Company cites desire to avoid giving Japan a bad reputation as visitors from overseas come for the Tokyo Olympics.
Family mart (Page 10)
7-Eleven Japan wants to stop selling adult magazines, cites concern for foreigners, female customers
Our reporter shares which version of this classic style of bento (all for 430 yen/US$3.83 or under) overwhelmingly stole his heart and stomach.
We test our luck with a new nine-person party snack that threatens to shoot our taste buds with wasabi.
Leaping into action and clearing Japan’s already high bar for customer service in an amazing way.
Family Mart’s newest drink campaign shoots for the moon and promises a rainbow of dreamy starshine flavors.
Shelf-stocking technique has some saying they’ll never shop at the branch, or even the chain, again.
Chain asserts its right to exhibit magazines filled with models who don’t cover up either.
Courageously protecting Japan with the aid of garrison-exclusive convenience store meals and socks.
As Japan continues to make an ice cream flavor of every conceivable thing, the limited Ottotto Ice is now only available at Family Mart.
Convenience stores in Japan are often like mini supermarkets, but this one near one of Shinto’s holiest shrines also feels like a time machine.
Organizations don’t want bare-all periodicals to have to hide under obscuring plastic covers.
In his ongoing search for the perfect affordable-but-stylish ensemble, our fashion reporter Seiji Nakazawa sets his sights on a major convenience store chain.
Okinawa, the tropical island at the southern end of Japan, is known for its unique culture and tasty foods like soki soba (Okinawa noodles) and rafuti (sweet stewed pork). Another local specialty Okinawa is famous for is the alcoholic drink awamori, a distilled drink made from long-grain rice.
While the beverage has its fans across Japan, it also has enough of a distinct flavor that some people consider it a bit of an acquired taste. So you can imagine it came as somewhat of a surprise when we found out that they sell an alcoholic coffee drink in Okinawa that is infused with awamori, and at a convenience store chain, no less. We definitely had to try this!
Did you know that FamilyMart sells 108 yen (US$0.90) packets of “roasted shellfish strings?” They’re made from Hokkaido-raised scallops, and just like clams and oysters, scallops can produce pearls underwater. Even the packages come with this warning: “please be careful not to swallow any pearls that the shellfish may have produced while you eat them.”
Well that’s a challenge if we ever heard one! We bought 21 packets of roasted shellfish strings and went on a pearl diving adventure. Did we end up finding one? Read on to find out!
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.
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