I quickly find out that most of the products are labeled in Japanese writing only - maybe one in four or five articles has at least some English description on it, but in most cases limited to less than five words. The dictionary doesn't help because it is sorted by pronunciation - and how would I know how to pronounce Japanese writing (especially the Chinese-style Kanji)?
For example, "Hand soap" were the only two English words on a bottle of liquid soap (or so I thought) which I bought. The bottle was full of Japanese writing which (probably) contained a more detailed description of the product. At home, it turned out that the soap wasn't liquid as I had guessed by the bottle's appearance, but foamy. (at least it was soap!) The situation is even worse in the shampoo department, because for each brand, they place two different bottles (shampoo and conditioner) next to each other. For the ones that have English writing it is easy to figure out which is the right one to buy...
On some shelves, there is no English description whatsoever on any of the products, and I also can't figure out what it is by looking at the products or their packaging. One shelf is just white stuff in different forms and different textures. For some shelves, I have a guess which I think might be accurate - the white stuff might be tofu - but unless I learn how to type Japanese characters or find a free on-line OCR tool that can work on digital images, I have no easy way of validating my guesses.
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| The shelf containing white stuff |
So if you're looking for something specific, shopping takes a really long time. For example, I wanted to buy cereals, low-fat milk and low-fat yogurt for breakfast. I was lucky to find some imported cereals, and as the packaging was transparent it was quite easy to figure out what was in it. Milk was fairly easy to find, too - but how to figure out which of the different types is regular milk, low-fat milk, and non-fat milk? No English description on any of the milk boxes, of course. There are some percentages given on the back of each box, but I haven't yet figured out what they mean. Certainly there is no milk with 8.7% fat, so that's not an option. There is also a list of the calories, protein, fat and carbohydrates the product contains. But which of the three numbers is protein, or fat, or carbohydrates? Well, I think I figured it out after comparing several different types, and bought one with 1% fat. Fair enough. Finally, non-flavored low-fat yogurt. Flavored yogurt looks a lot like the flavored yogurt you can buy in Germany, so I started looking in the vicinity. I found some containers that might have been curd or yogurt, but there were some images on the containers that were more typical for yogurt. So then I only had to figure out again which was regular and which low-fat. So finally, I had breakfast covered. Now imagine that there were many more items on my shopping list...
But well, it is also a lot of fun because I like to visit grocery stores in foreign countries, and Japan is no exception - just a little more time-consuming than other countries...
I also like to experiment and try stuff I have never tasted before (including stuff where I don't even know what it actually is). And for this, there is ample opportunity here.
For example, the Japanese sweets and snacks. Some look very strange. Some look similar to western stuff, but taste entirely different. Many taste different from what I would have expected from the pictures on the packaging. But I think I will be able to fill more than one blog post with strange sweets and snacks, so I'll write more of that later.
Another thing I noticed is that there is only soft bread, mostly toast. Among all the toast, I found some bread that looked like German brown bread. But when I touched it, it was as soft as all the other types of bread available.
As you would expect, there is lots of fish: fresh, packaged, processed into take-away food (Sushi, anyone?), frozen, in cans, and so on. I'm not really an expert on fish, but there is not only lots of fish, but also lots of different types of fish. I wouldn't be able to name most of them...
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| Fish... |
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| Fresh fish... |
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| ... and strange-looking fish |
Yet another thing I noticed is that there is lots of convenience food - or at least I think that's what many of the shelves contain - and freshly made take-away food. I have started trying all that fried stuff you see in the image below. I actually came upon one that tasted like Rösti - very nice surprise!
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| Take-away food |
