and I'm pretty sure it isn't going to succeed on either front. One was training staff to push themselves to the limit on speed during peak service hours (note that the campaign operates between 11:00 am and 2:00 pm, prime lunch hour range for most people). The other possible goal would be to create confidence in consumers that they would get served promptly and well during rush hours even if they were at a location that was somewhat swamped with customers. 

Besides focusing on the drive-through business and eliminating small stores in favor of larger ones, McDonald's plans on acquiring prime real estate in areas with a high commercial promise. It makes sense to assume that they hope to buy a good chunk of land in an area which has a high potential for massive numbers of customers and to erect large shops there. This makes fiscal sense because small places serving under-patronized areas can't be nearly as profitable. However, we all know that the little places tend to give better service, both in terms of quality and speed, because employees aren't harried and swamped. Once again, one can speculate that this campaign could work as a warm up for service at very large new locations. 

It's also possible that this is as stupid and ill-advised as it looks. Perhaps this is just a PR campaign which someone concocted for some quick attention without regard to the Japanese market's concerns or the insane pressure it would put on employees. It's also possible that the management bigwigs at McDonald's Japan are just too clever for the rest of this and they  have an ace up their sleeve that will pull all of this together into a happy ending. I guess time will tell. 

Variety Friday: Japanese bakeries

During my many years in Japan, I would often happen across something from America that I had not seen regularly or for a prolonged period of time and get excited. Things like Oreo cookies and KitKats didn't really light my fire, but on the occasion that Dr. Pepper or a Butterfinger bar popped up, I'd feel happily nostalgic. This sort of gleeful return to the thrilling days of yesteryear diminished as the years went by as I forgot what I missed back home as the lights of my memory dimmed and more American food found its way into Japan. They became less novel with this increased encroachment.

Now that I'm in America, I'm finding that the exact opposite is happening. Instead of being happy about American things, I'm searching for and thrilled to find the Japanese things that I'm familiar with. Sometimes they are the same, but more often than not, they are relabeled and packaged for the American market. It is rare to find something which has Japanese writing and an English  label placed over it, much rare than things with English writing and Japanese labels were in Japan. 

The San Mateo Andersen's Bakery

One of my biggest surprises was stumbling across an Anderson's bakery in the Hillsdale shopping mall in San Mateo, California (that's right, I'm not in the San Juan islands anymore!). At first, I didn't know if it was the same chain as the ones in Tokyo that I was so familiar with, but a peak around the shop, a comparison of the logos, and an online search revealed that it was one and the same. Of course, the pastries that they offered were not the same as those in Japan for the most part, but some things were similar or the same. They both sell fruit danishes which look remarkably similar and anpan (sweet bean jam bun) as well as good quality bread. The biggest surprise to me though was that the California one sold melon pan, though they called it "Sunrise bread". since melon pan doesn't actually taste like melon, it probably helps them not mislead customers about what it tastes like.

One of our greatest pleasures of living in Tokyo was picking a day once a week or so and going to a good bakery for a fresh pastry for breakfast. At the time, I often believed I "missed" American-style pastries and would be happy to come back and enjoy the danishes, especially the cream cheese ones. When I got back, things didn't quite turn out as planned. Most of the bakeries I've experienced offer gooey decadent monsters or over-sized muffins and cakes. Most things are too sweet for me and all are too big unless they are specifically marketed as "petit". The cinnamon rolls and similar offerings tend to be tough, dense, and slathered in frosting. I've been incredibly disappointed in most of the bakeries so far and have found myself hoping to find the types of bakeries I used to frequent in Japan. I guess there is no pleasing some people.

There are, generally speaking, two categories of bakeries in Japan. Note that I separate patisserie (cake shops) from "bakeries". To me, a "bakery" makes bread-based products with some types of cake, but mainly bread, donuts, and yeast-raised-based pastries. Patisserie made those fancy cakes that you could find at Cozy Corner and expensive shops. 

One kind of bakery is a very Japanese-style one which tends to focus on shoku-pan (soft almost cake-like, essentially a Japanese take on pain de mie) white bread with a high amount of sugar and fat) offerings. They sell anpan, sandwich bread, and sometimes various types of "cream bread", but the basic bread in these pastries tends to be much like a hot dog bun in the U.S. (though rather finer in texture). They also sell various other specialties, but most things are geared heavily toward Japanese tastes for lightly sweet, fatty, soft breads. You rarely, if ever, see a whole grain bread in such bakeries.

These small bakeries are the most likely to disappoint foreign visitors because the bread is so lackluster and the sweets are neither interesting nor very sweet. In fact, I'm not sure that the majority of what such bakeries offered were baked on site. I often felt that they were getting their wares from places like Yamazaki pan, a major maker of pre-packaged baked goods in convenience stores. Some of the bread at these shops is sold wrapped in plastic, though not with any commercial labeling. It really does whiff of shelf-stable mass-produced bread which does not have its maker identified. One of the reasons that I never developed a taste for commonly available anpan was that I didn't like the hamburger-bun-style consistency of most of the breads used to encase the sweetened bean jam. Note that anpan is not the same as manju, or traditional Japanese sweets, that are made with bean jam. 

The other common type of bakery is a European-style one. These are the types of bakeries that I loved in Tokyo. It's important to remember that Japan is not a culture with a heavy baking history and most of what is sold in bakeries comes courtesy of Germany, Denmark, Portugal, and, of course, France. German- and French-style are the most popular, but the plethora of castella options shows the Portuguese influence. Well, there is that and the fact that the Japanese word for bread, "pan", is actually the Portuguese word for bread. 

There are a number of "chain" bakeries which are easy to find all over Tokyo and I'd like to comment on some of the more popular ones:

Orange croissants, on sale, at Saint Germain.

Saint Germain:

This was one of the more reliable bakery options and it offered fantastic orange croissants and incredible cream bread. They also offer some of the best basic bread I had in Japan, especially crusty varieties with a tender middle. They also have a serviceable calzone, if you rely on enjoying the dough more than the filling (which was paltry). Their donuts were pretty poor though as they often seem to have been fried in oil that had seen better days. Saint Germain prepares its baked goods in the tradition of French bakeries, though it makes a banana bread that would make your grandma weep (no matter where you are from). They also offer samples more often and in larger sizes than nearly any other bakery. If you're hungry and strapped for cash, you might want to drop by and hope to beat the middle-aged ladies who descend upon them the minute they appear.

Vie de France:

Despite the name, this is the least European of Japan's European bakeries and I can't tell you how many times I went in for a browse and walked away empty-handed. I didn't know this when I was still living in Japan, but the chain is owned by Yamazaki Pan, which explains the fact that their baked items seemed so pedestrian. This is equivalent to a bakery being run by Entenmann's in America. Early on in my years in Japan, I loved one thing they had on offer, a baked potato with mayo wrapped in a freshly baked French-style bread bun. I'm sure it was pure poison, but I loved it and sometimes bought one as my lunch. They tend to carry a lot of seasonal items including apple and green tea pastries. They also had more pastries with cream filling than any other bakery, and despite my love of such things, they rarely appealed to me. All of that being said, I also used to buy their melon pan regularly and they were the bakery that got me hooked. 

Dragone:

Dragone is a pretty small chain which seemed to constantly be opening and closing locations (and I couldn't find a web page for them). One of my husband's students once bought 5000 yen (about $60) worth of their famous mochi bread because she thought it was so awesome. She left it in her bicycle basket while she stepped into another shop and someone stole it. Because of her ringing endorsement, we went to Dragone and tried their bread, croissants, and cake. All of it was underwhelming. The main point of their bread is that it's supposed to be chewy, but we found it all too dense and not especially flavorful.

Pompadour:

Hands down, this French-style bakery had the most incredible bread in Tokyo. It is frequently located in the basement of department stores, and almost always has a long line snaking through heavily trafficked locations. You can't go wrong with anything they offer and they have a wide range of sweets and breads. They make one of the best anpan because the bread is reliably good, and the version which has both bean jam and cream is a decadent treat. Most Japanese bakeries, even the good ones, do a pretty rotten job with scones but Pompadour's are quite good.

Edy's:

Edy's is a chain of bakeries located in JR (Japan Railway) stations. Despite the fact that they seem to be pretty mass market, they are a good bakery and one of the more unique and enjoyable items is a cream-filled donut-style pastry covered with cornflakes and powdered sugar on the outside. You have to get it while it's very fresh, but if you do, it is incredible.

Kobeya:

This bakery, which is also mainly located in department stores but also has some independent shops, makes the best scones in Tokyo. One of my favorites was their cranberry orange scones. They are small, crispy on the outside and coated with coarse sugar, and delicately textured on the inside. They are so perfect that no jam, butter or other accouterments are necessary. They also make a super egg tart with a perfect crust and a rich filling that is not too sweet.

Hokuo:

Hokuo is a Scandinavian bakery and often these shops are small and near major stations. My favorites were the maple bread, which features delicately sweet but flavorful veins of maple throughout cake-like bread and a flaky roll pastry with whipped cream and chocolate coating. The latter is often stored in the refrigerator case. Hokuo also had some pretty serviceable bread and was good for sales of the end pieces in large bags as well as reduced prices at the end of the day at some shops. They also have a very nice cranberry bread.

Antendo's banana muffins.

Antendo:

I probably went into Antendo more than most bakeries because my husband was in love with their banana muffins. These muffins had a strong banana flavor and were just sweet enough. They also seemed to be made with real butter, which is relatively uncommon in Japan. Most of the time, margarine is used in baked goods. Unfortunately many of the other items at Antendo suffered from being "too bready" as my husband would say. They were short on their flavor elements (like chocolate, maple, even bean jam) and big on bread. It's not that their bread was bad, but it wasn't incredible. Pompadour could get away with that, but Antendo couldn't in our experience.

Anderson:

As I mentioned before, Anderson has bakeries not only in Japan, but also in the U.S. and Denmark (and it is a Danish-style bakery). The truth is that most of my experience with Anderson came from visiting their cafe when I was working. Occasionally, my husband and I would buy their sandwiches, which were served on French bread and had a few thin slices of ham and cheese. Their bread is quite good, but not much else that they sold lit my fire. They had some of the softest melon pan in Japan, and the best melon pan is crispy on the outside with a light coating of sugar.

In my opinion, among these major chain bakeries, the best for bread is Pompadour. For pastries, we liked Saint Germain, but also Edy's. Almost no bakery in Japan reliably does muffins well, but Antendo did quite well in general. Oddly, none of the major bakeries regularly carried amashoku and small ones rarely did so either. You had to happen upon an independent bakery that offered them. Note that most Japanese bakeries do a pretty bad job with scones (often hard, dense and rock-like) and we generally avoided them. And also, please remember that this is not an exhaustive list, but just an overview of major chains that people are more likely to find. There are plenty of good local bakeries and other chains to sample.

I used to think that the bakeries in Japan were lacking, but now I think that many were quite good. However, none of them are a catch-all for one-stop shopping. If you know where to look for the best version of whatever a shop sells though, you can enjoy some of the best baked goods in the world. 

Variety Friday: Happy Meals in Japan

The offerings for Happy Meals toys in Japan at this time cater to both cute-o-philes and car lovers. All images pilfered from McDonald's Japan's web site. 

There has been a lot of hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing in the United States over the past decade or so about nutrition. The devil in most cases is luring you beneath the yellow arches and trying to convince you to inflate your belly and clog your arteries with his salty, fatty patties and starchy fried sticks of death. Nowhere is there more concern than when it comes to what is marketed toward children and what their parents purchase for them. Won't somebody please think of the children!

In America, the way in which the children have been thought of has encompassed a variety of changes at McDonald's including offering sliced apples instead of fries and soda being replaced by milk (low-fat, naturally). For reasons that I'm sure are logical to people who actually have children, they also decided that toys had to be taken out of American Happy Meals. Perhaps, they want to be sure that kids aren't nearly as happy as they could be about a Happy Meal and are therefore less likely to want one. Certainly, no one thinks that the toys are making kids fat, do they? Well, maybe they do. Sometimes the logic of some people escapes me and, for all I know, plastic crap made in China may be transmitting contact calories.

I had several discussions with various Japanese people with children about food at McDonald's and the "Happy Meals" in particular. Incidentally, "Happy Meals" are called a "Happy Set" in Japan. By no means are the people i spoke with a representative sample of parents and their opinions of McDonald's food or the inclusion of toys with said sets. However, the fact that the toys were displayed prominently in front of my local Mickey D's for years would seem to be an anecdotal indication that there wasn't a public outcry against using them to market fast food to innocents. 

As for what my conversations seemed to reveal, not one person felt that toys were the proverbial apple leading children out of the gustatory Eden of traditional Japanese cuisine. While they did believe that the toys may make kids want to buy the meals in order to get the toys, they said that it was the parents responsibility to make a choice about what to do. In fact, they said that, if they wanted the toys for the kids, they could simply buy the food to get the toy and throw the food away if they were so worried about the nutritional content of fast food. Indeed, many of the parents felt the kids weren't all that interested in the food in many cases anyway.

Menu options for a "happy set" in Japan. Click to see a larger, more legible version. 

The usual "happy set" in Japan does not offer the same "healthy" options as American "Happy Meals". In fact, it arguably offers less healthy options as you can choose from among a hamburger, cheese burger, chicken nuggets of small ("petit") pancakes as the main part of the meal. I can only imagine the cries of protest if pancakes were to be an option in America. As the side dish, one can choose fries or sweet corn and the drink options are any small beverage including soft drinks, tea, milk, juice, and milkshakes. Of course, you can also choose a toy option. Currently, people can have "Hello Kitty" toys or "Voov" miniature vehicles. The 15-second promotional commercials for these toys are very stereotypical in that only little boys are shown with the cars and mainly little girls are with the kitty-chan toys. You can view these commercials on the lower right hand side of the "Happy Set" page at present (but I'm sure they'll vanish in the future after this promotion ends). 

(Warning: Subjective conclusions and editorial commentary ahead!) One of the things that I concluded about living in Japan is that overall food culture as opposed to specific aspects of that culture is extremely powerful in shaping the health and bodies of the people and that the causes of the lifestyle problems in the U.S. which relate to lifestyle diseases (heart disease, diabetes, etc.) are not the result of the presence of unhealthy or fast food. There is a load of equally unhealthy food in Japan. When Americans try to fix childhood obesity by offering kids apples instead of fries, milk instead of soda, and taking away their toys, they're fixing a broken finger by putting a band-aid on a stubbed toe. Sure, they're both on the body, but one doesn't fix the other. The problem isn't the presence of empty calories being marketed with things kids will nag their parents to get them. The issue is an overall food culture that sees the frequency and volume as such things as being much higher than can support a healthy body. The Japanese, at least for the time being, are still in a place food culture-wise where they don't eat too much of such things too often. Parents don't care about the contents of a Happy Meal/Set because they care about food otherwise. They're not looking at taking their kid's to fast food places often enough for it to be an issue. They're looking at the whole day and entire composition of their children's diet. That's not to say that they never will care, nor that obesity rates aren't increasing in Japan, too (they are). However, for now, the kids can keep their toys, their fries, and even have pancakes if they want them and no one is going to scream "won't somebody please think of the children!"

What the future holds

This is the current availability of Japanese snacks at my present location, and what a sad lot it is!

When I left Japan, there were a lot of question marks about the future of this blog. I knew that I wanted to continue, but I wasn't sure in what capacity I could. One thing is for certain and that is that I can't post about the same types of snacks that I did when I actually resided in Tokyo. If that sounds like a lament, it's not. In fact, it's actually a good thing from my perspective.

The truth is that, after years of buying snacks, I was starting to feel fairly bored by a lot of what was on offer. Yes, there was the occasional rather extreme weirdness which was a stand-out like the twice-a-year odd Pepsi or Coke and the very rare strange KitKat which was actually "strange" and not just typical for Japan and therefore more curious to outsiders. While I would have never ran out of things to review, there was absolutely starting to be a real sense of "sameness" in what I could get my hands on, particularly as the seasonal repeats kept getting trotted out again and again. I could only review so many wasabi sembei, green tea sweets, or kinako candies before it felt old hat. My hat was looking pretty beat up by the time I left. 

If you want to know how boring it can get, check out the Onion's AV Club's occasional review of Japanese snacks. The "European Cheese" KitKat that I reviewed in November 2010 showed up on their rotation on March 26, 2012. That's a bit past the sell-by date. ;-) They don't even really want them. They just review what J-Box sends them for free because it's there. Their enthusiasm is so weak that they wait months (or years) to review limited edition items such that they are no longer available by the time the reviews appear. And these people have far less to be jaded about than I do as these are actual novelties to them. 

That is not to say that I no longer have an interest in Japanese snacks. That would be very far from the truth, but after awhile, having full access starts to mean less and less. I'm still interested in such snacks, but I don't think that only those things which can be had in Japan are of value for me to try. There are Japanese-style (and imported) items in America to be tried and comparisons to be made about the difference between what is offered in each country. Years of eating everything (and nearly anything) have given me a perspective that I could never have acquired otherwise. As one of my kind commenters suggested, there is also the potential for me to approach American snacks from the perspective of someone who hasn't had them for a long time and is well-acclimated to a different taste and presentation. The truth is that this idea was already on my mind because things are definitely not as expected on that front. 

Another point is that one thing which consistently nagged at me as I went about my business of snacking and reviewing was the way in which dumb people were occasionally writing to me and asking me to sell them snacks (as they thought I sold what I reviewed for reasons that mystify me) and lovely people with much better reading comprehension skills who were interested in the snacks I wrote about asked me how they might acquire such rarities. From where I was, I was in no position to know how one could get such things from outside of Japan. From where I am now (which is somewhere in the San Juan Islands), I can only access what everyone else can through the same means that they have. 

So, the state of the blog is that things will have to change, but I hope to largely maintain the focus on Japanese food, and snacks in particular. I still have a backlog of reviews of things I had in Japan as well as a stash of things that I brought with me. The reviews of uniquely Japanese things that can be bought only in Japan aren't drying up (and are unlikely to go away entirely for various reasons, least of which that I still have connections in Japan). Eventually though, my stash will be tapped out, but that's okay. Part of what I did was eat the food and talk about how it tasted, but I also simply let people know what was out there and what it was all about. That is something I can continue to do through product release information. I will be incorporating posts which talk about what is out in Japan, even if I personally can't buy such items. Frankly speaking, I don't know that this is incredibly different for my readers, particularly when they couldn't acquire those items anyway. If it sounds interesting and you're going to Japan, it doesn't matter if I put it in my mouth and told you if I liked it because each person's sense of taste is different. It mainly matters that you know enough to look for it and have some idea of where to find it. 

Right now, my access to everything, and I mean everything,  including all sorts of American products, is limited by my location. I also do not have a permanent address and will be a nomad until around October. That means that I can't really set up a connection with importers without switching addresses 4 times in less than 6 months. Eventually, I will make such connections, and I will definitely gain better access to stores with imports, but, for now, I'm going to have to go with what I have. I hope my readers will bear with me as this blog finds a new footing. I'm looking forward to the new challenge and focus. Thanks for reading.

Variety Friday: Japanese Hospital Food

Before I entered the hospital on December 20, one of my friends remarked that she believed that Japanese hospital food was better than American hospital food. I can't make such a comparison because my only experience with American hospital food was when I was 12 and had a tonsillectomy. Like many kids who were going to have their tonsils out, I was promised ice cream to soothe my sore throat and given a liquid diet consisting of broth, non-citrus juice, and gelatin. My disappointment was rivaled only by my pre-teen outrage.

The one thing about being in a hospital that I was sort of, kind of, well, just a little happy about was the opportunity to sample the food. I didn't know exactly what to expect, but I did know that the food would be vegetarian as that is what the hospital promises. Though Japanese cuisine lends itself well to dishes which do not include animal products, vegetarianism in this country is rather rare. I've never met a Japanese vegetarian, though I have taught a woman who is a chef at a vegetarian restaurant. She told me she was transitioning back to meat because she wanted to diversify her experience base and work for restaurants which served meat. She wasn't terribly committed to eschewing animal flesh, and most of the Japanese folks to whom I mention the notion of giving up things like beef and pork say they simply like these things too much. At any rate, with soybeans, tofu, and eggs being a big part of the traditional Japanese diet, I was curious to see what the hospital came up with in line with the "lacto-ovo vegetarian" food. 

The first day after surgery, I was given an all liquid diet. Though I was hardly thrilled with this because I didn't eat anything for more than an entire day, it did provide the chance to sample what the Japanese offer when someone is operating under dietary restrictions. Besides, this was something I could compare to what I had in the U.S., though I was a lot less sanguine at the prospect when I was a kid and denied my ice cream.

Note that you can click any picture and a much bigger one will load. This isn't because I think more detail was necessary, but because these are sized for my Facebook pages and I'm too lazy to make smaller versions for this blog post.

My liquid diet breakfast:

The tiny container in the upper left is a small quantity of melon gelatin. It tasted fine, but I'm not a big fan of melon-flavored things. The yellow cup to the right of it is decaf coffee. I was allowed a packet of sugar to add to it, but no milk. The coffee was extremely weak and lukewarm. The black bowl had extremely weak broth, likely vegetable based, but the flavor was so lacking in potency that I could barely taste much. It would have been greatly aided by salt, but it seems they preferred to give me my salt via I.V. at this point as I remained hooked up to bag after bag of saline during the day after surgery. The most interesting item was the clear stuff with the spoon in it. When I first removed the top from the covered bowl, I thought it was a bowl of hot water. It turned out to be something my diet card called "kuzuyu", or a kudzu-flour thickened soup. It was lightly sweet, and didn't taste bad, but actually lacked any strong flavor. It was a bit hard to eat it all because the sweetness tended to get stronger, but I was starving and put it all away. According to on-line sources, this is a hot winter drink in Japan. 

My liquid diet lunch:

Lunch was a little more fleshed out as it included a box of acerola juice fortified with iron and calcium. This time, I got a tiny quantity of strawberry gelatin instead of melon and miso soup instead of largely tasteless broth. Both of these were improvements, especially the miso soup. They gave me barley tea with lunch, but somehow thought it wasn't good with breakfast, oddly. The breakfast diet card included it, but it was whited out on the paper (diet cards are the slips of paper on the tray detailing the contents). The pink packet behind the gelatin is pickled plum sauce and there was also a tiny packet of salt. I guess this was stuff to be added to the bowl of white stuff in the forefront. This was "rice water" (omoyu), and that's what it really tasted like. It really did taste like slightly thickened water that had been siphoned off of washed rice. This reminded me of when I was a kid and made "glue" out of flour and water. I think this is what it would have tasted like. Even with the plum sauce and salt, it was pretty hopeless, but I drank it anyway because a starving women will take whatever she is offered. 

My liquid diet dinner:

My final liquid meal was one I greeted with extreme disappointment. Other than the pineapple carrot juice, it was all re-runs and the worst ones from lunch and breakfast at that. That's the rice-glue water, melon gelatin, pickled plum sauce, tasteless broth, and barley tea. I would have rather had the sweet stuff and some miso soup again, not to mention strawberry gelatin. It seems the repertoire for the liquid diet options in my hospital were extremely limited. 

I'd have to say that I can't imagine that American liquid diets are any better or worse than this. I think at the very least, they would give people black tea (without milk) as an option there. By the end of this first day, I was dying for some tea, as I'm a tea fanatic and drink at least 4 cups a day, usually more. Though I like barley tea just fine, one little half mug of it in a lukewarm state twice wasn't doing enough for my tea desires. 

Unsurprisingly, I was now looking forward to the solid food portion with exceptional gusto. Though I sneaked in a late night snack of some strawberry cookie bars I'd brought from home, I was hungry for "real food". The doctor mentioned that it'd be bread for breakfast, and that was just fine by me. 

First solid breakfast:

The green box is soy milk, which I rather like, but rarely buy for myself because it contains more fat than low-fat dairy milk. Of course, that's a banana, albeit not a super ripe one. It was also clearly refrigerated and I'm not really a fan of cold bananas, but starving people can't complain. The greyish stuff in the cup is potage soup. It was creamy, hearty, and had a good balance of onion, potato and milk as well as salt and garlic. I don't know if it was real or instant, but it was damn tasty. The little container in the upper right is a warm salad with what I guess is vegetarian salami and what I think was lettuce or cabbage (can't remember). The salad was very flavorful and delicious. The bread was fresh and tasted like it was recently baked. I twas also slightly warm. The packet of jam in the upper left is apple and I spread it on the bigger roll, which was white bread. The small one was whole grain and I dunked it in the soup. This was really a tasty meal. 

Solid lunch:

Lunch was the biggest meal that I received there, and was impressively tasty and diverse. The stuff with the green peas on top that looks like curry is hayashi rice, a sort of stew with a demi-glace sauce that is usually made with beef. Obviously, there was no beef in this. It was packed full of onions, carrots and what seemed to be grilled mushrooms with slightly blackened edges. There was a lot of heft to it and it was savory without being too salty and richly flavorful without being heavy. I'd like to have the recipe for it because it was a feat doing this as all vegetarian and making it so delicious. The salad was baby spinach greens with toasted slivered almonds. The salad itself was great, but was served with a packet of lackluster "French" dressing which did little to enhance it. The drink is a yogurt drink which was pretty much the usual tasty mixture of yogurty sourness and sugary sweetness that such drinks offer. It was yummy as well, but all of these types of things are. The finish was a small container of flan, which was sweet, creamy and had a nice burnt caramel sauce on the bottom. There was also a half mug of barley tea which really did not do the rest of the meal justice as a pairing. 

Solid dinner:

I'm not sure if dinner was intentionally lighter than lunch, but the portions of food were definitely on the slighter side. That was okay, because the truth is that the hospital meals I got two days after surgery were bigger than anything I make for myself at home. The item on the left is a warm cabbage salad with bits of carrot seasoned with sesame. It tasted great, but gave me horrific gastrointestinal distress all night. At every meal prior to this dinner, the nurses queried me about having gas and stuck some device on my stomach to test for difficulties and I was worried they'd find out this one had done a number on me and fret over it (possibly delay my release, heaven knows!), but they'd given up on monitoring my digestion after lunch. 

The rice is what passed for brown rice in Japan and nothing more. It's served with a fish-stock based soup that includes konnyauku (a flavorless, gelatin-like substance with little black specks on it), daikon (Japanese radish) and carrot. I believed it was meant to be a vegetarian take on tonjiru, a popular pork-based soup, but I could be wrong. This might simply be a standard non-miso type of soup. The stuff in the upper right is fried tofu with a savory and sweet sauce topped with a broccoli sprig. This was also pretty tasty and even a non-tofu lover like me found it pleasant. Finally, I was given a small carton of tomato juice and more barley tea. 

Second solid breakfast (last hospital meal):

Breakfast is actually my favorite meal and what I had at the hospital was no exception. One thing I loved about it was that they always included soup with the first meal of the day. It's something I'd like to do at home, but just don't have the time to make it. The combination of food at meals was inspiring, and I actually have added in some of the common elements in my own breakfasts since the hospital stay (including a little salad sometimes). This final meal was a piece of what I'm certain was Roman Meal whole wheat bread (the only sort of whole wheat bread you can cheaply and commonly get in Japan, though it is more of a bastard whole grain than the real deal as it's very white-bread-like), a packet of strawberry jam, a piece of "pocket cheese" (in the foil wrapper), a carton of whole milk, fresh pineapple pieces, and vegetarian minestrone soup. The soup was delicious with that familiar flavor of minestrone without the familiar oil floating around in it. The pineapple was six shades of awesome as it was clearly not from a can and sliced off a sweet, ripe fruit very recently. 

One thought I had as I consumed these meals is that there must be an immense competition for hospitals among food manufacturers. I never thought much about companies like Yakult (famous maker of yogurt drinks) and Kagome. They must sell huge numbers of packaged drinks to hospitals to serve to patients. In fact, I'd be shocked if they weren't better customers than the consumer market since the supply need would be quite steady. 

Since I never had any solid meals in an American hospital, I can't say if this was better or worse. However, my sister tells me that, during my mother's hospital stay, she was served things like canned fruit rather than fresh and that things were very overcooked. I do think that it's more likely in the U.S. that canned food would be used. However, I cannot stress enough that the food I ate was just what was on offer at my particular hospital. It could be different in various other hospitals. Mine was a smallish place, which may factor into how much care they take with meals. I cannot know. 

Overall, I thought the food was fresh, tasty and well-prepared. I was also impressed by the care given to the nutritional balance that was achieved. Of course, one would expect a hospital to be careful about such things, but I think they really did a great job. If this were a restaurant, I would feel okay, but not thrilled because I'd likely be paying more at a restaurant. However, if it were a school cafeteria, I'd be quite pleased to receive such dishes and if I could buy this food for cheap at a restaurant, I'd go there very often. 

If you've had experiences with hospital food in Japan or your home country, I'd absolutely love to hear what it was like to provide points of comparison to what I had. I know most of my readers are young and probably haven't been in hospitals, however, so I won't expect to hear too much.

Thanks for reading, and I'll be returning to usual form next week. An extra thanks for my readers' patience with all of my hospital talk on both blogs. It's just something that I had to get out of my system. 

Variety Friday: Best of the Best

How much do I love Heart Chiple? I bought this gigantic bag (50 cm./20 in.) full of garlic chip goodness at Don Quixote. That's a 30-cm. ruler (about a foot).

By the time you read this, I should be busting myself out of a Japanese hospital after having had surgery on December 20. Because I have been busier than ever during the lead up to this surgery, I'm bringing a list out of the buffer which has been languishing for a long time. I hope you'll forgive me that there is no new review for Friday this week. I realize that with only two reviews per week, it's probably not the most welcome to have a post which isn't 100% new content. Trust me when I say assembling this took a lot longer than writing a single review. It's simply that this was finished and I don't have time for a new post, especially when, as I write this, I will be spending an entire day being unable to eat. The surgery is not "serious" (the removal of a benign tumor in my neck), at least no more than any sort of surgery is. Still, I've had surgery twice before (tonsils and gall bladder removal) and I know what is coming. On T.V., they show people in recovery after the deed is done and all seems just peachy keen. That doesn't account for the post general-anesthesia cookie tossing and the pain of having been cut open and had bits of your body taken out. Surgery to the body is little different than an assault, an antiseptic, skilled one, but deep cuts are deep cuts and it's going to hurt.

I think that's more than enough of my whining. Back to business:

My ratings system is based on whether or not I believe I will buy things again. Considering the frequency with which I sample new foods, it's often difficult to actually get around to enjoying things a second time. That means that only the creme de la creme actually gets bought repeatedly. There are only so many junk food calories that I allot myself per day, so winning that little corner of my diet is a hard-won battle.

Unfortunately, my big bag of Heart Chiple was full of little bags that were exactly the same type of bags that I can buy at the local 99-yen shop. The only different is that the bags cost 40 yen each in the giant novelty bag and only 27 yen each locally. Moral: Don't go for the gimmick!

After more than 3 years reviewing, here are the things that I actually have bought again (and again):

1. Double Cream Brown Sugar Sembei

If I were to stop food review blogging tomorrow, this would probably be on top of my refrigerator 80% of the time for frequent snacking. It satisfies a salt craving. It placates a desire for sweets. It also gives you something crispy for 62 calories for two crackers. If you like brown sugar and salty sweets, you absolutely have to try these if you have a chance. I keep thinking someone should find a way to market them abroad. These are my number 1 absolute favorite thing that I've eaten since starting to review Japanese snacks. The rest of these entries are in no particular order of favoritism.

2. Candied Yuzu

Yuzu is a Japanese citrus fruit that tastes like a cross between grapefruit, lemon and orange. It can be a bit bitter or sour, but the candying balances that out. I've had little packets of candied yuzu a few times for a snack, but I have also bought it to replace candied lemon or orange rind when baking. It's both chewy and sweet, and it's on the healthy side. For those who like lemon chews or candied citrus peels, this is a winner.

3. Kinako Mochi Tirol Chocolates

Each autumn, this particular square of chocolate is reissued in Japan and remains available throughout the winter. Kinako is toasted soybean power, but depending on the presentation, it can taste a little like peanut butter. I've bought both the "premium" (slightly bigger and more sophisticated)  and regular (small and simple) varieties of these for their somewhat peanut-buttery flavor and the textural interest from the gummi interior.

4. Riska Super Heart Chiple (garlic chips)

I love these super light, rice-based chips that come in single-serving bags for only 27 yen (about 30 cents) each. They're strong on the garlic and have a very small bit of heat, but so satisfying and flavorful. The portion size is just enough to satisfy without going overboard on the calories at 85 calories per bag. It's big flavor for a little price both monetarily and nutritionally.

5. Kinako KitKat big bar

This has two things I love - the high wafer to chocolate ratio and kinako. The kinako isn't too overwhelmingly "soy" and just enhances the chocolate nicely. It isn't available everywhere or all of the time, but it is re-issued seasonally (usually in the spring or summer).

6. Yuzu Koshoo Sembei

These are peppery, spicy, and savory rice crackers. The blending of flavors is so perfect that it makes my mouth water just thinking of them. They are second to the Double Cream Brown Sugar Sembei as my all-time favorite. It's too bad that they're only available in convenience stores and only at a certain time of the year (winter). I adore these when I want a salty, spicy snack, and hope that they come back later this year so I can buy them again.

7. Cratz
I like all of the Cratz pretzel flavors, but the black pepper bacon are the bee's knees. Each hard little pretzel piece is an intensely savory nugget. Since many Japanese people prefer subtle flavors, Cratz stands out for its intensity of flavor. It's meant to be paired with beer, but you can have it with any beverage you like.

8. Pure Gummy
I tend to keep a bag of one flavor or another of Pure gummy candies around for quite awhile. They have a perfect blend of sour and sweet and offer a nice textural combination with their smooth chewy interior and little flakes of citric acid powder on the outside. These are gummies for adult tastes.

9. Cheese Almond Sembei
These appeal to me because there is a crunchy, delicious roasted almond glued onto each and every cracker with a pungent dab of processed cheese. With experience,  I have grown enamored of the dubious allure of the much-scorned processed cheese. Yes, sometimes eating enough junk makes you start to like it. At 14 calories per cracker, I find myself creating big piles of wrappers at the snacking hour. The combination of textures and flavors is simply a winner which transcends the appeal of any individual component.

10. Senjaku Diet Cocoa Candy
I have purchased bag after bag of these chocolate hard candies. They have an intensity and a feeling on the tongue which makes you think of a chocolate bar in a manner that no other hard candy has ever conveyed to me. I try to keep two extra bags on hand at all times because both my husband and I eat them. When you've got a chocolate or sweet craving, these are 12 calories of satisfaction. I hope they never go off the market.

11. Eichoseika Fluffy Chocolate Sembei
This list was originally going to be only 10 items, but this seasonally available treat forced me to add one more. Available each year from September to March, this "sembei" is not what you'd expect. It's not a hard, crispy little rice cracker, but a puffy ball of melt in your mouth white chocolate and vanilla ambrosia. It is an amazing taste and texture experience which I liken to balls of vanilla ice cream without the need for refrigeration.