Anyone who’s been to Japan knows that the convenience store is the prefect place to get snacks, pay your bills, buy adult material, and get into a fight. Wait, what?
convenience stores
When you work in a customer-facing role, you can expect to deal with some difficult people from time to time. Being hospitalized by one of them, however, should never be a concern…
Does that beautiful breakfast look like it came from the kitchen of a high-class ryokan inn or loving Japanese family? Guess again – it’s all from 7-Eleven!
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.
Since its creation around 150 years ago, many people have dedicated their whole lives to the art of making good sushi, and we’re certainly thankful for that.
In fact, you could say the art of preparing good sushi is kind of like learning to do tricks on a skateboard, or at least it is if you have a vivid imagination. For those of you scratching your heads, it’ll make a little more sense after watching this entertaining sushi-meets-skateboarding ad. And hey, here at RocketNews24 there’s nothing we love more than sushi and entertainment.
But Japan’s top sushi chefs don’t really need to shred a skateboard park to make good sushi… do they?
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.
On June 12 Twitter user @radio_skyblue12 tweeted about coming across a family of ducks during a trip to a neighborhood Lawson convenience store, uploading a photo along with the caption: “Look at these unexpected shoppers I ran into! What a surprise.”
This cute family duck photo quickly circulated around the popular social networking site, and became a hot topic among Japanese Twitter users. The post was in turn met with numerous replies, additional sightings, and other duck tales by fellow users, and has since been retweeted over 24,000 times.
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?
We’ve all been there. You run down to the convenience store during your lunch break, buy a delicious bento box, then dash back up to the office lunchroom, anxious to indulge in your cheap yet hearty meal. But then you open it up only to discover that you’ve been carrying it sideways the whole time, and everything has spilled over to one side, causing a jumbled, mixed-up mess.
It appears as though Taiwan has found the answer to this catastrophic problem: bags that make it impossible for a bento lunch to turn sideways, or any other direction that would spoil its deliciousness. How does it work? Watch the video and prepare to be amazed.
As we’ve mentioned before, Japanese convenience stores are pretty awesome. Since so many people do their shopping on foot in urban and suburban Japan, convenience stores often function like small grocery stores for the immediately surrounding neighborhood, not just a place to buy junk food, beer, and dirty magazines (although they stock all three of those in abundance, too).
Because of this, Japanese convenience stores sell a lot of stuff that you might not expect, like a fairly extensive array of low-calorie dining options, or, as 7-Eleven is now offering, a life-size replica of hit anime Attack on Titan’s 3-D maneuver gear.
We absolutely love Japan’s convenience stores, and even amongst the tough competition, the various brands have managed to create their own identity and each have their own strengths and specialities.
In most convenience stores, a short chime goes off when a customer enters or exits the store, and if you’ve ever set foot into a FamilyMart location, you might have noticed that they have a unique door jingle in contrast to the more common “ding-dong” sounding ones. The iconic chime has become so familiar, it’s almost synonymous with the FamilyMart brand, but did you know that the jingle is not exclusive to FamilyMart? You can have it in your own home!
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.
Take a quick look at the picture above. Notice anything strange? Perceptive readers may have spotted something out-of-place right away. If you didn’t, well, no worries, but you’ll probably want to facepalm yourself when you take a second look.
Like this Chinese “7-Twelve,” there are a number of fake, localized versions of popular convenience store 7-Eleven scattered throughout the Asian continent. They may think they can slip through the cracks, but perhaps it’s only a matter of time before a lawyer comes knocking at their doors. We have to hand it to them, though–they score high on creativity for coming up with some amusing names.
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