bread, bread all around
Stepping aside from the realm of snack food for a bit, I’ve chosen boring old bread as the subject of today’s review. Why? Well, one of the most frequent complaints of new foreigners to Japan, apart from the fact that everyone speaks “that barbaric picture-word language” and all the pornography is censored, is the bread, which is unlike any bread you will have ever experienced.
However, the problem isn’t that the bread tastes bad - in fact certain brands taste very good - the problem lies with the fact that for some reason all bread manufacturers in Japan are under the impression that a slice of bread must be twenty feet thick, and denser than a collapsed star. I think I have a pretty good idea how this came to fruition and it goes something like this:
The President Of Bread: So have we decided on a thickness yet?
Japanese Researcher: Yes. Our studies clearly show that an average person will eat 2.7 slices of foreign bread in one sitting. Thus in the interests of eating efficiency, we propose the national standard thickness of one bread slice in Japan to be equal to that of 2.7 slices of foreign bread. Hell lets just make it 5, to be sure.
Overpaid And Underutilised Foreign Consultant: That is stupid. How the frick am I supposed to make a sandwich out of slices of bread that are as thick as 5 regular slices? It wouldn’t even be able to fit in my mouth, or I would die of suffocation once I got it in, if I couldn’t eat it quickly enough.
Japanese Researcher: Hey I have an idea shut up.
The thickness and density of the slices also explains why there are almost no regular pop-up style toasters in Japan (most homes just have a toaster “oven” thing, or they use the grill) since gravity simply will not allow one of these behemoth slices to be accelerated upwards at a speed other than minus 1 billion parsecs a second. In fact, I suspect that if everyone in Japan held a slice of bread and coordinated a nationwide bread-toss in the same direction at the exact same moment in time, the earth would spin off it’s axis and drift away into deep space, killing all life on the planet. This is probably why Japan has such a small military for a country its size - it doesn’t NEED to spend any money on defense because all the protection they need is in the form of slices of deadly bread. Even if the earth/axis plan doesn’t work out, in combat situations you can simply throw the slices at large crowds of people and watch them scatter like bowling pins, or like when B.A. Baracus shoves some bad guy into a bunch of other bad guys and they all go flying into bales of hay.
Good uses for Japanese bread:
as a bludgeoning tool as highly absorbent beer mats as duck food for feeding ducks then watching them sink helplessly into the depths as a shuriken that can be thrown for hundreds of miles at a time as body armour as dark matter, pressed together and used for spaceship fuel
Bad uses for Japanese bread:
for sandwiches, toast, scrambled egg on toast, French toast, eating on its own, and any other activity that involves putting the bread in your mouth and swallowing it.
Following on in this pattern, the wrong-brainedness of Japanese bread doesn’t stop at the threshold of the sliced bread genre, but goes on to infect all other forms of bread-based products such as rolls and pastries, like throwing a snowball down a shit-covered hill.
Routinely, otherwise nice-looking rolls are filled with either jam or some coffee-flavoured faux-cream, making my ham and cucumber rolls taste altogether more coffee-like than I would prefer. Its that “going one step further than is really needed” mentality that affects these products adversely. Nice crusty roll, fill it with crap. Delicious-looking pastry, smother it with mayonnaise. I suspect that a large part of a Japanese food manufacturers responsibility is to figure out how to ruin these generic food products, which they probably buy cheap from China, using as little effort as possible. In my head I imagine several scenarios, such as the plucky young intern who is left to “level up” a French Brioche which he does by smashing it with his fist and looking up at his delighted boss with a satisfied grin proclaiming, “now its flat! saves space”, and the employee so detached from reality that he actually created a sandwich with strawberries and cream as the filling. This is no joke - you can buy sandwiches filled with a succulent combination of strawberries and cream from any regular convenience store, which you can eat and wonder why you can hear Jesus crying. I will no doubt review this product at a later date.
Appearance I think I’ve made it clear that Japanese bread is thick. One other quirk is that bread never comes in a full loaf, and will almost always come in a strange 6-slice cube-like pack. I sometimes wonder what happens to the ends of the bread, as we the consumer never sees them. I imagine there are huge mountains of bread-ends in some forgotten industrial sector of Tokyo, encircled by gigantic sparrows as big as 747s, grown super-strong from having lifted slices of bread hundreds of times their own body weight every day. 2/5
Taste/Smell Uncannily bread-like. With an strange, sweet aftertaste. 4/5
Fear Factor Unless there is an obscure phobia involving being smothered to death by bread, Japanese bread should pose no significant challenge to the average human being. 0/5
Health Implications Ah Japan, I shake my head at thee. Japanese bread is not at all good for you. Presumably because of the thickness and sugar in the ingredients, Japanese bread quite routinely packs in around 200 calories PER SLICE. So what might have been a good-intentioned healthy sandwich turns out to be a 50′000 calorie mega-dinner, leaving you never wanting food again for a week and making you grab absent-mindedly at the rolls of fat forming around your wrists. 1/5
Final Verdict: 3/5 - I love bread, but Japan, you punish my love. Punish my love.
you suck
shut your cunt, krystal.
Very funny. Nice job on the website. You should quit JET and move to Tokyo where there is a Kobeya Kitchen in the basement of every office building (star products: fruit salad sandwiches, cheese curry pans and Mentaiko Frances). However, if you moved here you’d probably get a life, which would adversely affect your post rate, and that would be a pity for all of us.
I’m glad to see this site up again… sometimes it’s here… sometimes it’s not… seems like it’s always different… I was getting ready to give up on it and hadn’t visited for a number of months… then on a whim–Surprise! It’s a cool site again.
Hi yongfook! Your site is really clever! Nice work!! Its been a long time since I’ve seen a page that makes me actually
I’m relieved to have stumbled upon your site, because now, I don’t have to feel obligated to eat all the strange stuff I see crowding the shelves in conbini, in the interest of cultural understanding (and a massive amount of masochism). Thank you for talking this bullet for the rest of us!!!
I can tell you my bread story too: After a little while of living in Tokyo, I was missing some of the more American foods I’m accustomed too (Japanese food is really great, but sometimes you want something like spaghetti with NO natto on it).
I was overjoyed to notice several Bismarck (jelly filled doughnuts) sitting coyly in a corner on the massive bread rack in a 711. I could even see a little of the tasty red jelly dripping out of edge… As I finished my lunch, I chomped down on my “Bismarck”!? instead of being rewarded with that sweet orgasmic raspberry jelly, my mouth was filled with stale starchy red bean paste… I don’t think I’ve ever cried so much in my life ;_;
P.S. I like those Strawberry & Cream ones, so good (in a dirty way)!! I can feel my arteries clogging with each bite!!
Ah that explains it. I saw loaves in a Chinese bakery in London and the loaves were exactly as you describe, cube, 6 thick slices, no crusts. Couldn’t see what they did with the crusts though. And they must have had to adapt the weight, they didn’t appear to be taking the shelf down with them just then. Great website, by the way.
Wow, I hope yongfook didn’t really say that nasty comment to krystal. Sure, her reply was immature and had no backing, but he sounds like such an intelligent and good-humored person in the article. I’d expect better. Anyway, I used to live in Japan. I haven’t been there in a while, but i remember going on a fieldtrip from school to a small bakery. We got to try some of the bread. It was kinda thick, but I liked the taste. And it didn’t seem insanely thick and heavy, like you suggest. I really love those other kinds of bread that you talk about, like bread filled with sweet bean paste or curry. I guess it’d be hard to make a sandwich out of it, though.
That’s great! I hated the shoku-pan meself. The only thing it was good for was “Portrait Eggs” (cut hole in center of bread, put bread in pan, break egg into hole, fry, fry, fry. Pour on okonomiyaki sauce or ketchup and eat. Yum!) Gotta say, JET was a great experience if for nothing else than discovering Japanese food. For instance the cheesecake. But that’s another story. Love the blog (krystal notwithstanding).
Where do you do your shopping? In a remote island with a population of two?! Or are you blind when you are in a supermarket? You can easily find AT LEAST FOUR different types of thickness of bread in the bread section, from the superthick four-slice to the half cm thick slices locals call the sandwich bread. Please do your homework before you blabbermouth. It makes you look incredibly ill-informed and stupid. I’m a first-time visitor to your site by accident and it will be my last.
You are certainly entitled to your own opinion based on your experience. However, like Sue said above, you seem to not have fully explored the culture nor the “bread” there. Some of your readers even call you “intelligent”. I would say, from having lived in Japan for over 15 years, your article significantly lacks experience and knowledge maybe due to your ignorance or simply, lack of local friends to enrich your experience in Japan. I am also a first-time visitor to your site by accident and will be my last. As comical and clever as some parts of your article may have been, if the information containedi were inaccurate or limited, it is a junky piece of writing not worth reading unless you like to have your intelligence insulted or insult the people and the culture you are reading about.
this syt is shit!!!!
Hey Young fuck why dont you keep your fucking dumass opinions to yourself. at least the japanese dont eat dogs and live octopusses like you garlic smelling pieces of shit
u fucking penis breathed bitch fuckers are gayness ina can u fukin man whores suck cock 4 food mofucker peace out fukin skank ass ho’s
You obviously have no sense of taste. Maybe you just don’t know what good food tastes like. I’m not Japanese myself but I love their bread. I agree with some of the other people, get your facts right before you write an article about something you obviously don’t even know very much about.
Yea yongfook, do some more research and get your facts straight. You know why? Because apparently the internet is full of rocket surgeons that can’t tell the difference between this and a serious food review website. The white coat wearing scientists that work at this brain farm we know as the internet are having their “intelligence insulted” by reading your website, which irresponsibly and unrepentantly promotes the idea that you can only buy thick bread in japan. The other day I saw a japanese kid in a schoolground surrounded by a circle of white kids who were all pointing and shouting “Thick Bread! Thick Bread!”. These children had no doubt seen this website that you attempt to portray as 100% Accurate(tm) and fallen into a lifelong path of misinformation and racism. Ho-ly fuck. Oh, and Krystal? Shut your cunt.