Japanese Junk Food Times - Pepsi Dry and Kit-Kat Zunda

Oh! I didn't see you there! Let me just put my gourmet hat on, and then tell you about my journeys in the realm of... flavour.

I don't need to go into how the Japanese snack food market retains its vim and vigour by trying out new flavours of existing products all the time, do I? I've read about a zillion other blog posts explaining the concept recently, so let's just say that I am thoroughly down with the concept. It reminds me of Grant Morrison's Seaguy a little, and also makes me think of white suited cowboys of the lab - pouring bubbling test-tubes into each other in search of the essence of... pistachio nut shells or something.

Above you will see Dry Pepsi. What is Dry Pepsi? It is non-sweet Pepsi. It makes no claims about being especially healthy on the bottle (though you would assume the lack of sugar is a good thing) and instead talks about being light and refreshing or something. I don't like Pepsi really, weirdly it is a little to sweet for me. So I figured that non-sweet Pepsi might be something worth checking out.

It was not.

It is not less sweet, as I was foolishly imagining, it is not sweet at all. In fact, it doesn't taste like Pepsi, it tastes like soda water, and I soon found myself wondering why it existed. If you like the bitter tang of soda, try it, or better yet JUST BUY SODA. After Shiso Pepsi, Azuki Pepsi and Montblanc Pepsi... this was a let down.

Better, but not incredible was, Kit-Kat Zunda - Zunda-Mochi being soy-bean rice cakes from Sendai. A quick google reveals that Pocky Watch - based in Sendai - reviewed this back in 2009. Tohoku was devastated by the tsunami in March of course, and now it looks like they're rolling out this flavour nationwide and giving 10yen from every bar to support the rebuilding effort. Good stuff.

The bar itself was nice, faintly bean-y, faintly rice-cake-y, but nothing to write home about. Wait, what am I doing here? Is this more effort or less than writing home? I'm lost. Anyway it was ok, but as usual they nail the scent a lot more than the actual taste - which comes out a little bit like funny white chocolate.

Anyway, that's my traditional Japanese food post. You're welcome.

Sapporo Food - Dominika (Soup Curry)

A soup curry shop so good that I went there twice in one week? That's... that's... well, not unheard of actually. Anyway, Dominika was good.

And it's in Odori, where it's always nice to find good Soup Curry. Sadly last order is at 8.30, and I need victuals later than that sometimes, but that's the way the disk of fried cheese crumbles I suppose.

Yeah! Check that bad boy out - a circular cheese wonder that you can break up or allow to melt into your soup as you see fit. Amazing as that is I did actually find I preferred the pre-melted cheese, but this fried cheese topping is apparently the most popular so you should really try it at some point.

Dominika was recommended by a friend, and it's a little tucked away on the ground floor of an office building thing just along from Tokyu hands. I must've seen that bloody wooden elephant outside a thousand times though, and that makes it pretty hard to miss.

You have a choice of four soups, should you choose to go to this place. Yellow is the regular soup, delicious and with a pretty sharp, strong flavour to start off with. Black is a richer soup, made with beef stock I think the dude said, and that was certainly the impression I got from it. These are the two I've tried so far, but there's also white - which is made milder with added soy milk - and red which involves tomatoes in a way that me, Yuki and the very, very chatty dude who works there couldn't get to the bottom of. Like - not a tomato based soup, not like tomato soup, not soup with added tomatoes... he just told us to try it next time.

The dude who took our order by the way - worth mentioning. He is very chatty, eager to explain everything about the menu and to crack jokes (or he was with us when he worked out our Japanese was ok) and quick to weigh in with advice while you're making your mind up. A lot of warnings about the spice-level of the curries, let's put it that way. I had a five both times, and it packed a punch but it was ok (the regular actually seemed a little hotter than the black one). Some other Westerner in the guest book had picked a number eight and it sounded like tough going. Anyway, the Dominika guy - best intentions in the world, but he rubbed one of my friends the wrong way, and it was kind of difficult to chill out at times with him buzzing about. It was okay by me, but... I cannot speak for all of humanity.

The top photo is the black soup with pork. The soup and the vegetables were strengths, coz while the pork was good, I've had some sensational pork curries using buta kakuni (slow-cooked pork) that have raised my standards unrealistically high. When I went back I had the tontoro (pork neck) which looks like this:

And actually feels like two dishes, since the pork comes in a wonderful teriyaki sauce that means you're not meant to transfer it into the soup. Whatever though, because that tontoro was absolutely delicious. Strongly recommended sir!

So, the best soup curry I've had in Odori. Oh and free salad! Check it out. It's on the map.

What's with the manga?

I have been reading manga recently. I say reading, but really I apply that verb with a variety of degrees of accuracy, considering I'm reading in Japanese, and my Japanese remains not-great. So what's with this stack?

Well Joe-Bob, it's a funny story. Yuki was selling an old mobile phone, and got a 500 yen voucher for the used store. But there was nothing either of us wanted to buy, so I picked out five first volumes for a hundred yen each and now I have a bunch of extra manga that I might not read.

Was that a funny story? Not really. Sorry, Joe-Bob.

Anyway there are some manga that I'm reading pretty seriously. Lets see - working down from the top...

Deathnote Vol. 1 - Everyone knows Deathnote, right? Popular enough to spawn three movies, a forthcoming American remake and the Manga's available in English too I believe. This was one of my 100 yen  purchases, and that only one I've started so far. There are sections where the Japanese is beyond me, but everything has furigana - small characters telling you how to read the kanji - so it's easy to look stuff up if I don't know it. Looking anything up takes time though, and I can understand Deathnote pretty well so far so I haven't bothered. The story of a boy who finds a notebook with the power to kill anyone whose name is written in it, I'm not all that far into it, but I like how it doesn't take long at all for the boy to become a budding sociopath and start killing people like crazy. It might be a crude reduction, but I'm guessing that, like Evangelion and Gantz to some degree, Deathnote is another smash hit series aimed at somewhat antisocial insular folk who hate the world, with the underlying message that it's not good to hate the world. Could be wrong about that.

Drop Vol. 1 - is another 100 yen snap. It's a yankee manga about delinquent youths, and it looks like it has a slightly cartoony style, which I kinda like. I haven't read any of it, but a movie of it came out just after I came to Japan, so I'd heard of it before.

Touch Vol. 7 - is my most serious manga reading project. Recommended by the wonderful Yukiko, it's a 1980s high school, sibling rivalry, love-triangle, baseball story by Adachi Mitsuru. It has furigana spelling out the kanji, but the dense 80s high school slang makes it a little tricky to unpick the grammar at times, and I'm told that some of the phrases used are dated to say the least. But it's a fun story, and with Touch I'm looking up and translating everything. It takes a while, which is why I'm only on volume seven, after reading it forever, but it's kind of worth it, and I like Adachi's drawings too.

Gantz Vol. 14 - So, I started reading Gantz when the first film was coming out, because... I don't remember why. The concept piqued my interest or something. Anyway, I care about missing things in Touch, and I take care reading it, but Gantz is basically high-concept trash so I've just been blazing through these volumes like anything. In fact the only thing slowing me down has been the fact that the series is so popular now it's hard to find the volumes in used stores when you want to read them. There's no furigana,  which makes it irritating to look things up and so I haven't bothered. There are fan translations online, and at first I was reading both at the same time to test my understanding. Then I realised that in Gantz there are often action sequences that are two hundred pages long, and that most of the dialogue in those is "GODDAMNIT!" and "AARRGH!" and "IT HURTS!" and most often, "OH SHIT! OH SHIT! I DON'T WANT TO DIE!" And it's much more fun to read comics on paper than on a screen so now I just blast through the Japanese books and if there's something really important that I think I'm missing I look that bit up online. I half like / half hate Gantz. The writer, Oku Hiroya, said that he had the idea for Gantz in high school and boy does it feel like that. People die, but instead of dying they're sent to a mysterious room where a mysterious ball gives them crazy future-tech weapons and sends them off to defeat 'aliens' that are hiding on earth. After that they're free for a while until the next 'game'. There's insanely gratuitous violence, nudity and sex, and for a while it really did feel like a very well rendered 16 year-old boy's wish fulfillment project. But the internal logic of their tasks and the problems they face are so really well done, and I did want to see where things were going enough to keep reading at the start. Then after a while I guess I became inured to it, or it just got better, and certainly the main character developed a lot, and I was thoroughly enjoying the big arc that I just finished, which had some amazing action pieces. Now there are some vampire dudes and I'm not digging it so much though... I'm halfway through the whole run thus far though, so I reckon I'll still keep going.

Hana Yori Dango Vol 1. - This is a super-popular high-school romance manga. I haven't read any of it yet, but I will! I need an antidote to Gantz.

Rideback Vol 1. - I don't know anything about this, but I liked the colours on the cover, and I liked the loose illustration style inside. It seems to be a girl and robot motorcycle vs. facist state thing? Or a race thing? No idea really!

20 Seiki Shonen Vol 1. - I already know the story to this, and I love Urasawa Naoki, but I've never read the manga. So I figured, I really should start. After all, James read the entire bloody thing.

So that's too much rambling about manga. Next time more food, or possibly music. Depends on how lucky you are.

Sapporo Food: Senraibou

Not a vegetarian restaurant, but a restaurant which leans heavily on vegetables and has a lot of veggie dishes. Senraibou is in the sparkly, fancy G-Dining building, and while it's a little pricey it was worth every penny.

Finding this place, by the way - totally the result of me getting an iPhone recently. Using one of the GuruNavi apps we just threw out our restaurant gathering net into the inter-ether and this is what it came back with. I mean, a coupla hundred years ago we would've had to use real nets to eat! Ah, livin' in the future.

Senraibou is an intimate izakaya-esque restaurant that specializes in veggie dishes, tomato nabe for example.

This was so, so, so good. I really can't express properly how good this nabe thing was. It was GOOD. Perhaps italics too on that? It looked nothing like the picture on the menu amusingly enough, but it didn't need to because it was so damn good. It was a Japanese style stew meets a rich Italian tomato soup in the best way possible. After we had eaten the seafood and vegetables in it they took the rest of the soup away to make rice porridge with it, and that was incredible, but it was so hard to stop eating that soup that I was worried they wouldn't have enough soup to work with. It was incredible. Also this:

...was incredible. Baked tofu with kimchee and cheese. Oh holy crap yes. The last thing we had was sadly the worst of the three, but it was interesting in a different way at least.

Kabocha (squash) soba noodles. They didn't really taste of kabocha, but they were thick and wholemealy. They were good, but they weren't up to those other two heavenly dishes.

As I said, Senraibou isn't the cheapest place, but it isn't crazily expensive. Our meal plus drinks ran us about 5000 yen for two, and it was really, really good. I recommend the place, and of course there are tons of other fancy eateries in G-Dining too, so that's on the map now! Eating! Yes!

Japanese Music: Scraps

I wanna blog, so here's a post about random Japanese music I've been listening to.

It's getting to be a pretty hard and fast rule that I like about a third of everything Kreva puts out. When he's focussed and forceful and working with good beats (which mostly err on the glittery 'futuristic' side) he's got a good flow and I can get into it. His last single 挑め (Idome) is pretty ace:

But when he's doing the modern pop R&B thing he sucks atrociously. The B-Side to Idome for instance. Yuck.

Monobright, now including Hidaka Tooru from Beat Crusaders have put out a really decent Mini-Album and a really decent double A-side already this year. He hasn't really done much to change their sound, although the new releases are generally more consistently upbeat, which he might have something to do with. The double A-side was some insane triple tie in, whereby one song was being used by the J-League, and one song was the theme to a new movie with Yoshitaka Yuriko and was also being used in a Pocky commercial. Tie-in-a-licious yo, and it's a fun song. I got myself a Nico-Nico Douga membership so that I could post this video. It looks like the movie is about Yuriko choosing between a bunch of boys, so they went for the same thing in the video, with all the members of Monobright:

The new single from Kuriyama Chiaki (of Kill Bill and Battle Royal fame) works for me too, because it was written by Shiina Ringo, and performed by her band Tokyo Jihen. In other words, it's a Ringo-chan song sung by someone else, which, since her voice is so unique, is pretty dumb. The song still manages to be pretty good though:

I also picked up an album that came out last year: Jim O'Rourke's 'All Kinds Of People Love Burt Bacharach'. Jim O'Rourke is, of course, not Japanese, but he's working with predominantly Japanese singers and musicians on this covers record and as far as I'm aware it's only available here. I figured that with O'Rourke it could go one of two ways - restrained and perfectly performed covers or out-and-out experimentation, but I wasn't sure what to expect. It's the former for the most part, with excellent drumming from Glenn Kotche keeping the whole thing simple and light, and generally good vocal performances in variously accented English from the singers. Thurston Moore adds a faint wash of fuzz to 'Always Something There To Remind Me' and Yoshimi from the Boredoms and OOIOO  puts some random percussion on her track, but other than that it's nice and straight (as you could probably expect from listening to his Bacharach-fueled Eureka album). I do really like the twist in the opening track though, where Haruomi Hosono from YMO sings an altered version of 'Close To You' which starts out "Why do birds suddenly appear every time I am near? Just like me, they long to be, close to me." It's very 'Insignificance', very, 'Halfway To A Threeway."

There's more but I've sated the blogging urge so let's leave it there. I'm digging the new Polysics album title - "Oh No! It's Heavy Polysick!" so I really hope I can afford to pick that up soon.

Sapporo Food: Cheese Cheese

Cheese Cheese, located on the ground floor of the somewhat unbalanced Norbesa Building in Odori, does not (luckily or unluckily) serve only cheese. It is instead a good Italian restaurant. I suppose that cheese is an integral part of Italian cuisine, and is pretty alien to Japanese cooking so emphasizing the presence of cheese in the name of the store is probably justified. Still, it's not that cheesy.

I've been to Cheese Cheese a few times now, and I really like it. Not just because it does Italian food that's a sight more satisfying that most Italian restaurants in Japan, but because they seem to have a nicely showy approach to serving some of their dishes that makes things look all the more delicious. The salad we ordered was mixed and spun in a massive bowl-within-a-bowl thing, and then we were given a choice of cheeses and told to say when. We left that girl grating for a pre-tty long time.

They mix some of their cheese-based dishes inside a massive, hollowed out cheese for maximum cheesiness, and when the dude ground our pepper, he did so in a somewhat scatter-shot way. Plus they give you coloured pencils and a big white paper place mat that you're encouraged to draw on (hints of our work can be spotted throughout these pictures). That's just plain fun.

That pasta was delicious, and I can't resist ordering a pizza when I go there because decent pizzas are a thing to be cherished in Japan. I think the chef won some international pizza competition - anyway, good pizza. Of course with a somewhat Japanese bent, but then... this is Japan.

So I like the place and I recommend it. It's in Norbesa, which has a bloody great ferris wheel on top so you can't miss it, and I've marked it on my map too. Speaking of pizza though, just a quick shout to say a while back I finally thoroughly enjoyed a delivery pizza in Japan. It was from Pizza-La, and after unsatisfactory orders from every other chain I can think of, I'm gonna stick with them from now on.

Moments from Opera (1987)