30. The Convenience Store Pancake

There is nothing “convenient” about The Convenience Store Pancake.

We’ve already seen how Western breakfasts are besmirched by the hands of Japan, but this…

This is equivalent to eating a memory foam pillow but with half the taste. Any flavour this once had is eliminated by a state of anoxia and a Strongman’s helping of sulphur dioxide. Also important–there is no syrup or butter enclosed in this “snack.” You are supposed to eat it in its Paleocene-era form, feigning satisfaction or at least low-level tolerance.

Only your imagination can serve as a palliative agent while eating this Misinterpretation of The West. Think back to more sanguine pancake times–family breakfasts, post-bar brunches, or even that backdoor kegger where a drunk and pimpled nineteen-year-old boy in a legionella-filled kitchen made pancakes for the first time and forgot such ingredients as flour and/or water.

Just do not buy this alimentary betrayal more than once. The depression may never lift.

29. Organized Fruit

This is really unfortunate. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is now a fully treatable disease.

But part of the problem is that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), America’s “bible” of psychiatry, still does not view organizing fruit as a part of a larger illness.

Let us read from the DSM’s current definiton of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

Compulsions as defined by (1) and (2):

(1) repetitive behaviors (e.g., hand washing, ordering, checking, [organizing fruit]) or mental acts (e.g., praying, counting, [organizing fruit], repeating words silently) that the person feels driven to perform in response to an obsession [to draw attention away from otherwise unripe cherries], or according to rules that must be applied rigidly [each cherry must form a mere bead in the grand vision of an abacus]

(2) the behaviors or mental acts are aimed at preventing or reducing distress [i.e. consumers realize pulchritude is not a substitution for taste] or preventing some dreaded event [a wanton bunch of berries left recklessly astir]; however, these behaviors or mental acts either are not connected in a realistic way with what they are designed to neutralize [a sour perversity] or prevent [i.e. people of reasonable intelligence realize that they paid $40 US for symmetry] or are clearly excessive [how much labour was squandered through this aimless enterprise?]

Most insensitively, organizing fruit is not listed here. But I have added my own scientific notes in red to justify (rather seamlessly) its inclusion.

It also appears that this blog classifies as a compulsion. Therefore, the cherry farmers of Japan and I will report back to you after a ten month rest cure and an ambitious trial of paxil.

28. The Canadian

This is Japan at its most perceptive. It has now perfectly compressed Canada’s national identity into a 4cm sandwich cookie.

Yet despite its polite and inoffensive taste, The Canadian it is not about to be the next major player on the world stage.

It could, however, be the next player on the world rink, as The Canadian has a texture uncannily reminiscent of a hockey puck. Alternatively, some may notice a ligneous consistency to this cookie, which is likely a tribute to Canada’s vast woodlands.

Even cleverer is the maple leaf adorned to the packaging, despite the fact that this is a 100% chocolate cookie and there are zero cocoa trees in Canada. This alludes to Canada’s “confused” ideology whereby citizens aren’t really sure what they stand for but will wittingly dress in a clear plastic sock resembling the national flag. It also speaks to Canada’s “cultural mosaic,” where diversity is concentrated within designated pouches of the nation.

But where The Canadian parallel fails is with price. A single bag of The Canadian[s] is available at the local 100 yen shop. This is a tad unfair given the recent success of the Canadian dollar. One bag should now rest at about 101 yen.

A final failure is the omission of a bear or an American from this careful exhibit. If there are two things Canada is known for internationally, it is these.

27. The Pre-Packaged Soft Serve Cone

Japan loves to preserve things. This is why locals add cherry blossoms to everything from ramen (post coming soon) to rice balls in the spring. This is also why, if you move to Japan, you will find yourself living in an uninsullated hospital green apartment from 1821.

But there are some treasures in life that cannot be preserved

• You cannot pour sunshine into a vial
• You cannot lock health into a cabinet
• You cannot buy a one night stand in a box
• You cannot seal your friends into a tube

And most importantly

• You cannot desecrate the soft serve cone, Japan’s lynch pin of hope, by trapping it under an hermetic dome of reconstituted plastic

There, it will suffer under a bitter miasma of re-circulated air. It will respond by sprouting a coat of ice crystals and atrophying its cone base until it is actually softer than the alleged “soft” ice cream itself.

For now, stick with the original, freshly dispensed version. You won’t have a problem finding one in Japan. They are more common in this country than are gas stations, garbage cans, or even people.

26. Bacon and Egg Bread

It’s a sad fact that the Grand Slam Breakfast of the West is still compartmentalized by food groups. This makes extra work for consumers, who must tirelessly fork their way through staunchly demarcated territories of hash-browns, eggs, bacon, and toast.

Luckily, in Japan, this practice has ended. Bacon and eggs are now glued to a single platform of cold, withered bread. This creates extra space on your plate in case you need to be sick.

And since this rapture rests on an unrefrigerated bakery shelf, there is a good chance that you will be sick. Just recall your first month in Japan when your friend was couriered to the hospital, infused with saline, and X-rayed after eating an unrefrigerated tuna rice ball from the bakery chain in question.

Don’t let the kaleidoscopic design lead you astray. Bacon and Egg Bread is still a leading cause of voluntary death in this country. The individual who eats this lethality is surely asking for a quick escape.

25. Fanta “Shake”

What really needs a shake here is the CEO of Fanta.

Why ruin a perfectly good drink by adding a bunch of commands?

When people want a can of pop, they crave instant gratification, not a series of arm exercises, pectoral flexes, and deep thigh lunges. While the lunges may be a slight overstatement, it is true that you are supposed to shake this beverage for about 10 seconds before drinking it.

Then, just when your wrist alights with the flame of your arthritis, you receive a lamentable surprise: what you thought was a nice, carbonated treat is, in reality, an liquid travesty.

Perhaps liquid isn’t the right word. What I really meant was gel. An orange stream of magma will flow unwelcomly into your mouth from the crater that is this can.

You are correct: what you see here is actually JELLO. In a can. This drink (purposely) turns to jelly when you shake it for ten seconds. Fanta Japan, not unlike Starbucks Japan, foresees a market for these types of let-downs.

It is clear that in Japan jelly is the new black.

Banana Genocide: A Commentary

Let us briefly interrupt this list of kitchen harlequinade for an important news flash.

Genocide is at large in Japan. Readers will be shocked to hear this, but it is true: this country is currently disposing of and/or violating an entire race of bananas.

The conflict appears to have an intense neurological motivation rather than a religious or political one. Needless to say, countless bananas are being derided–graded even– on the basis of skin colour. (This apparently started when Belgian ethnologists colonialized Japan and issued identity cards to bananas in the 1920s). Those with green skin are rendered useless and jettisoned from the agricultural scene; those with lighter skin fare even worse.

Medium-toned “chartreuse” bananas are either cast out to die with their green-skinned cohorts or perceived as “near yellow” and shipped off for ruination. Rarely, this borderline breed is dumped in a displacement camp to die alone.

But the worst off are the yellow “level six” bananas. These citizens are individually wrapped in jail of cellophane and marketed to low-end convenience stores in the armpit of Tokyo.

While experts are attempting to address these crimes, we are not where we need to be; the UN still has not labelled this tropical fruit abhorrence a “genocide,” despite an estimated death toll of 200,000 green bananas.

Part of the problem is Tokyo. It continues to aid militia agricultural groups and to destroy forensic evidence of the horror, such as emeraldesque banana peels and their prisons of plastic.

24. Matcha McFlurry

If there ever was a molestation of culture, here it is.

The Matcha McFlurry spells the end of Japan’s traditional tea ceremony days. Once the drink of Zen Buddhists, matcha is now a small-town salve for a certain red-headed clown.

The Japanese are already sick of matcha misuses; the green tea finds its way into everything from marshmallows to toilet paper nowadays–but to sentence it to the jail of the Golden Arches is the final straw. This is corporate colonialism at rock bottom.

Next we’ll be taking the Sacramental Bread at Taco Bell.

It’s time to redraw the boundaries of green tea. It works as a tea, as 1000 years of success has shown us, and maybe as flavouring in the odd traditional Japanese dessert. Never should we find it in a bucolic storm of ice milk further threatened by the dark clouds of oreo.

23. Chocolate Potato Chips

In order to understand the reasoning behind chocolate potato chips, or Pottatcho, as they are cleverly called, let us first recall elementary school math.

Multiplying Integers

positive	x	positive	=	positive
negative	x	positive	=	negative
positive	x	negative	=	negative
negative	x	negative	=	positive

It turns out the rules for multiplying integers are the same rules that govern Japan’s culinary sphere. The person who masters this formula will go on to dominate kitchens across the nation.

The logic behind chocolate potato chips is simple: a positive food multiplied by another positive food equals a positive outcome. Chocolate and chips are both positive, good foods. This formula is fail proof. We’ve already seen this magic formula bring us gems like Almonds and Fish .

It matters little that the so-called “crispy” chips undergo saponification under a mask of year-old chocolate–or that the “mild” chocolate taste advertised here is as potent as the sperm of seven oxen.

What is important is the formula. Good foods plus good foods have a positive result; bad foods plus bad foods are also positive. We must eyelessly proceed through the dark of the night with these integer combinations in hand.

22. Mayonnaize Drops

Most Westerners spend their lives waiting for the day that condiments will be available in a drop-like form.

Through years of transient office jobs, mediocre marriages, and seasonal bouts of sinusitus, Westerners wait drearily for the golden panacea, a mustard-flavoured mint, a ketchup kandy, or better yet, a relish ring-pop.

Fortunately, in Japan, the long wait is over. The Mayonnaize Drop heralds as the promise of a new day.

No longer will people require clumsy accoutrements such as hot dogs or hamburgers to sneak in that taste of sauerkraut.

The stigma of liking condiments as is–in their elemental form–is now over; the sinister curtain has been drawn, the closet door, opened.

We can only hope that the brave Japanese factions that have fought for the Mayonnaize Drop will inspire Westerners to do the same. Radicals may be tried, but it is only through perseverance that the Mayonnaize Drop will make its way to the shelves of our nations.