Quirks 67-69

67. You can buy lucky bags.

No, not fun bags, but lucky bags. Shops in Japan are closed for New Year’s day and just about all of them will open up for business on the second or third day of the year with a huge discount sale and limited numbers of lucky bags.

I guess it’s a bit like the Boxing Day sales in Australia or the Black Friday sales in the US, except as far as I know, Japan is the only place that has lucky bags.

In lucky bags you’ll find an assortment of things (sometimes stock that the store just wants to get rid of) from clothes to food and the bags are sold at a fraction of what the goods inside would cost to individually buy. The catch is that with most lucky bags you can’t actually see what is inside them as they are sealed.

Department stores always have lucky bags and many chain stores like Starbucks and Mister Donut have them as well. This is typical of what you would get inside a Starbucks lucky bag for 3000 yen (about $30):

Beans, a tumbler, aprons, bags, coffee bags

Considering that one bag of beans will set you back about 1200 yen ($12) it’s not a bad deal. One year I bought one and there was a coffee press inside, six bags of beans and a pre-paid Starbucks card to the value of 1000 yen.

Here’s a Mister Donut’s bag from 2009 for 1000 yen:

Calendar, clock, blanket, cushion, cell phone strap, plates, coupons for free donuts.

You can get donuts or pies (apple pie etc.) with the ten coupons in the lucky bag and considering that the cheapest you can ever buy the donuts for on sale is 100 yen each, you literally get all the other stuff for free.

As you would imagine everyone wants to buy a lucky bag or several. On tv they generally have several shows introducing the type of lucky bags available and some people form groups to hit several stores at the same time and buy bags for other people.

The lucky bags at the department and electric stores generally see huge queues forming from early in the morning or sometimes the night before. There’s also a healthy amount of crowd-control needed and many places selling a variety of lucky bags will ask people to form queues at specific places in specific directions:

Orderly queue forming instructions

So if you’re in Japan at New Year and see this sort of scene:

Or this:

Think lucky bags.

68. If it looks like candy, it probably isn’t.

A while back I had some visitors from the Tokyo office come out to Australia and they brought the usual obligatory food gifts with them. What made this visit different was that they asked me beforehand what I wanted and so I put in an order for some of my favourite ‘nibblies’ that I can’t really buy outside of Japan:

Inside my bag of entertaining food (which has the very interesting name of Banzai!!) are lots of individually packaged nibblies including some wrapped in silver and gold foil that look suspiciously like something they’re not:

If you open up the foil, you’ll see something that looks like a stockcube:

Pop one in your mouth and you’ll taste fish.

It’s actually a little cube of dried fish that is seasoned with soy sauce, sugar and other seasonings and it’s not the sort of thing you want in your mouth when you’re expecting candy. I first ran across these little beauties a few days after I first arrived in Japan. As part of my job in the hotel I had to set up ‘welcome drinks’ for the guests checking in that day and on the table along with cookies & cakes was a bowl of these silver-wrapped mysteries. Thinking they were something sweet, I grabbed several to have with my coffee one day and sat down for afternoon tea.

Dried-fish-afternoon-tea fail.

Although I don’t mind them, I have to say they’re my least favourite nibblies out of the entire pack, so I’ll be chomping down on the several varieties of dried squid first before going for the fish cubes.

69. If it looks like a penis, it’s probably candy.

Another thing I came across within a few days of landing in Japan was some unusual chocolates in a local souvenir shop:

The boobies with their bright pink nipples were disturbing enough, but then I took a close look at the packaging:

Which stated that they were ‘cream-filled’….

Then I looked at the penises a bit more closely and I noticed the true-to-life shape:

Then I came across a mixed box of chocolates that were supposed to ‘encourage’ you to get it on:

The pack includes: boobs, penises, squishy condom gummi, clitori (I’m assuming it’s like octopi because I’ve never had to count multiple clitori before…) and a “question” chocolate that I will let you decide for yourself what it is:

The "question" is the top right-hand one

And if chocolate isn’t your thing, how about boob-shaped creme caramel?

The boob puddings are available in a lot of major train stations recently as the souvenir of choice.

Of course, I made sure to take back several packets of boob & penis chocolates as Christmas presents when I went home that year. They are apparently popular as Valentine’s Day chocolates to give to people you don’t really like but feel obligated to give a gift to. I’m wondering whether they would get the wrong idea though…