Episode 217: Clotheshorse in Japan: Konbini, Egg Salad, and A Love for Denny’s

Welcome to Clotheshorse, the podcast that is in Japan right now!

I’m your host, Amanda and this is episode 217, recorded in Kyoto, Japan.

I’ll be honest: I had planned on writing and recording this episode last week when I was in the mountains in Hakone, Japan.  But I was just too filled with grief and anger about the election results in the United States. To be clear, I’m still going through the stages of grief right now.  I wake up every few hours throughout the night, and after my brain sort of fully turns itself on, I’m confronted by this sense of fear and despair. It makes it really difficult to go back to sleep.  

If you’re feeling like this right now, know you are not alone.  And I’m doing a lot of thinking about what we do next.  I don’t have the answers yet.  I just know that all of us are an important part of that.  You, me, and everyone we love.

But that’s not what this episode is about.  And while my antics in Japan feel silly and kinda stupid in comparison to everything else in the world, I promised you some Japan episodes. And I think we need rest, relaxation, and a brain break.

So let’s talk about Japan.

What has happened on my trip so far?

Well, I’m still working just about every day.  I wake up at five AM, work for my clients until about noon, then I go out into the world.  When I come back to the hotel at night, I work a little bit and then I go to bed.  I haven’t watched a single movie or television show since I got here. And I’ve read six books so far.  I’ve done a lot of writing and thinking.  I’ve remembered random stories from my life and reflected on them. And of course, I’ve done a lot of exploring.

Within hours of arriving in Tokyo, I got on the wrong train and almost ended up in Yokohama.  It ended up taking me four hours to get from the airport to my hotel, rather than the hour it usually takes.

I have gone to a lot of art museums.  

I took a daily long walk through Ueno Park, which is a massive park that was established in 1873. It’s full of temples, shrines, museums, a big lake, a zoo, lots of great people watching, and many, many birds. At night the crickets are super loud and it’s kinda dreamy to walk around in the warm early evening, listening to the crickets and seeing the warm lights of the shrines.

For a few days, I was up in the mountains, in Hakone, where I saw more art and stayed in a hotel with my own private onsen bath on the balcony overlooking the river.

Next I went to Nagoya, where I met Christine of Lady Hogg Vintage. We took some epic day trips (all via a series of trains) to see art, make fake food, and visit an awesome retro museum way up in the mountains.  

And now I am in Kyoto.

One thing has been a constant of my trip: visiting the convenience store, known as konbini here in Japan.

It’s a good time to tell you that I lowkey feel like I grew up in convenience stores back home.  My mom worked in them for a long time: the overnight shift when she was going to school (and my brother and I would sleep in the car while she worked), and later she went on to manage them. Sometimes she would let us help her stock the milk in the cooler or put out the new shipments of candy.  My first job was in a convenience store, where I rang up cigarettes and gas, made to-go sandwiches (cut my finger on the slicer and had to get stitches), and placed orders every week for grocery and health and beauty aisles.  But as an adult, I don’t spend a lot of time at convenience stores because they just aren’t a part of my life in the same way.

And to be honest: spending all of that time in convenience stores as a kid (and as a first job) left a bad taste in my mouth regarding convenience stores. They have always felt so predatory to me.  The surcharge for convenience is very expensive for necessary items like medicine, diapers, and tampons.  And in a food desert, the ridiculous prices of the grocery items feel  like an extra tax on poor people.  My convenience store job was in Steelton, PA: a formerly thriving steel mill town…seriously, the steel mill ran the entire length of the town…but by the time I started working at a convenience store in the middle of town, only a small portion of the mill was still in use.  The rest of the town was beyond poor now that the best (and only) job in town was gone.  And there was no supermarket. The closest one that I can picture would have been at least a 30 minute bus ride.  And few people could afford a car. So everyone had to get their groceries at Rite Aid, Family Dollar, or the convenience store…which meant they didn’t have access to fresh fruits and vegetables (at least my employer sold bananas) and all of the groceries were super expensive.

So yeah, I guess I have negative feelings about convenience stores.

But here in Japan,  I eat a lot of food from konbini, at least one meal a day. I worry about the plastic waste of take out food, so I’m trying to eat in restaurants more often (I prefer coffee shops, which usually have affordable “set menus,” where you can get an entree with a tiny salad and a coffee for under $10). Still, that is a massive adjustment for me as a person who almost never eats in restaurants back home. In fact, I can afford to come to Japan because I don’t eat out, I don’t drink, I buy most of my groceries at discount grocery outlets, and I do a lot of cooking.  So sometimes I just want to eat in my hotel room while I read a book. And the konbini foods are great for that.  Now, if we were back home and I said I ate at 7-Eleven every day, you would be worried, because a 7-Eleven diet in the United States would be nachos, hot dogs, and chips.  Like omg my blood pressure!

It’s different here in Japan.  And I’m here to tell you that I love konbini food. From the ubiquitous (and TBH beloved) egg salad sandwiches, the rice balls (onigiri), tiny little parfaits, seasonal hot items, noodle bowls, salads, the iced coffee machine, canned highball cocktails…and SO MUCH MORE…you kinda never run out of things to eat at the konbini. Whether you’re in the big city or out in a rural area, it always seems like you can find one. It’s always the first place I go after I check into my hotel.  I pick up an egg salad sandwich, a little dessert, a couple of onigiri to eat when I wake up in the middle of the night and my body is super confused. Ground coffee to use in my travel pour over thing (I get really riled up about coffee cup waste). Rice crackers that are both salty and sweet. 

And sure, the western tourists LOVE konbini. Ask any friend who has been to Japan and they will gush about the sandwiches.  The canned cocktails.  Smoothies and bread filled with mayonnaise, corn, and cheese.  ATMs that accept international debit cards. Fried chicken and little bento boxes.  All of the snacks that feel novel to us back home, like Pocky and Pretz.

But the reality is that the Japanese love their konbini, too.  There are about 56,000 convenience stores in Japan. They have become such an intrinsic part of Japanese life, it’s kinda hard to imagine it without them. The Japanese call them reizoko no kawari (meaning substitute fridges).

Before we understand how convenience stores became such a big deal here, we have to go all the way back to 1920, when Ito-Yokado opened its doors. Ito-Yokado makes all of the department stores and big box stores in the US look like amateur hour.  Because they are a combination of a Target-style big box store and grocery store, but they are also a shopping center. They tend to be located near rail stations, like most department stores here in Japan.  In fact, in the cities, the train stations are often surrounded and connected to several malls, department stores, large food courts, grocery stores, drug stores, and hotels.  After all, the train system here is sophisticated, reliable, and expansive. You can get just about anywhere via train.  It’s also reasonably affordable and comfortable.  I’ve probably taken 50 trains since I arrived here a few weeks ago, from tiny rural trains with just two cars, subways and regional rail lines within the city, and of course, the hyper fast bullet train called the shinkansen. Most people are taking the train most of the time.  So it just makes sense to surround these transportation hubs with shopping.

Anyway, back to Ito-Yokado.  A visit to its website shows the sheer expanse of products and services it offers:

• Elaborate Christmas cakes available for preorder.
• A new collection of takeout food called York Deli.
• A new fashion line called Found Good
• And its own chain of fast food restaurants called Poppo that can be found in every store. The Poppo menu is exciting, from seasonal desserts filled with sweet potatoes to ramen, fried rice, and takoyaki.  Also grape soft serve and the classic green melon ice cream soda.

There are 126 Ito-Yokado stores in Japan, along with 12 in China.  And here’s a fun/interesting fact: rather than making announcements over the loudspeaker, the register staff play instrumental versions of famous songs as a code to the rest of the workers in the store:

• Help! (The Beatles) – Hey! We need more people to work the registers.
• Rhythm of the Rain (The Cascades) – This is to let customers and workers alike know that there is heavy rain outside
• Carmen- Robbery and other criminal activities in the premises.
• Symphony No. 5, 1st. Movement (Beethoven) – Bomb threat.

In early 1970s, Ito-Yokado bought the franchise rights for two very American brands: 7-Eleven and Denny’s.  

Let’s take a minute to talk about Denny’s here in Japan:

First things first, I love Japanese Denny’s.  There’s no Moon Over My Hammy, but it’s a good place to get a cheap and pretty solid meal. They have good salads, a nice omurice, lots of classic japanese coffee shop food.  And also, they have this all you can drink beverage bar full of coffee (iced and hot), teas, and all of the sodas you can imagine. I’m currently in the  midst of a complex love affair with Calpico, the soda that is basically a mixture of yogurt (just a hint of yogurt), lactic acid, and soda water.  It sounds weird, but it’s so refreshing, and YES, it is available on the Denny’s beverage bar in plain and lemon flavor. Also, you order using a tablet at your table and that’s very chill when there is a language barrier.

At first, 7-Eleven was kind of a flop here in Japan.  It just wasn’t appealing to customers, who had plenty of other places to shop and get food. And people weren’t really excited about hot dogs and the other American convenience store offerings.  Nonetheless, Ito-Yokado took an aggressive expansion approach, opening tons of stores in hopes that it would catch on. They sort of forced the issue, I guess.

In 1978, 7-Eleven in Japan tried a new product. Okay, well it wasn’t a new idea but it was certainly new to convenience stores: the introduction of the onigiri, the triangle rice ball wrapped in seaweed.  They are filled with a variety of different ingredients.  My personal favorite is tuna salad (and apparently this is the best seller for the chain) but you can also find them filled with beef, teriyaki chicken, different types of fish and seafood, pickled plum, and fried chicken.  And they are delicious.  A great lunch or snack.  While I’m talking about onigiri, I should mention two things:

• If you live in Austin, TX you should check out Asahi Imports, who has honestly the best onigiri I’ve ever had. And they even have an onigiri hotline where you can text in your orders for pick up. 
• And two, here in Japan, the onigiri are packaged in a clever way where the seaweed is separated from the rice by a thin layer of wax paper-ish film, to prevent the seaweed from getting soggy.  If you follow the number/arrows on the outer packaging, you can open it in a very efficient manner that removes that layer while keeping the seaweed wrapped around the rice. It’s kind of amazing.

Well guess what? The onigiri were a hit.  And today, the average 7-Eleven store in Japan sells about 200 rice balls each day.  Realizing that the Japanese customer was interested in less American food and more Japanese food, the company expanded its offering to sushi, noodles, salads, soups, tonkatsu platters, those irresistible egg salad sandwiches, and more.  The bakery aisle became a big deal. They added hot seasonal offerings. Fried foods.  They also worked out their inventory and product delivery systems so that stores would receive fresh food deliveries every day. And over time, the Japanese learned to love konbini, stopping in to pick up lunch and/or dinner.

In fact, 7-Eleven was doing so well, that in the 1990s, Ito-Yokado actually bought 70% of the  American 7-Eleven, which was on the verge of bankruptcy.  What had begun as an experimental overseas franchise opportunity was now essentially a Japanese company. In 2004, Ito-Yokado established Seven & i Holdings, a massive mega corporation that owns 7-Eleven, the Japanese version of Denny’s (which is no longer a franchise and just a trademark agreement), American convenience store chains like Speedway and Stripes, Tower Records (in Japan), and Japanese department store chains Sogo, Seibu, and Loft (btw Loft has the best stationary section ever).

But 7-Eleven, despite being such a wild success and the biggest convenience store chain in Japan, isn’t the only game in town.  In second place (in terms of number of stores, not in terms of its place in my heart) is Family Mart, known for its excellent blue and green stripe branding (it even sells tube socks with its iconic stripes) and the unique song that plays every time the door opens.  Let’s give it a listen…

Okay, that’s cute and catchy as hell right?

Family Mart has been around since 1973.  It’s usually not my first choice, but it does have some decent desserts and people seem to love its chicken (called Fami-Chicken). Family Mart is known for buying up unsuccessful convenience store chains and folding them into its empire.  It’s also been caught in the past engaging in union busting.  And in 2019, a video emerged of rats hanging out near the sushi section in a Family Mart in Shibuya.

And then there is my personal favorite, Lawson.  Lawson feels intrinsically american from the outside, with its blue and white logo of a vintage milk can and its very western movie font.  And that’s because Lawson began as an American company, too.  The original Mr. J.J. Lawson was a milk farmer from Ohio.  He opened a shop in 1939 in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio to sell his dairy products directly to customers. He was bought out by Consolidated Foods in 1959, who began to open Lawson’s convenience stores around Ohio and western Pennsylvania in the 1960s.  

Consolidated Foods changed its name to Sara Lee in 1985.  And the Lawson stores were sold to another company called Dairy Mart. Dairy Mart promptly renamed the Lawson stores to Dairy Mart.

In 2002 a Canada-based convenience store conglomerate bought Dairy Mart, and most of the stores were renamed Circle K.

But back in the 1970s, Consolidated Foods signed an agreement with Japanese company The Daiei Inc to open Lawson stores in Japan. 

And now there are more than 11,000 Lawson stores in Japan.  And you know what? They are kind of my favorite. In Tokyo and other big cities, Lawson has a spinoff called “Natural Lawson,” with healthier takeout food options and snacks and a whole gluten free aisle. Anthony Bourdain felt that Lawson had the best egg salad sandwiches, calling them “unnaturally fluffy, insanely delicious, incongruously addictive.” And I happen to know that Christine of Lady Hogg Vintage agrees.  I like their fruit options (who doesn’t love a fruit cup that includes persimmon) and salads (I had one with roasted pumpkin just last week). And Lawson stores usually have an aisle of basic clothing and other essentials from Muji. Prior to 2020, Muji had a contract with Family Mart but that was not renewed when it expired. And honestly, I think that’s because Lawson has a fancier feel.

I was trying to rank the konbini this morning, but it felt kind of like an impossible task. So here are my thoughts:

• 7-Eleven: I love the onigiri assortment (more options than the other stores) and I actually prefer their egg salad sandwiches. Also, sometimes they have potato salad sandwiches, which sounds very starchy, but sometimes you just have to eat a potato salad sandwich, okay? I also think 7-Eleven has the best coffee (not in the world, but like in comparison to other konbini chains).
• Family Mart: possibly has the best desserts, like the sweet potato and chestnut parfait that I ate on the long train ride back from Takayama yesterday.
• Lawson: Obviously a big fan of Natural Lawson, where I found some awesome herbal tea that I’m drinking right now, but I also think they have the best fruit and salads.

One last thing before I wrap this little episode from Japan: I recommend reading the book Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata. It’s a short read, but it’s such a great representation of convenience store life here in Japan.