2 easy ways to "eat like a local" in Japan
Where to find Japanese popular food
I haven’t spent enough time recently in Japan to give people specific recommendations like “go to this restaurant and have this”. But I think I understand the culture well enough to give some general advice on where to look for interesting things as visitors. This is that post.
The first post I wrote here was about folk food, popular food, and art food (terms I made up there by adapting terms about music). I’ll focus on popular food here, which is any kind of food that is intended to appeal to a wider audience so that someone can have a business selling it (please read the post for more nuance).
Something that I tried not to give away in that post is that I often find American popular food to be boring, because I know what to expect, and it’s mostly just trying to deliver what the eater expects. But when you go to a different culture and find the popular food there, it can be an adventure. From experience, I’m thinking of things like Roman pizza or street food in Thailand. I’ve been fascinated by French tacos since I learned about it and would definitely try it the next time I get to go to France1.
So I’m going to suggest 2 places where you can find popular food in Japan that are places you might not have thought of, because these probably aren’t where you look for food in the US2:
Convenience stores
Department store basements
The fact that both of these places have shortened Japanese names (see the section titles below) is a sign that they have some cultural significance in Japan.
Konbini
Konbini is an abbreviation of convenience stores, but it’s basically the only way people refer to them in Japan at this point, and they are ubiquitous in Japanese cities. 7-Eleven might have started in the US, but its Japanese branch bought out the American company because it was doing so much better. Along with 7-Eleven, Lawson and FamilyMart are the giant chains that you find in most of Japan. Many branches are open 24/7/365, and it truly is a wonder of Japanese capitalism3.
Konbini provides sustenance to countless young people, busy people and, really, anyone who needs a bite. Most items are cheap and low margin, and we’re talking about making money through volume. So this is a classic example of popular food, where the seller really needs a lot of people to like the food in order to justify using precious shelf space for it. The remarkable thing is how high the food quality is, with the caveat that the flavors are laser-focused on pleasing Japanese consumers4—because pleasing the audience is what popular food tries to do.
We’re not just talking about the rice balls that are kinda hard to open for the uninitiated, but a whole range of snacks and sweets that are sold across the country.
A lot of these are store brand products, as you can see from the 7-Eleven logo in the video, and they come up with new products every season. It’s an entirely different food culture from what you’d find in convenience stores in the US.
Edit: Apparently
is a thing. They have a podcast/newsletter specifically about konbini.Depachika
Depachika is a widely-used term for the department store basements in Japan, or the food section in such basements. “Depa” is the beginning of "department store" and "chika" (地下) means underground or basement.
As you probably know if you’re in the US, there's a standard layout for American departments stores, where you have the cosmetics on the first floor, women's clothing on the lower floors, etc. Japanese department stores have a pretty similar setup, but one major difference is that the Japanese expect there to be food in the basement.
What makes depachika where you find popular food is that this can be a very high traffic area, because department stores in Japan are often connected to train stations5, and the connections are often at the basements. This makes perfect sense in major cities where the stores could be connected to subways, but even in Okayama—a medium-sized city that is a tad too small to have a subway—the Takashimaya department store is connected to the Okayama Station on the B1 and B2 floors. So you can imagine this is precious real estate, where staying in business means needing a lot of people to buy your food.
So what exactly would you find at a depachika? Layouts vary by store, but most depachikas have at least some high end grocery, including fresh fish (this is Japan), as well as bentos and ready-to-eat side dishes. If you’ve never been to an East Asian bakery, the bakeries might be interesting, with fluffy white breads (shokupan) and all kinds of pastries, some with unusual flavors.
But what usually takes up the most floor space in a depachika is the sweets. The Japanese makes a clear distinction between Japanese sweets (和菓子 wagashi) and Western sweets (洋菓子 yōgashi), and there will be many shops specializing in each of these categories.
Yōgashi would probably have slightly different flavor profiles from what you expect—again, these are targeted for Japanese eaters—but I think you will know what to do with them because most of them look like cakes and pastries from Europe and America. By contrast, you might have trouble figuring out what is even in a wagashi. Unless you have someone helping you, you may just have to try one and see what it’s about. (Scary, I know! But what’s travel without some adventure?) One thing I would stress about wagashi is that they are almost always intended to be enjoyed with green tea.
To end on a concrete recommendation, or maybe just something I really like, kasutera (castella) is an interesting case. It’s a Western-style sponge cake, but it’s been developing in Japan for 400+ years since the Portuguese left something like it in Japan. So it’s a very traditional yōgashi, if that makes sense. It's a simple cake, but really satisfying to have with coffee or tea, and I find that the ones I can get my hands on in the US are usually frozen once for shipping and not quite the same. The last 2 times in Osaka, I got kasutera from a shop called Kurofune (or Quolofune as they write it6) in depachikas, and it was very good.
What I’m listening to now
I started out my newsletter with Natalia Lafourcade and Jorge Drexler, and I was trying to avoid talking about music in Spanish this time. Then this baby arrived in the mail:
Having seen her live, I think Weyes Blood really gets that music is a communal experience7.
I do still like her previous album Titanic Rising better, but I don’t mean that as a knock on the new one because I thought Titanic Rising was the best album I heard in 2019. It’s really hard to top “A Lot’s Gonna Change” for an opening track.
The main trap you have to avoid here is popular food for tourists. This is probably not a big problem in Japan, but it definitely is in Italy. Unless you know for a fact that a place is good, avoid restaurants near big tourist attractions in Rome, Venice, etc.
My understanding is that both of these advices apply to some extent to other East Asian countries, but I’ll need someone with actual local knowledge to back me up on this.
Edit: I did get confirmation for Taiwan. What I wrote here mostly applies there as well, except the traditional snacks don’t do as well in department stores.
Yes, I am suggesting here that there’s some questionable work culture that makes the level of service possible.
Since I mentioned French tacos, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the Japanese 7-Eleven burritos. I haven’t tried one yet, but I know I shouldn’t be expecting what I expect when I hear “burrito".
If you needed any more evidence that the Roman alphabet is a design element rather than readable text in a lot of Japanese culture…Kurofune (literally “black ship”) is the term for foreign ships that arrived in Japan in the pre-modern era, and it’s possible they’re making a historical reference with the unusual spelling, but I can’t confirm it.
This is one of the things that makes music and food similar.