Oct 28th 2015 | These Snacks Are Nostalgic if You're Japanese
This month's shipment was a box containing six items. This shipment will likely arrive around the mid-November. The contents featured a smorgasbord of old school style Japanese snacks called "dagashi," traditional confectioneries for children who saved their pennies. Also, wondering what "Taro" means? It's literally just an old name. Old school name, old school snacks!
Brown Sugar Fu-Bo
I love chewing these. Fu is basically fried wheat, and "bo" means stick. That's right. It's a big stick of fried wheat, flavor blasted with brown sugar. The outside gives a satisfying crispy crunch, while the inside has a fun fluffy and sweet cotton candy like texture. It almost doesn't get more traditional than this.
Toumorokoshi Dagashi
Toumorokoshi is corn in Japanese, and these are crispy salty corn rings. Corn on the cob is actually another famous traditional matsuri (festival) food. Now you can roll around without the cob. Now that I really look at these they're more like corn cylinders actually. They're also really thick!
Kyabetsu Taro
Kyabetsu is Japanese for "cabbage," so you can probably guess what these are. That's right. Grape soda and ramune flavored crisps. There is a fizzle explosion with every crunchy bite. Ok, they're cabbage flavor, delicious savory cabbage. Probably not a flavor the West is used to seeing!
Kabayaki
Unagi, Japanese for eel, is a delicacy in Japan. I once paid well over $60 for a plate of unagi and rice in Izu, so the prices can get quite high. This sticky sweet and savory unagi snack packs all the punch of traditional unagi into a travel-sized candy form. They are just drenched in unagi sauce. I absolutely love these, and can often be seen grabbing whole handfuls on my way out of the local Dagashi chain.
Choco Taro
More Taro! This chocolate and peanut covered corn wafer is a departure from the other more savory and salty snacks featured in this box. I couldn't get Brienne out of the picture, so she makes a cameo.
Don Don Yaki
Don Don Yaki is a famous festival/matsuri food made out of okonomiyaki on a stick. These pack all that salty umami flavor and tradition into little bite-sized crackers. The matsuri image is really strong in this one. The package features yukatas and traditional Japanese drums called taiko.
Besides Fallout 4 and working, things have been pretty quiet for me. The school year is almost over, so I'll probably be taking a trip to my girlfriend's home town in Ookayama. As I'm writing this, I'm sitting in a studio doing a modeling job for Grind magazine. The complimentary food spread doesn't include much candy though.
This is the 5th or 6th job I've done for the fall season. I recently spent time shooting in Hachijojima as well. The shots came out quite nice I think!
For nostalgic purposes got a GameBoy, but we've had no time to play and the only thing we've done with it is take yet another baby photo. Besides caring for him, spent my time arranging businessy stuff. I guess we became adults.
