Bringing you yesterday's news from Japan and Asia, today.
convenience stores (Page 31)
You can get practically anything via online retail giant Amazon, and there are even some products that you can only get via the website. Ordinarily one such product is a special beer from popular Japanese craft brewery Yoho Brewing, but beer drinkers will soon be able to pick up a can at their local Lawson convenience store. You’ll have to hurry, though, because the number available is limited, and once they’re gone, they’re gone.
At some point in life, someone is going to ask you a question that makes you feel uncomfortable. How much money do you make? How many people have you slept with? Just what did happen to all of your political rivals from the junior high student body president election?
Quite often, though, you can get out of answering by asking in return “Why do you want to know?” As a matter of fact, the question “Why?” is so disarming it can even prevent armed robbery, as one foreigner working in Tokyo just found out.
Convenience stories in Asia are known all over the world for actually living up to their name. Whether you need an emergency swimsuit, want to grab pretty much any drink ever made, or just have a hankering for some Evangelion donuts, a nearby conbini will suit your needs.
But sometimes there are items available in conbini that don’t seem to make any sense… and yet people still buy them. Japanese netizens shared their most confusing yet surprisingly useful convenience store finds online, and we have them here for you. Would you ever admit to buying some of these?
Just how big is Comiket, the dojinshi (independently produced comics) event held twice a year in Tokyo? Over the three days of the event, some 35,000 creative groups and roughly 600,000 fans are expected to attend. In terms of size, Comiket isn’t so much an anime convention as it is a temporary city that roles through the Big Sight conference center.
Comiket is such a large-scale gathering that it changes the whole atmosphere of the neighborhood on the weekend it’s held, and with this summer’s iteration right around the corner, the local train station and convenience store are looking a lot more otaku-centric, as these photos show.
There isn’t enough praise we can give to Japanese convenience stores because they provide exactly what their name suggests, convenience. They stock all sorts of snack foods, expertly pre-prepared meals, and a wide selection of delicious rice balls. Those tasty onigiri are the perfect snack, portable, tasty and with very little waste.
But sometimes you are just so hungry that you need to be eating that onigiri right then and there. You try to quickly open the package, but it all just gets mangled instead. Fear not! RocketNews24 will show you how to open an onigiri in only one second. You won’t want to miss this video after the jump.
Walk into any Japanese convenience store or supermarket, and you’ll find a row of rice balls waiting. You can always count on the old standards, such as salmon, pickled plum, and spicy cod roe being represented, but each store also sets aside a bit of shelf space for unique, limited-time versions as well.
In the past, this form of carbohydrate-packed one-upmanship has given us such wonders as the bacon cheeseburger musubi and headscratchers as the fish butt onigiri (musubi being one of the Japanese words for “rice ball,” and onigiri the other). It’s always a flip of the culinary coin whether these outside-the-box rice balls are going to be a hit or a miss, but when we heard about ramen-style onigiri, we were immediately onboard.
Heat and humidity are as much a part of a Japanese summer as festivals and fireworks. With the threat of dehydration always looming, it’s a smart idea to always carry a cool, rehydrating beverage with you, but if you’re sweating profusely, you can bet the plastic bottle your drink is in is doing likewise.
To keep the rest of the contents of your bag from getting damp, you could wrap the bottle in a hand towel. A more effective alternative, though, is to slip a specially designed cover over it, and if you’re going that route, why not use one of these cool Sailor Moon costume covers that you can get for free with a bottle of Japanese tea at Mini Stop convenience stores?
Everyone is trying to get in great shape for the summer season and everywhere you look there is a new exercise or diet craze that guarantees quick and easy weight loss in only a month. Most of these are too good to be true, but some of them might just work for you! Introducing the “Chef Lawson Diet,” which involves eating only at the Lawson convenience store for an entire month. Actual user testimony guarantees* you will lose five kilograms (11 pounds) in just one month!
* On second thought, RocketNews24 doesn’t actually guarantee anything.
Japan has a reputation for outstanding customer service, and as such you’ll usually find courtesy and pleasantness on both sides of retail transactions. As polite as clerks are, most shoppers are just as respectful towards the hard-working individuals who’re ringing their purchases up.
Still, not every customer is a joy to deal with, and one young women working at a convenience store thought she was encountering an extremely rude male customer who refused to be served by her. As it turns out, though, the man she’d mistaken for a chauvinist was simply following his own particular code of chivalry.
Convenience stores are easily a part of everyone’s daily lives in Japan. So long as you’re in an urban area, you’re probably never more than a five-minute walk away from one. More commonly known as “conbini” in Japanese, they really are just as handy as their name suggests. Need to pay a bill or for an online purchase? Do it at the conbini. Want to print some photos or scan something? Get it done at the conbini. Late-night alcohol- or munchies-run? TO THE CONBINI!
While some convenience store chains can only be found in certain regions, others can be found nationwide. After opening its first stores on Friday, March 6 in Kouchi Prefecture, 7-Eleven only has three more prefectures to go until they’ve got the entire country covered.
Oh Japanese convenience stores. Those bright, white-glowing oases that have everything you could ever possibly need inside of them, all wrapped up with a pair of chopsticks and a warm smile from the clerk.
Except for when you want an onigiri (rice ball) or sushi roll. Anyone who buys one of the items pictured above typically finds themselves suddenly engaged in a battle of wits matching human against plastic wrap. And the plastic wrap usually wins, resulting in a mess of rice, seaweed and tears of frustration.
But fear not! We here at RocketNews24 are here to help with step-by-step instructions so you will never lose to another conbini snack again.
Before you start obsessing over Valentine’s Day plans, let’s turn for a moment to another February whoop-de-do: the Japanese Bean-Throwing Festival or Setsubun. Celebrated on February 3 this year, it’s an intriguing blend of evil ogres and spirits, roasted soybeans, and chomping on a whole baton of thickly rolled sushi while facing in the proper direction. These somewhat disparate ingredients commingle on this day to assure good fortune and health for the year to come.
In recent years, western Japan’s custom of eating a special type of sushi called ehō-maki (恵方巻き, literally “blessed direction roll”) for Setsubun has spread across the nation due to marketing campaigns by grocery and convenience stores; what’s more, the sushi rolls have been evolving into scrumptious cream-filled Swiss rolls! Iconoclastic? Maybe. Delicious? Yes!
So let’s jump on the bandwagon and look into this holiday a bit before drooling over this collection of sushi and their sweet doppelgängers. And Yowapeda fans, I think I spy a Makishima-maki!
In a lot of ways, convenience stores in Japan are more like miniature supermarkets. So while they still sell a lot of the candy and canned beverages their counterparts in other countries specialize in, you can also find plenty of edible, even gourmet-sounding food.
For example, the chain FamilyMart sells pouches of fried scallop meat, specifically the mantle, or part of the animal that attaches it to its shell. There’s a certain level of risk that comes with eating any mass-produced foodstuff, though, as one customer found out when he found what he felt was a foreign object in his pack of marine mollusks. And while generally the only thing you want to find in your food is, well, food, we suppose if we had to find something else mixed in there, we’d want what he discovered hiding in his snack: a pearl.
Like with wine, there are variations in flavor between different types of Japanese sake. However, it can be kind of tough to pick up on the subtle differences unless you’re drinking them back to back. Unfortunately, it’s not unusual for prices for anything other than the house sake at restaurants to start at about 800 yen (US $6.75), so putting together your own sampling set can get pricey.
But if you’re looking for a budget-friendly way to dip you toes in the wide, wonderful world of sake, convenience store Family Mart is here to help, with its new lineup of affordably priced canned sake.
There are many “symbols of Japan”–from Mt. Fuji to Akihabara, the country has numerous faces to the outside world. But regardless of what comes to mind when you think of the country, there’s a good chance that you’ll stop by one of its many convenience stores on the way to your destination. In many ways, the army of small shops that squat on half the corners from Hokkaido to Okinawa are the perfect symbol of the country. But it looks like the convenience stores of Japan are now facing a serious problem: They can’t find enough employees!
Although video game developer Square Enix had dabbled in a few direct follow-ups here and there, whenever the counter for its Final Fantasy role-playing franchise rolls over to a new numbered sequel, the company completely ditches the old cast of heroes and villains, and even the previous game’s world.
But even if the narrative is starting from scratch each time, that doesn’t mean the games aren’t connected. For example, every Final Fantasy has scenes where the player rides on airships or horse-sized flightless birds called chocobos. The cursor is always a white glove with a pointing index finger, and major victories in battle are marked by the sounds of the series’ instantly recognizable “Victory Fanfare.”
Gamers have already heard the short but sweet melody played by the NES, Super NES, and PlayStations 1 through 3, and this month, they can look forward to hearing it someplace new: at the register of Lawson convenience stores when they purchase special items.
Last summer, we thought the heat might have been getting to the executives at 7-Eleven. Sure, offering two-meter (six-foot, seven-inch) tall Evangelion statues as special promotional prizes was a cool idea and all, but did they really expect anyone to pony up the 1,836,000 yen (US$16,000) they were asking for the 25 more giant figures they was selling outright?
Well, not only did all 25 of those Eva statues find homes, they sold out in just two minutes. Emboldened by that success, 7-Eleven has teamed up once again with the hit anime franchise to release the most expensive item the convenience store has ever sold: the Evangelion car.
Are there ever times when you feel really glad to have been born where you were? Maybe you’ve felt that way during a holiday, or while eating your favorite local food, but regardless, most of us have had those moments when we’re just plain thankful to be a citizen of a particular country.
Internet portal Mynavi Woman was curious to learn the specific situations and things that made Japanese people happy to be Japanese, and so in typical Mynavi fashion they opened up an internet survey in July to find out. Those results are finally in, and we’re happy to present to you the top 10 things that made Japanese respondents feel lucky to be nihonjin!
From a genie in a bottle to a city at the bottom of the sea, if you’re a fan of Disney, then you’ll know the sweetest things can be found in the most unlikely places.
So it’s no surprise that Disney princess parasols are now waiting patiently for new owners down at the local 7-Eleven. On sale from the beginning of September, fans are heaping praise on the seven designs available and falling in love with all the gorgeous details from their favourite Disney films.
If you’ve ever experienced an Asian summer, you’ll know how unbearably hot and humid it can be. In Thailand, where summer temperatures often stay above 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees F) and can reach 100% humidity, keeping body temperatures down becomes a priority not only for people, but for our furry friends as well.
Clever canines know to beat the heat by hanging outside local convenience stores, where there’s shade, a cold surface to lie on, and best of all, a steady flow of traffic to open the automatic doors, releasing precious, steady gusts of cool, conditioned air. But there’s more…
Studio Ghibli releases new plush mascot character collection with a focus on friendship
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Family Mart releases 47 convenience store socks and stickers, one for every prefecture in Japan
Three amazing Japanese convenience store sweet potato desserts to eat right now (and 11 for later)
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Japan’s human washing machines will go on sale to general public, demos to be held in Tokyo
Studio Ghibli has a new anime out, and there’s only one place in the world where you can see it
Starbucks Japan releases new drinkware and goods for Valentine’s Day
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Family Mart releases 47 convenience store socks and stickers, one for every prefecture in Japan
Three amazing Japanese convenience store sweet potato desserts to eat right now (and 11 for later)
Japanese sweet potato ice cream season! Häagen-Dazs and Muji take different paths to our hearts
Emperor of Japan poses for photo with Studio Ghibli’s No Face [Video]
My night trapped in Nagoya’s flood: what do you do when Japan’s trains shut down?
New Cardcaptor Sakura fashion line delivers magical girl style for real-world ladies
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Japanese convenience store is very focused with its new bento…maybe TOO focused
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New Gundam Base superstores coming soon in the U.S., with one opening this month