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The 5 Most Delicious and Incredibly Horrible Japanese Kids Snacks


pancakes%20and%20donuts.jpgBy Bryan Hartzheim

American children have grown on a diet of Nestle?s Quik and Dunkaroos, Hershey?s chocolates and Slim Jims, pork rinds, Twinkies, and whatever other barely legal garbage you can find permanently stationed at the express checkout counter. Snacks and candies evolve, but the perennial goods from our youth are eternal.

The Japanese are exactly the same. They have their ever-evolving Koala?s March and Pocky cookies taking funky new shapes and flavors, but their staples are fixed, forever to be doled out by the neighborhood granny from her dilapidated snack box. Well, maybe not exactly the same, unless you think eating a fermented squid on a stick is similar to licking a Charms Blow Pop. They have their hits: Bontan chewies, whose translucent goo is sticky but not overly sweet. And then there are the misses: a portable yogurt made entirely out of chalky powder. Behold five of the most fun and delicious classic Japanese kids? snacks conceived, and then flip the page for five of the most horrifying snacks to kick you in the nuts (if your nuts were in your mouth).

THE BEST:

5) Shot of Ramen
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If you?re in a hurry and don?t have time to prepare an entire bowl of steaming hot delicious ramen, just take a shot of seasoned dried noodles. At only 10 yen (approx. 10 cents), it?s infinitely cheaper and infinitely more unsatisfying than a regular bowl of ramen, but kids can?t complain since they?re poor and one shot of ramen might fill them up, they being small and Japanese. Still, the ramen shots work even now for us larger, working folk as a nice mid-hour pick-me-up, along with two to seven cans of beer.

4) Little Ice Cream Cones
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A cup of Haagen Daaz costs over three dollars in Japan, and there?s no Ben n? Jerry?s over there, either. Invention, meet necessity. She?s your mother. Really though, how could Americans have not invented this first? It?s so ridiculously simple: sponge cones filled with whipped sugar or marshmallow. Sure, real ice cream might be better, but real ice cream can?t be brought into class and nibbled on through the duration of a lecture on the solar system or, uh, The Tale of Genji. Maybe Space Ice Cream can, but the prices are astronomical (zing!) and really, they taste like filmy shit after a couple packs. These tiny ice creams cost mere pennies. Pennies! Note the pattern here: all of these snacks are dirt cheap.

3) Milk-flavoring Powder
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Fuck chocolate milk. Or rather, fuck only chocolate milk. If candy companies can invent a chocolate or strawberry milk powder, surely then there can be a banana, melon, and coffee milk powder as well. This last one is so good?a bit of espresso drenched with sugar and milk?that hot springs will sell them ice cold in small milk bottles outside in changing rooms for a hundred yen (one dollar).

2) King Donut and Mini Pancakes
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?Deliciousness brings on smiles?? Fuck yes, it does. Especially when you can get a donut with a winking cow on it for a quarter. The hotcakes are actually more like the traditional dorayaki red-bean pancake than our American butter-coated flapjacks, since there are two smaller pancakes sandwiching congealed maple syrup. The same Twinkie-questions, however, apply: ?Why don?t they spoil when they?re composed of bread and milk and eggs?? Answer: ?Lots of delicious preservatives.?

1) Fugashi and Kinako Stick (tie)
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Two of the classiest of the classics. The fugashi is a bakery wonder: a batter cut into long blocks, baked twice to a golden brown, and then showered in brown sugar. Its texture, a combination of sponge, air, and flake, is like a cross between a soft piece of sugar toast and a croissant.

Kinako bou, on the other hand, are viscid mochi covered in soybean powder, which might sound disgusting but is actually delicious since it?s not as diabetes-inducingly sweet as powdered sugar, yet possesses the same texture along with a hint of bean. Kinako bou are a cheap version of the more refined kinako mochi that kids eat for the New Year?s holiday in Japan. Best of all, there?s a toothpick included in the package to eat the messy sticks, and if there?s a seal on the toothpick, you get to have another pack free.

Hit the jump for the worst. Be warned?squid is involved (of course).

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THE WORST:

5) Chalk Cigarettes
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We western colonizers like to light up a stogie every once in a while after completely owning someone?s parcel of shit, and our offspring imitate our Darwinian behavior with candy cigarettes made so that they can puff out little powdery bursts of colored smoke. The Japanese are no strangers to lighting up packs a day between bouts of being belittled by the section chief, so why don?t their cigarettes for children emit faux-smoke? I?ll tell you why?they?re not made of foam, they don?t have filters, and they?re just little pieces of chalk in a box, barely flavored with tinges of coffee or green tea. This is not what makes pretending to smoke fun, and it?s for this tragic reason, along with diseases such as lung cancer, that smoking among Japanese youth has been on the decline for the past decade.

4) Ume Jam
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Ume means ?pickled plum? in Japanese; it’s a frequent Japanese foodstuff which transforms the naturally sweet plum into a sour gummy ball. This is a sour plum glutinous extract that is supposed to be swallowed whole, without milk or bread or tea or biscuits (we supposedly have a British reader of this site). The sour jam is actually far worse than the actual sour plums themselves, sold in packs of red, LCL-like liquid which preserve the juiciness of the actual plum. Thus, Ume Jam is like eating a pack of preservatives.

3) Big Katsu and Squid Noodles (tie)
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Tonkatsu, or ?pork cutlet,? is great, and a portable, snack-sized pork katsu sounds even greater for that kid on the go who doesn?t have enough coin to eat a cutlet meal, but still wants to participate in a culinary jubilee. Unfortunately, the Big Katsu is about the size of Fruit Leather and is not made out of any pork, but rather a pork-flavored fish derivative caked in a soggy batter meant to pass off the look of a fried piece of pork.

The Ika Somen, or ?squid noodles,? on the other hand, are not so bad, if you can handle nibbling noodles made entirely out of dried squid run through a paper-shredder. Didn?t think so, but these are actually infinitely more appetizing than the Squid-on-a-Stick, which doesn?t even mask the fact that its cephalopod has been plucked straight out of the sea, fermented in soy sauce, and speared with a woody chopstick.

2) Sakura Radish
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Why would you subject a child to eating vegetables as a snack? Dunked in an extract even more sour than the Ume Jam, the Sakura Daikon is a slab of the giant daikon radish (from the top, discardable portion of the radish), fermented in melted down sour plum, and then given the cute and saccharine packaging normally reserved for Shin-chan merchandise. This might seem perfect with a bowl of rice, but can you imagine eating this while waiting for the bus? This is not the sort of thing one spends his precious allowance on when presented with other options to go along with his bottle of Ramune.

1) Apricot Stick
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So much more fraught with peril than its appealing bou of kinako origin, the anzu or ?apricot? bou sounds like it has the potential to be appetizing. But not when those apricots have been sliced, diced, and dried to look nothing like apricots and more like chopped up shiitake mushrooms. And also not when those dried shiitake mushroom clones are floating around in a brown jelly that looks like burger grease. Supposedly when you freeze these, they?re a lot better, but that?s only the difference between eating and drinking your brown bile.