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Plus, an exclusive bag of snacks to sprinkle on ramen, inspired by the iconic instant noodles.

Japanese convenience stores are always coming up with exciting new ways to make hot food more interesting, and 7-Eleven is doing that right now with a brand new fried chicken inspired by the flavour of a beloved mini cup of tonkotsu ramen.

Called “Okashina Chicken (Butamen Tonkotsu Flavour)” this new product has been created in collaboration with Oyatsu Company’s long-running Butamen mini cup ramen brand.

▼ Butamen (ブタメン) literally translates as “Pig Noodle“.

Butamen is a long-selling small cup ramen that first appeared in Japan in 1993. Its tonkotsu flavour, based on the rich pork-bone broth associated with Japanese ramen, proved to be particularly popular, turning Butamen into one of Oyatsu Company’s best-known products.

▼ Butamen comes in many flavours, but tonkotsu is the most popular.

Now, that nostalgic ramen flavour has been turned into a hot snack, with 7-Eleven’s new Okashina Chicken (Butamen Tonkotsu Flavour).

▼ The Okashina Chicken is priced at 198.72 yen (US$1.25) and comes in cute Butamen paper packaging.

“Okashina” translates as “Strange”, and that’s an apt description for this piece of fried chicken as it looks more like a fried doughnut. The unusual doughnut-like ring shape, complete with a hole in the middle, makes it stand out from other products in the hot food display at the counter.

▼ This promo image highlights the candy look of the chicken with a blurb at the top that reads: “Is this a sweet? No, it’s fried chicken!”

Made with chicken breast, the snack has been designed to balance the savoury Butamen-inspired tonkotsu flavour with a crispy coating. Biting into the crunchy fried exterior is said to deliver the familiar rich and savoury flavour of Butamen.

The playful look of the product is all part of the appeal, with 7-Eleven describing it as the sort of food that’s likely to catch people’s attention and inspire photos for social media.

For many locals, this is an unprecedented new way to enjoy the ramen they’ve grown up eating, and 7-Eleven is amping up excitement for the new release with another surprising Butamen product.

▼ Butamen Roast Pork-Style Snack (Pork & Garlic Flavour)

Priced at 140 yen, this limited-edition snack is inspired by the toppings you might add to a bowl of ramen, with a light, crispy texture and a rich pork-and-garlic flavour. It’s designed to be eaten on its own, but Oyatsu Company also recommends crumbling it over a cup of Butamen to give the ramen a roast-pork-style topping. The snack starts out crispy before gradually melting in the mouth, adding another texture to the experience.

▼ Enjoy the ブタメンパラダイス (Butamen Paradise)

Both products will be available at participating 7-Eleven stores nationwide, with the snack going on sale from 10 August and the fried chicken on 11 August.

Source, images: Press release
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Famous Japanese fruit appears in summer to remind us that autumn isn’t too far away.

Japan might still be in the throes of a sweltering hot summer, but Starbucks Japan is already looking ahead to autumn with two new drinks starring one of next season’s most beloved fruits: Kyoho grapes.

Designed to give customers an early taste of autumn as a reprieve from summer, the new beverages are said to have a rich aroma, juicy fruitiness and distinctive depth of flavour. Each one offers a different take on the popular Japanese grape variety, with the Houjun (“Rich”) Kyoho Frozen Tea combining chunks of Kyoho with refreshing black tea, while the Kyoho Chillax Soda pairs juicy grape pieces with sparkling soda.

▼ Houjun Kyoho Frozen Tea (Tall only, 668 yen [US$4.18] for takeout; 680 yen for dine-in)

This sophisticated frozen tea has an aromatic Kyoho base reminiscent of fully ripened grapes, with black tea adding body and a gentle astringency to the mix. A hint of cassis flavour is added as a subtle finishing touch, leaving a lingering fruity aftertaste.

With chunks of jiggly Kyoho grape jelly and generous pieces of real grape in the base, the drink reveals an increasingly fruity character as you sip your way through it. The sweetness is kept deliberately subdued to highlight the flavour of the ingredients, keeping the finish clean and light despite the richness.

▼ Kyoho Chillax Soda (Tall through to Venti, 579-680 yen)

Starbucks’ “Chillax Soda” series is known for combining fruit flavours with a specially developed “green citrus” syrup to create a delicious and refreshing carbonated drink. This new variety adds juicy pieces of Kyoho grape and Kyoho grape jelly for a fun textural contrast to the effervescent beverage.

For many people in Japan, the flavour and aroma of Kyoho grape is a harbinger of autumn, so these new drinks are a great reminder that despite the summer heat, the cooler days of autumn are just around the corner. Whether you’re still in the mood to enjoy summer or ready to start welcoming autumn, these drinks bridge the gap between seasons in a very delicious way, and they can be purchased at Starbucks stores around Japan for a limited time from 17 August.

Source, images: Press release
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Our crane game novice heads to Benex for a training day with the Assist Crew.

We’re in the middle of a golden age of crane games in Japan. Though traditional video games continue to have a diminished presence at game centers, statistics show that the crane game industry more than doubled between 2013 and 2024, growing by 120 percent in that time frame.

A lot of this is thanks to the diverse array of prizes that modern crane games offer. Plushies and figures of popular characters remain some of the most sought-after items, thanks to Japan’s multi-generational fandom population where everyone from little kids to mature adults has a series or two that they’re fond of. Today’s crane games are also often stocked with candies, chocolates, and other snack foods, and even practical things like cleaning supplies and other sundry household goods, all waiting to be won by players willing to part with 100 yen (approximately US$0.65) per chance.

▼ A crane game with electric water kettles as the prize…

▼ …and another with high-end facial skin care packs.

With crane games a bigger deal than ever, they’ve been catching the eye of our Japanese reporter Natsuno Futon more and more. There’s just one problem though…well, actually two, which is that Natsuno doesn’t have the luck or skill to consistently win at crane games.

The luck part we can’t help her with, since the blessings of Japan’s get-idol-concert-tickets shrine don’t transfer to crane games, as far as we can tell. There is a path, though, for Natsuno to improve her crane game technique, and that path led her to Benex.

▼ Benex’s Kawasaki branch has 387 crane games.

Benex is a chain of all-crane game arcades, with five branches in Tokyo’s neighboring prefectures of Kanagawa, Chiba, and Saitama. The chain wisely realizes that if players aren’t winning, they’ll stop playing, and so it takes a couple of extra steps to up visitors’ chances of going home with a prize. For example, at the Benex that Natsuno visited in the city of Kawasaki (just south of Tokyo), they have a dedicated free-to-play crane game that visitors can use for practice.

But there are skills in life that are hard to acquire though self-taught methods, so Benex also has a team of employees designated as the “Assist Crew,” who’ll give you personal, on-the-spot advice as you try to win prizes from the machines.

While it’s common for arcades in Japan to have their staff reposition crane game items upon request from customers, the Assist Crew goes a few steps beyond that, as they’ll aid you in forming specialized strategies such as figuring out where the center of gravity is for a specific item, rather than just leaving you to flail around on your own after they position the prize.

So with Benex’s extra level of support, how much could our relatively inexperienced Natsuno win with a budget of 5,000 yen? There was only one way to find out, so she filled a cup with coins and got to playing.

With her Assist Staff assistant by her side, Natsuno started off with what’s called a hashiwatashi, or “bridge-passing,” type of machine, with boxes of sweet potato snacks.

Here you need to use the claw to move the prize around so that it falls between the slats of the rack it’s resting on top of. Obviously, it helps to start off with the staff positioning it such that you won’t need to shift things around too much to get it to drop.

But what was really helpful was the Assist Crew’s insight into exactly how the prize’s shape and distribution of weight was going to make it swing and sway depending on where Natsuno grabbed it with the claw.

Armed with this knowledge, she was able to win the box of sweets in just three tries!

Sticking with the same type of machine, Natsuno next decided to try for one of those facial packs she’d had her eye on since entering the building.

This time, the Assist Crew even demonstrated the best grabbing point for her, with the employee grabbing the pack on their very first try. When it was Natsuno’s turn, she couldn’t quite match that performance, but with repositioning and advice between tries, she won the prize on attempt number five.

With someone coaching her step by step, Natsuno began to see winning the prizes not as a purely luck-based game of chance, but something where she could influence the odds through skillful strategy. Filled with a new sense of confidence and fun, next she decided to go for a big Monchichi plushie that was waiting inside a conventional claw-type crane game.

This turned out to be tougher (the staff had told her that the hashiwatashi-type machines are generally the easiest to win at).

But again, with the Assist Crew helping her fine-tune her approach…

…Natsuno won her Monchichi in 10 tries. That still works out to just 1,000 yen, which would be a really good bargain for something this size if you were buying it at a regular store.

Of course, as we’ve covered before, crane games are not vending machines, and there’s never any guarantee of winning a prize (well, almost never). Try as she might, Natsuno couldn’t grab the lucky bag from this hook-type machine, and since she didn’t seem to be getting much closer, even with the Assist Crew’s assistance, after a few tries she decided to move on to different machines, so as not to blow her whole budget just to come up empty-handed.

So instead, she focused her newly developed talents on the machines containing things like cocoa milk drink powder…

…somen noodles…

…and toilet paper.

So what was her total haul?

● 1 big Monchichi plushie
● 1 crate of sweet potato chips
● 1 Kiku Masamune facial skincare pack
● 1 crate of soup pasta
● 1 12-roll pack of toilet paper
● 1 pack of Milk Make cocoa drink powder
● 1 bag of croissants

Considering that she was starting from zero in terms of specialized knowledge or techniques, Natsuno is very happy with what she came home with from her 5,000-yen experiment. Really, there’s just one problem, and it has to do with her Monchichi.

As adorable as it is, Natsuno has two young daughters, so she’s keeping the Monchichi hidden until she’s got another similarly sized plushie, so that each of the kids can get a present from Mom. So maybe she’ll be back at the arcade soon to try for another one…

…and also maybe to get one of those fireworks packs she wanted too.

Location information
Benex (Kawasaki branch) / ベネクス（川崎店）
Address: Kanagawa-ken, Kawasaki-shi, Kawasaki-ku, Kokkan-dori 4-8-3
住所　神奈川県川崎市川崎区鋼管通4丁目8-3
Open 10 a.m.-midnight (weekdays), 9 a.m.-midnight (weekends, holidays)
Website

Related: Benex location list
Photos ©SoraNews24
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Hard times and hard drinking don’t mix.

Of course, there’s never a good time to experience a 7.1 magnitude earthquake, but late July and early August is a particularly bad season for it. The addition of frequent typhoons and sweltering heatwaves not only hinder search and rescue efforts, but also make a hard situation exponentially harder for those who have had to evacuate their air-conditioned homes.

You could hardly blame anyone in Kumamoto for uttering the words, “I could sure use a drink” in this situation, but the Kumamoto Prefectural Police are asking everyone to think twice before cracking open that bottle. On 5 August, they issued a request on Twitter explaining that drinking is fine, but getting excessively drunk raises the risk of requiring police or medical assistance which would be better off directed at the disaster response.

Upon reading that warning, it would be reasonable to assume that the bleakness of the situation is driving a lot of victims to drink in order to escape from reality for a bit. However, Kumamoto Police later told media that the number of drunk-in-public, fighting, and alcohol poisoning incidents is more or less the same as it was before the earthquake.

It should be noted here that Kumamoto has a reputation as being a land of hard drinkers. The region is considered to have a very high number of experts in both the production and consumption of the distilled beverage shochu. They even invented a special cup just for drinking it called a sorakyu, which is shaped like a cone so that you can’t put it down until you finish drinking everything in it.

▼ Mr. Sato with a 2.7-liter bottle of shochu that cost about 1,200 yen (US$7.60) and has 20% alcohol.

So, when the police are telling people there to drink less, they actually mean to drink less than usual rather than not drinking more due to despair over the disaster. In the first week since the earthquake struck on 28 July, police received 27 calls due to public drunkenness, which was par for the course in the downtown areas of Kumamoto City.

A lot of online comments from people who live in the area pointed out that the downtown areas were largely spared from the destruction seen in other parts, which is why things seem to be unchanged. Other comments expressed mixed feelings over whether people there should indulge in alcohol at a time like this.

“The downtown areas weren’t affected very much by the earthquake, so it’s probably business as usual there.”
“I visited Kumamoto before the earthquake and was surprised how many people were out drinking at night, even on weekdays.”
“That’s just their way of life down there.”
“They should just drink at home. But it’s probably a dump, which is why they go out.”
“That’s basically back-to-back major earthquakes. I can’t blame them for wanting a drink.”
“If you were forced to sleep on a gymnasium floor with no AC, you’d feel the same way.”
“Leave the drunks alone. They’re still less of a nuisance than smokers.”
“They definitely have good reason to drink, but this is no time to cause trouble for others.”

The fact that most public drunkenness incidents are occurring in relatively unscathed parts of Kumamoto doesn’t change the fact that people requiring public services to be called in are taking them away from areas that really do need it.

The police there aren’t even telling people to stop drinking altogether, just not to get completely sloshed. So, hopefully, people there, in an act of solidarity during this time of need, can keep the sorakyu on the shelf while the initial relief effort is still underway. Actually, for Super Volunteer Haruo Obata, who’s in the area now and quit drinking himself a few years back, this might be a perfect volunteer job for him to tackle.

Source: J-Cast News, My Game News Flash, Tanoshi Osake
Images: Pakutaso, ©SoraNews24
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Packets of curry you can store and eat at room temperature could be the answer to our prayers for portable, smell-safe curry.

Curry and rice is always a winning combination, but the road to victory can be a difficult one when you’re packing a lunch to take with when you’re heading out for the day. Curry rice might seem like it’d work great for a home-made bento boxed lunch, since it’s a dish you can eat out of a single container with just a spoon, but transporting curry comes with the risks of the roux, or its aroma, leaking out inside your bag, car, or elsewhere before you make it to lunchtime.

But it looks like we might have found a solution to this problem thanks to Miyajima Shoyu Co., a Tokyo-based maker of soy sauce and other condiments. Miyajima offers something they call the Hitokuchi Series, and it includes packets of ready-to-eat curry!

In addition to Hitokuchi Curry, there’s also Hitokuchi Stew and Hitokuchi Hayashi, packets of cream stew and hayashi rice sauce (similar to a tomato-based demi-glace sauce). For our taste test, we opted for a combo bundle with a total of 10 packets so that we could try all three.

▼ Hitokuchi Curry (yellow), Stew (white), and Hayashi (red)

The packets can be stored at room temperature and eaten without reheating, and they have a shelf life of over one year, so keeping a stock in your pantry, or carrying a few with you when travelling or camping, are viable options. The packets are easy to open without getting your hands messy, and the sufficiently thick consistency of the sauces means that they don’t come dribbling out and spilling in places you don’t want them to. That thickness also makes it easy to regulate the speed at which you squeeze them out, so there’s no worry of accidentally overflowing your plate or bento box because you put too much on your rice too quickly.

▼ Left to right: curry, stew, and hayashi

So how do they taste? Very nice, across the board. The curry is on the mild side, but Japanese curry is more about the overall combination of spices than just simple spiciness. Hitokuchi Curry fits with the familiar expectations for Japanese curry, and it’s a flavor that a wide range of people will be able to enjoy, and it was tasty even at room temperature.

The Hitokuchi Hayashi had a surprising amount of tomato tang to its flavor profile, but still balanced with enough sweetness to keep from feeling harsh, though it had the most impactful flavor of the three Hitokuchi siblings. Finally, the Hitokuchi Stew was satisfyingly creamy. We were a little worried about eating cream stew with rice, as it’s not a common combination in Japanese cooking, but it turned out that they can play nicely together, though we do have to admit that it felt a little unusual eating stew at room temperature since it’s usually served piping hot. But yeah, if the question is “Do they taste good?”, the Hitokuchi series goes three for three.

So as long as you’ve got a bento box of rice and a single Hitokuchi Curry packet, are you all set for lunch? Probably not. For one thing, each packet only contains 30 grams (about one ounce). Considering that Hitokuchi literally translates to “a single bite,” that modest quantity doesn’t mean that Hitokuchi Curry is falsely advertised, but it does mean that a single packet probably isn’t going to be enough for the amount of rice one would usually put in their bento. One packet is enough if you’re looking for a changeup in flavor as you finish off the last few mouthfuls of rice, but if you want enough curry to enjoy for the entire meal, you’re probably going to need three packets.

▼ This does, though, open up possibilities like the triple-temptation curry stew hayashi rice we made for ourselves.

On the other hand, one Hitokuchi packet is enough if you’re spreading it on some toast, which we can confirm is a tasty alternative.

The other thing to be aware of is that unlike some kinds of instant curry that toss in a few slices of vegetables or pieces of meat, the Hitokuchi series is strictly roux/sauce, so if there are any other toppings you want, you’re going to have to provide/procure them separately.

That said, in terms of what it promises to be, a mouthful of curry sauce in a packet, Hitokuchi Curry works very well. We found our curry/stew/hayashi bundle on Amazon Japan here for 1,340 yen, but if you’re all about the curry, a 10-pack of Hitokuchi Curry packets is also available here for 795 yen.

Photos ©SoraNews24
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