Snack Nation: Japan's obsession with weird and wonderful pocket-money delights

Products in Japanese convenience stores come and go at a bewildering velocity. One day you find the greatest canned coffee of all time and then, a week later, it’s gone forever.

The existence of these products is often so brief they almost completely fail to enter our collective memories or get tangled in the branches of the Internet.

We step into the local convenience store -- or the one right across the street from that one -- and select the latest and oddest products we can find.

The results aren't always pretty, but the write-ups are crucial for capturing the ephemeral nature of Japan’s consumer culture.

The remaining question is why Japanese companies spend so much time and money developing products that are likely to disappear within a few weeks.

Cultural explanations point at the Japanese obsession with “seasonality.” More plausibly, convenience store shelf space is limited and, therefore, highly competitive.

This forces manufacturers to constantly offer something new and attention-grabbing to impress the convenience store higher-ups who make decisions about shelf-space allocation.

Regardless of the reasons, dozens of new products have been introduced into the marketplace just in the time it took to read this introduction. We’d better get tasting ...

Canned teas

Canned coffee still stands as one of Japan’s lasting contributions to human civilization.

Yet at this point, with the market so saturated by hundreds of concoctions available in every convenience store and vending machine across the land, Japanese manufacturers are at a loss over what to put in those miniature cans next.

The future, for now at least, seems to be tea.

Fuyu no Horoniga Latte

Coca-Cola and Kirin battle it out for the future of tea in tiny cans. This is the former's Fuyu no Horoniga Latte.

Kirin’s Gogo no Koucha (“Afternoon Tea”) line made the first move with its Espresso Tea series. Although the word “espresso” seemed to suggest a dense and thick portion of tea, packed to the brim with bitterness and caffeine jolt, the selections have until now been unusually sweet and milky.

Kirin, however, must have felt like the cold winter weather warranted the right time for a correction to the flawed formula, and so we get the new ¥120 Fuyu no Horoniga Latte -- a name meaning, “‘A slight bitterness for winter latte.”

The drink lowers the sweetness to get one step closer to the “espresso” part of “espresso tea.”

That being said, it’s still really, really sweet. And really, really creamy. In fact, the tea only works in winter if you want your tongue coated with a thin layer of dairy.

In summer, drinking this sort of thing would require a whole liter of water afterwards to wash it down.

Overall Fuyu no Horoniga Latte is a success -- easily the best of the Espresso Teas so far. Too bad it’s likely to disappear once spring is on the horizon.

Ayataka Maccha Latte

Ayataka Maccha Latte -- Coca-Cola's foray into the vast green tea market.

Since the Japanese firm Kirin was able to engineer English-style tea into small coffee cans, American company Coca-Cola is, ironically, the one to attempt similar things with green tea.

Not that you’d know the Ayataka line of green teas is from Coca-Cola. The can for its Maccha Latte (¥120) is covered so completely in kanji characters that you’d need a PhD in Japanese Literature to grasp its full verbose glory.

Generally speaking, Maccha is the thickest and frothiest of all green teas and, based on Starbucks and other coffee chains’ versions, works extremely well in the latte format.

Yet the Ayataka Maccha Latte has a much thinner flavor than you would expect -- especially when compared to Kirin Fuyu no Horoniga Latte. It also suffers from being intensely sweet and having out-of-place flowery notes.

The overall effect is pleasant but not particularly ... masculine. Women seem the best candidates to enjoy Ayakata Maccha Latte, but they’re usually not the gender you see quaffing down those little cans on the morning commute.