Twentythree

The unexpectedly cutest part of shopping at Kochi’s Thursday Market was seeing some fellow shoppers of the very small variety in action. 

Kochi City, the capital of Kochi Prefecture, has a local custom where shop vendors set up shop on various streets on different days of the week. While the Sunday Market is the biggest in scope and probably the most famous, another version is the Thursday Market, which materializes on–you guessed it–Thursdays, near the Kencho-Mae bus stop in front of Kochi Castle. It’s a place where you can buy locally grown fruits and vegetables from Kochi Prefecture.

On a recent visit, we thought that it might be a bit touristy, but it turned out that there were more locals shopping there than not. Lots of local salarymen also came to buy lunch.

Taking a closer look at the products being sold, we saw plenty of seasonal vegetables, including a variety of the citrus fruits that Kochi is famous for. There were also dried fish, freshly pounded mochi, and even vegetables that we didn’t know the names of. It was fun to poke around to see what local treasures we could find.

We even spotted some so-called “countryside sushi”, made using the unusual vegetables. It’s apparently a local culinary tradition from the mountainous regions of Kochi.

The market was enjoyable enough to browse through on our own, but before long we caught sight of a group of tiny humans. They looked to be either preschoolers or young elementary school students who were walking around with their teachers and buying goods. From what we could see, a few of them were earnestly chatting with the salespeople to make their own purchases. The cuteness was overwhelming!

It now made sense why we had seen some signs next to food products offering special deals just for kids, like these bags of kiwis or mikan for only 100 yen (US$0.63). It was heartwarming to see how how the city was communally helping to raise its children.

Asking around, it seemed like most people who were born and raised in Kochi had experienced this kind of educational field trip during their school days. It sounded like a very ordinary thing that the locals were fully used to, and we wished that other parts of Japan would take note.

So if you’re in Kochi Prefecture for the annual Yakko Welsh Onion Tossing World Championship or to take a boat tour down the Shimanto River, you may want to stop by some of the local street markets while you’re at it. You may just see one of the cutest sights of your whole trip.

Market information
Thursday Market / 木曜市
Address: Kochi-ken, Kochi-shi, Honmachi 5-6, in front of the Kochi Prefectural Government Building
高知県高知市本町 5-6 高知県庁前
Length: About 200 meters (219 yards)
Size: About 65 food stalls
Duration: Held every Thursday except January 1st or 2nd
Hours: Around 6 a.m.-around 2 p.m.
Website

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Senior citizen passes away shortly after being arrested and taken to hospital by police.

With cherry blossom season winding down, last Sunday many people were out at Suimeidai Edohigan no Mori, a park in the Hyogo Prefecture town of Kawanishi that’s famous for its many sakura trees. However, all was not peaceful under the boughs covered in springtime flowers, as at some point a woman in her 40s and an 89-year-old man became embroiled in an argument after the woman took issue with some aspect of the man’s behavior and cautioned him about it.

It’s unclear what exactly set off the disagreement, but at some point, according to witnesses, the man made an unexpected rebuttal by biting the woman’s arm.

The police were called, and when they arrived they found the man calm but claiming he hadn’t bit the woman. He was placed under arrest on suspicion of assault, but as the two officers attempted to lead the man to a squad car, he sat down on the ground. He was then placed on a stretcher and carried to the vehicle, but as the officers placed him in the backseat, they became concerned about his unnaturally pale complexion and saw that he appeared to be slipping out of consciousness. Postponing processing him at the police station, they instead drove him to a nearby hospital and released him into the staff’s care, but he died roughly one hour later.

▼ The park where the incident took place

▼ A CGI reenactment of the events

The man, whose name was not publicly released at the time of the incident, had come from the city of Ikeda in Osaka Prefecture, roughly 30 minutes south of the park via train, apparently by himself. The police say that he was not physically restrained or otherwise handled in a rough manner during his arrest or transport to the hospital. While the unusual circumstances have drawn online snickers to zombie outbreaks depicted in movies and video games, the more likely scenario is that the man was suffering from sort of less fantastical condition that was severely impacting him both mentally and physically, and an investigation into his cause of death is currently ongoing.

Source: Teleasa News via Yahoo! Japan News via Jin, ABC News
Top image: Pakutaso
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We find out if this “Greedy Sandwich” with cherry blossom bread tastes as good as it looks.

Japanese convenience stores have become famous around the globe for all the great things you can find in them, and right now there’s one item everyone is scrambling to try: the Chocolate Sprinkles & Whipped Cream sandwich.

Sold exclusively at 7-Eleven, this new release is the latest in the chain’s big-sized “Greedy Sandwich” line, and ever since it became available on 31 March it’s been a hot topic, selling out at stores and going viral online, with some videos receiving millions of views.

The visuals make this sandwich a total showstopper – not only is it thick, with a generous filling that makes it bulge out at the sides, but it also uses pink cherry blossom bread to complement the spray of colour provided by the chocolate sprinkles.

▼ After a few tries at several stores, we eventually found a 7-Eleven that hadn’t sold out of the sandwich so we could pick one up for a taste test.

Giving the sandwich a satisfying squeeze, we could feel the thickness and softness giving way under our fingers, and we found ourselves mesmerised by its pretty appearance. It kind of resembled fairy bread, a popular children’s party food from New Zealand and Australia, but it was like fairy bread on pink party steroids – instead of scattering sprinkles on a slice of buttered bread, this one scatters them on cream and stuffs it into a sandwich.

▼ Why did parents never think to create fairy bread like this?

It was so good looking it seemed almost a shame to bite into it, but bite into it we did, and the experience turned out to be pillowy soft and incredibly sublime. The slices of bread were moist and supple and the cream was light and airy, allowing the crunchiness of the sprinkles to pop in between all the softness, accentuating the textures.

Despite containing so much cream, it was never too sweet, and the mouthfeel was light with a refreshing aftertaste, making it easy to devour in one sitting. Another surprise was the hero of the sandwich, which we’d initially thought would be those eye-catching sprinkles, but as we ate through it, we discovered the sprinkles were only scattered on the surface.

▼ So in the end, the showstopper turned out to be the elegant and divinely delicious whipped cream.

Of course, the sandwich owes a lot of its wow factor to those colourful sprinkles, but the cream provides a delicious depth of flavour that keeps the fun going, right to the very last mouthful.

It really is a fantastic convenience store find that’s everything we’d hoped it would be, and well priced for what you get, at 213 yen (US$1.33). So if you do manage to come across the colourful sandwich during your travels, we highly recommend trying it, along with the viral 7-Eleven smoothies that taste even better when you drink them the way locals do.

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If you’ve got a frying pan and some aluminum foil, this kurukuru chashu recipe is ready to revolutionize your home cooking.

Whether you’re someone who likes cooking for yourself, don’t have any good restaurants in your neighborhood, or just don’t feel like going out to eat, a bowl of ramen is pretty simple to whip up for yourself. Well…it’s mostly simple.

Ramen noodles and soup stock are easy to find at supermarkets, even if you live outside of Japan, and their long shelf life means you can keep some stocked in your pantry for whenever your cravings hit. What’s not so easy to source, though, is chashu roast pork, which many enthusiasts would say is just as critical to the joy of ramen as the noodles and broth are.

Luckily, it turns out there’s an easy way to make your own chashu, and you don’t even need a huge, restaurant-size chunk of meat to work with, or any specialized cooking equipment other than a frying pan and a lid!

Cluing us in to this is Japanese aluminum foil maker Toyo Aluminum, who’s shared a recipe for “kurukuru (roll-up) chashu” through its official website. As you can probably guess, you will need aluminum foil, and plastic wrap too, plus a handful of basic ingredients, but this still sounds like an easy way to make chashu at home, so today we’re giving it a shot for ourselves.

Ingredients

● Thin-sliced pork loin (400 grams [14.1 ounces])
● Soy sauce (2 tablespoons)
● Cooking sake (2 tablespoons)
● Honey (1 tablespoon)
● Water
● Salt
● Pepper
● Flour
● Cooking oil

Step 1

Start by spreading a sheet of plastic wrap over a cutting board, then lay out half of the strips of pork, slightly overlapping them. Evenly sprinkle them with dashes of salt, pepper, and flour. Picking up the edge of the plastic wrap, tightly roll the pork slices from front to back, then unroll the plastic.

Step 2

Repeat Step 1 with the remaining pork slices, but roll them onto the top of the rolled pork from Step 1, with the first roll’s seam facing downward.

Step 3

You should now have one large mass of meat. Apply a thin layer of cooking oil to a sheet of aluminum foil, then place the meat on top of it. Tightly roll the foil and tie off the ends as shown in the photo below.

Step 4

Apply oil to a frying pan, then place the foil-wrapped meat in it to cook for five minutes, occasionally rotating the cylinder.

Step 5

With the foil-wrapped meat positioned so that the wrapping’s seam is facing upward, add two cups of water to the frying pan. Place a lid on the pan and let the meet cook on medium heat for 15 minutes.

Step 6

Now it’s time to take the meat out of the pan and remove the foil…and also to resist the urge to start chowing down, because we still need to season our chashu. Drain the water from the frying pan, wipe the pan off, and then add the soy sauce, cooking sake, honey, and one tablespoon of water. Heat the mixture in the pan, then add the meat, coating it and letting the sauce simmer until it thickens.

Once the sauce thickens, your kurukuru chashu is ready to eat! Simply slice it into your desired thickness, which should be easy to do since, if everything has gone according to plan, it’ll be tender and juicy.

While the most common way to eat chashu is as a ramen topping, that’s far from the only option, and the delicious flavor here means it’ll work just fine as a main course too, maybe with some white rice to compliment the meaty succulence. This recipe is also incredibly well suited to picnics, potlucks, and other parties, as cutting it into bite-sized pieces turns it into an easy-to-munch-on crowd-pleaser with a flavor that’ll be enjoyed by just about anyone, regardless of whether or not they’re already a Japanese cuisine enthusiast.

And if even this mouthwatering recipe doesn’t have you inspired to make your own chashu, if you happen to be in downtown Tokyo, we know a ramen restaurant that’ll hook you up with a monstrous amount of meat too.

Reference: Toyo Aluminum
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Likely wanderer from Nara Park won’t be going back, but has a new place to live in a hot spring town.

Both the business and academic year start in spring in Japan, so right now is what’s known as the shin seikatsu, or “new lifestyle,” season, as new workers and college students move into new commuting-distance homes to start the next chapter of their lives. However, one new Osaka resident who just moved into a new place isn’t a university freshmen or a new corporate recruit, but a deer.

Last month, a deer was found wandering the streets of Osaka City’s downtown, and decidedly urban, Tsurumi Ward, where it was taken into custody on March 25 after being corralled onto the grounds of a police training facility, as shown in the video below.

This wasn’t the first recent deer sighting in Osaka Prefecture (of which Osaka City is a part). In the weeks leading up to the deer’s capture, deer had been seen in other eastern parts of the prefecture, with subsequent sightings becoming further and further west. But not only does Tsurumi Ward not have any wild deer, there are no known deer populations in the mountains that make up the prefecture’s eastern border, either.

On the other side of that border, though, is Nara Prefecture, which is famous for its herds of wild deer that are allowed to roam freely through Nara Park and its surrounding neighborhoods. So the most likely explanation for why a deer showed up on the streets of Osaka, Japan’s third-largest city, is that it wandered there from Nara, and since Nara Park’s deer are officially designated as living national monuments by the Japanese government, many people assumed that the captured deer would be shipped back to Nara so that it could return to the park.

However, the situation turned out to be more complex. When asked by the media about the prospect of transporting the deer back to Nara Park, Nara governor Makoto Yamashita said that the living national monument status only applies to Nara’s deer while they’re actually inside Nara Park. Once they step outside the park’s grounds, they’re to be treated like any other wild animal, and so Nara Prefecture, or at least its governor, was unenthusiastic about sending the deer back to its probable home.

At the same time, Osaka City doesn’t have a pre-determined protocol for dealing with captured deer, since the city doesn’t ordinarily have any wild deer. Thankfully, the deer captured in Osaka now has a new home, and also a new name: Shika-yan.

▼ Video of Shika-yan’s naming ceremony and new home. The Shika-yan name combines shika, the Japanese word for “deer,” and -yan, a sentence-ending emphasizer used in Osaka and the Kansai region, the name sound like a funny, friendly way of saying “It’s a deer!”

As of Match 27, Shika-yan has been living at Nose Onsen, a hot spring facility in the town of Nose in northern Osaka Prefecture. In addition to hot springs baths and a hotel, Nose Onsen also has a campground, and a part of it has been converted into a habitat for Shika-yan.

Last Friday, Nose Onsen’s owner, Osaka governor Hideyuki Yokoyama (who suggested the Shika-yan name), and Nara governor Makoto Yamashita attended a naming ceremony at the facility. Perhaps feeling a twinge of responsibility for his supposed former constituent, Yamashita brought presents for Shika-yan in the form of a wooden name plate and 200 shika senbei/deer crackers of the type sold by vendors in Nara Park for visitors to feed to the deer. Noting how Shika-yan sauntered over in a visibly familiar manner when the governors offered the snacks, Yokoyama bluntly declared “This deer is from Nara,” to which Yamashita replied “That is definitely a possibility.”

▼ Video of Shika-yan from the Nose Onsen official Instagram account

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Even if it could be conclusively proven that Shika-yan originally came from Nara Park, returning the animal there probably wouldn’t be the best move. Nara Park’s deer population has reached record-high levels, which experts say is causing some of them to leave the park in an attempt to find territory of their own to claim. If that’s what happened with Shika-yan, shipping the deer back to Nara could just result in it leaving again, and it might not be so lucky as to avoid automobile traffic and the myriad other risks of traversing urban areas unaccustomed to wild animals suddenly appearing. “I hope Shika-yan will be loved by everyone forever,” Yokoyama said at the ceremony.

The plan is for any visitor to Nose Onsen, not just those booking overnight camping spaces, to be able to see Shika-yan, but as the finishing touches are still being put on the habitat and the animal is still in a transitionary stage, the new Osaka Prefecture resident’s public debut date is yet to be announced.

Related: Nose Onsen
Source: Yomiuri Shimbun, YouTube/FNNプライムオンライン
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“Sakura saku” literally means “Sakura bloom” but it’s also code for something else. 

Japanese often feels like a deeply poetic language, where even everyday expressions carry layers of imagery and cultural meaning. A beautiful example is the phrase “sakura saku” (“cherry blossoms bloom”). Beyond its literal meaning, it has long been used to signify success, or passing an exam, evoking the image of blossoms opening in spring as a metaphor for achievement and new beginnings.

Due to its short length and codified nature, the phrase first became widespread when it was used in telegrams to notify students that they’d passed their entrance exams, with “sakura ochiru” (“sakura fall“) being the phrase used to signify failure. It still lives on today, and is especially prevalent at this time of year, when the sakura bloom and students await the results of their entrance exams.

▼ Now, KitKat is keeping the poetic tradition alive with its latest limited-edition variety, “Sakura Saku Sakura Flavour“.

KitKat has already positioned itself as the chocolate of choice for exam season, due to the way it sounds like “kitto katsu“, which means “surely win“. With connotations of “surely win” and “sakura will bloom for you” in the name, this release is doubly fortuitous, making it the perfect gift for test takers and sakura lovers this season.

In keeping with the gift-giving theme, the nine KitKats inside each pack come in specially designed packaging. Some have messages like “キット心配ないよ” (“Kitto shinpai nai yo” [“Surely there’ll be no worries”]) and “キット出し切れる!” (“Kitto dashikireru yo” [“You can definitely give it your all!”] on them, while others are left blank for you to write on.

The ones with messages printed on the front have space for you to write a personal message on the back, while the blank ones have the words “Kitto Sakura Saku Yo” (“The blossoms will surely bloom”) on the back.

▼ While the packaging shows careful thought in its design, so does the chocolate inside, which contains beautiful flecks of pink.

This is due to the cherry blossom leaf powder that has been mixed through the white chocolate coating and the crispy wafers within, which are made with cherry blossom-flavored dough and contain pink feuilletine (crepe pieces) for extra sakura flavour.

All these cherry blossom ingredients combine to create an incredibly well-balanced treat, with hints of saltiness from the cherry blossom leaves intermingling with the sweetness of the white chocolate to help draw out the floral aromas, leaving a refreshing, springlike aftertaste on the tongue.

Every ingredient delivers perfect measures of flavour to create one of the best sakura KitKats we’ve ever had. It’s as if Nestlé has fine-tuned its sakura expertise after years of practice, giving us more nuanced flavour than the Sakura Sake variety we previously tried in 2019 and less punchiness than the Sakura Mochi KitKats released in 2020. Now we can’t wait to see what type of sakura KitKats will be coming our way when the cherry blossoms bloom in future years.

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This is one of 7-Eleven Japan’s rarest sweets, but is it worth tracking down?

7-Eleven is an ubiquitous part of Japanese cityscapes, but while you’re never too far from a branch of the convenience store, that doesn’t mean that each location has the exact same snack selection. Some 7-Eleven stores also offer the chain’s 7 Cafe Bakery line of baked goods which are finished off by the staff using the oven in-store, making them extra fresh, warm, and delicious. Even out of the branches with the 7 Cafe Bakery lineup, some are more special than others, and today we’re looking at an incredibly tasty, and even elegant, treat that can only be found at 7-Elevens in Tokyo and two other parts of east Japan.

We don’t usually expect convenience store snack runs to broaden our vocabulary, but that’s what happened with7-Eleven’s Sugar Palmier, a type of pastry that gets its name from being shaped kind of like the top of a palm tree. Palmier aren’t among the staple breads like melon bread or curry bread that you can always expect to find in Japanese supermarkets or chain bakeries. They’re usually the sort of thing you need to go to fancier specialty food stores for, so finding them at a local 7-Eleven, and with their baking finished right there in the store, is a big surprise.

After ordering one at the counter and paying the 220 yen (US$1.40) 7-Eleven prices them at, the staff finished off our palmier in the oven and placed it in a bag for us. We could feel its enticing warmth through the paper, and even after we’d arrived back home for taste-testing, it was still nice and warm.

Visually, it’s very classy, with its heart-like shape and glisten of light reflecting off the sprinkled sugar giving it an air of refinement despite its humble source, especially after we plated it.

Of course, if we stared admiringly at it for too long, it would eventually get cold, so before that happened we took a bite, and were thrilled to learn that 7-Eleven’s palmier tastes every bit as good as it looks! The rich buttery sensation, which has both a stimulating taste and aroma, melts into the sweetness that comes with a tiny touch of crunch from the sugar, making for a harmonious luxury throughout its flavor profile. The texture of the bread itself is excellent and complex. The stint in the oven right before you receive your palmier imparts a pie-like crispness to its outer surface, with a softer fluffiness, similar to a Danish’s, waiting at the center.

The buttery sweetness comes through with lightning quickness thanks to the in-store baking, and the flavor didn’t just fill us with satisfaction, but with happiness.

As of right now, the Sugar Palmier is available only at 7 Cafe Bakery branches in Tokyo and two of its neighboring prefectures, Chiba and Kanagawa, but if you’re in one of those three places, this is definitely worth tracking down.

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