There are many reasons to like Japan. Extremely good service at every restaurant you visit, complete with a steaming hot towel handed to you as you sit down. Trucks that warn you they’re backing up by playing the Disneyland Main Street Electrical Parade song. Walking behind a Seven-Eleven and finding a beautiful hundred-year-old Buddhist temple. Japan is also home to some amazing desserts, and if you visit you’ll probably discover some new taste treats. Japan’s dessert world can be divided into two groups: 和菓子 wagashi, Japanese sweets such as taiyaki (a fish-shaped pastry common in anime) or kompeito star candy; and 洋菓子 yohgashi or Western sweets, a word which covers everything from German baumkuchen cakes to Belgian waffles to custard-filled cream puffs, which naturally come in Rilakkuma and Totoro-shaped versions. Japan’s world of Western sweets includes an amazing sponge cake from Nagasaki called Castella with about 500 years of history behind it, as well as a vast world of patissier cakes sold at high-end shops inside Tokyo Station. But the king of all Japanese desserts is an egg custard/flan pudding with caramel sauce the Japanese call purin (pudding), which is extremely popular.
One theme I write a lot about is how there’s exactly one “correct” way to do things in Japan — a correct way for students to sit at their desk while in school, a specific stroke order that every kanji character must be written in, and so on. There’s even exactly one correct way to hold chopsticks, though my family often comments that my son holds his chopsticks in an “odd” way, and when he got a girlfriend, there was real discussion about how he should hide his strange chopstick holding method from her to avoid embarrassment. I came face-to-face with Japan’s “universal correctness” when the time came to get my Japanese driver’s license, which required me to drive a special course while checking dozens of specific points in the exact order, which was basically like learning to play a level of Mario Bros. while blindfolded. Perhaps the symbol of doing things the “proper” way in Japan is 正座 seiza, lit. “proper sitting,” which is how you sit when doing martial arts, tea ceremony and so on.
While J-List customers are browsing our our awesome stock of Japanese snacks for the final days of our Flash Sale we’re getting ready for a road trip to Phoenix! The Phoenix Comicon is a great show with great fans, and we’ll have tons of stuff for everyone. Make sure you come to our eroge and visual novel panel on Friday at 10 pm!
