Do you ever wonder what Teddy Roosevelt’s favorite kind of juice was? It’s hard to imagine the 26th President of the United States having to do anything as trivial as deciding between orange and apple, but after a long, hard day of riding moose and judo-tossing William Howard Taft, no amount of influence and respect is going to keep you from getting thirsty, and it’s a choice that has to be made.

But while the late Teddy’s fruit nectar preferences may be lost to antiquity, we can now say for certain which brand of tea the Dalai Lama reaches for when he visits a Japanese convenience store.

The Dalai Lama arrived in Japan on April 6 to begin a nearly two-week stay in the country. His schedule includes visits to disaster victims of the massive 2011 earthquake and tsunami, lectures in Tokyo, and meetings with prominent cultural and educational figures. Oh, and apparently a stop by a 7-Eleven in Wakayama Prefecture.

While Japan’s large number of temples means that the sight of a robed monk walking about in secular society isn’t really cause for any great surprise, it’s a little different when you’re working the register in rural Japan and the leader of Tibetan Buddhism wanders in and starts eyeballing your store’s display case of corndogs and croquettes.

We can also see that His Holiness has a liking for the Coca-Cola Company’s bottled royal milk tea from its Kocha Kaden series. As a matter of fact, he’s apparently so fond of it that he started drinking it before paying for it, so it’s a good thing someone snapped that photo in case he skipped out on the bill and they had to track him down for payment later.

This isn’t the Dalai Lama’s first appearance in Japan’s convenience stores, either, as shown in this photo from 2011, where once again we see him sipping his drink as he walks around the shop.

▼ For a man who ordinarily radiates such tranquility, he seems surprisingly impatient. We suppose when you give as many speeches as he does you work up a serious thirst, though.

▼ We feel better about our weakness of spirit when we see that even the Dalai Lama is apparently tempted by the candy aisle.

The religious leader’s most recent convenience store sighting came as he and his entourage were en route to the Buddhist monastery at Mount Koya to speak with its resident monks.

The Dalai Lama’s current journey to Japan is his third since 2011, with each return coming more quickly than the last. Two years passed between his 2011 visit and his next stay in November of 2013, after which less than six months passed before he was back again. Is his increased amount of time on Japanese part of an effort to foster a warmer relation with the country, or to see what kind of limited-time munchies its snack food makers have come up with? Having not spoken to the man, we can’t say for sure, but we’ll be sure to ask if we run into him at our local 7-Eleven or Family Mart.

Source: Naver Matome
Top image: Naver Matome
Insert images: Flickr, Cloudfront