Beer and Sake Culture in Japan
Hello again from J-List! I’ve made the hop from San Diego to Japan again. Just as I finally get over my jetlag, it’s time to start it again!
One fun aspect to living in Japan is its drinking culture, which I became a lifelong fan of when I visited my first izakaya back in 1991. Drinking of alcohol in a formal setting — for those who don’t drink or who are driving, non-alcoholic drinks like oolong tea are substituted — can be an important part of life in Japan, serving as a social bond between friends, coworkers and other members of organizations. There’s even a word for the special kind of interchange of ideas that occurs over beers after work: nomunication, made from nomu (to drink) and communication. One reason imbibing with others in a group is a good social glue in Japan is that you’re usually pouring for each other out of bottles — pouring one’s own drink is mildly taboo — which encourages goodwill and happy times. Also, there’s a convenient social rule that if you drink too much and make a minor fool of yourself, it’s always forgiven thanks to the all-purpose Japanese mantra sho ga nai (“it can’t be helped”).
Just as there’s a category of old-timey treats from the Showa Period, there’s a special category of snacks made to be consumed with beer and sake called otsumami, which encompasses everything from those persimmon seed-shaped spicy rice crackers with peanuts (Kakipea) to dried, shredded ika (squid) which tastes better the longer you live in Japan. There’s almost no end to the variety of these snacks, and every convenience store sports a well-stocked otsumami selection. Some of these snacks are relatively well-known outside Japan, like the edamame soybeans that they sell at Costco in San Diego, while others are more rare, like chi-tara, strips of cheese with dried fish to make it chewy and wonderful. A few weeks ago I was having a glass of wine with Mrs. J-List and she pulled out a bag of snacks she’d bought that day, offering some to me. Unfortunately it was one of my least favorite foods in the world: tiny dried anchovies, which she proceeded to eat eat like Cheetos.
If you’d like to try Japanese snacks that go great with beer and sake (sans the dried anchovies), we’ve got a new otsumami snack pack, handpicked by me, on the site. Give it a try and tell us how you like it!
Great news! We’ve gotten in all the new anime magazines, from Megami Magazine to Dengeki G’s Comic, all loaded with free stuff for fans in the form of posters and other cool stuff, and tons of awesome visual’s inside. It’s fun to follow the newest shows and collect these great magazines from Japan. Browse them all here!
