Guide Ronan Maynard Cancio in Osaka, Japan.Arigato Tours/Supplied
As any visitor to Japan knows, it’s hard not to fall in love with convenience-store culture there with its always stocked shelves, addictively delicious egg sandwiches and unbelievably fresh bowls and bento boxes.
The experience couldn’t be more different than popping into one at home, staring at stale-looking sandwiches, overcooked hot dogs and racks of expensive junk food.
Although 7-Eleven in Canada recently launched a Japanese version of their iconic crustless egg sandwich, made with Kewpie mayo and shokupan milk bread, it’s hard to see things changing much.
Something has indeed been lost in translation.
The fascination with Japan’s convenience stores – known as konbinis, a shortened version of konbiniensu sutoru – has heightened in recent years, likely owing to the rise in tourism in the country, as well as social media, which is full of videos of what to eat at 7-Eleven, Lawson or FamilyMart, the Big 3 that make up some of the country’s 55,000 outlets.
The stores and their seasonal and exceptionally fresh offerings have become so popular that custom tours are now being offered to find out what makes konbinis tick. In Osaka, Arigato Tours charges approximately $205 a person, including snacks, for a custom tour.
Guide Ronan Maynard Cancio was uniquely qualified to lead us – he is a veteran of working the overnight shift at a 7-Eleven in Tokyo when he was a student.
“I’ve never offered this before,” he said as we began our tour. “But right now, it’s like a big thing. A lot of people, especially tourists, are lost about what to get here. They only know what they see on TikTok, on reels on the Internet. They get the chicken, the egg sandwich. They get the rice balls – onigiri. Of course you can get it, too, but I will show you some local favourites.”
What came next was a 3.5-hour tasting menu from seven different stores, including lesser-known ones such as Poplar, Ministop, Daily Yamazaki and Lawson 100 (the Japanese version of a dollar store).
At FamilyMart, we sampled their favoured famichiki (fried chicken). At 7-Eleven, we had a freshly baked sweet bread called melonpan and mitarashi dango (rice-flour balls doused in sweet sauce) and at Ministop, soft-serve ice cream, the only convenience store to offer that sweet treat.
At Lawson, we skipped the ubiquitous egg sandwich, as by that time my travel companion and I had eaten many on a multi-day hike on the Kumano Kodo trail, working in multiple konbini stops to refuel. Instead, we tried the strawberry version since it was strawberry season. We also tried the mouth-watering Hokkaido milk cream cake roll.
Of course, both were fresh and delicious.
The stores are renowned for the freshness, Cancio explained. There is a high turnover of product and a strict restocking schedule of a few times a day.
“Some people work as early as 7 a.m. and they don’t have time to cook breakfast, so they’ll go to the nearest convenience store [to] their home or at the station or near their workplace and grab something quick to eat, like those rice bowls, onigiris, or some bread,” he said, adding convenience stores are often the first stop when a teenager turns 20 and comes of age.
“They buy their first cigarette and alcohol and they would tell it to me at the register: ‘Today’s my birthday.’ And it’s, like, midnight.”
Not only can locals be served their first legal drink, they can do banking, pay bills or taxes and buy concert tickets at automated booths.
Ironically, both 7-Eleven and Lawson started off in North America almost a century ago before being acquired by Japanese companies. Lawson opened in Japan in 1975 and the Japanese version of 7-Eleven opened in 1991.
Needless to say, Japan has taken the convenience store model and made it something to be admired.
The writer travelled as a guest of Arigato Tours, which did not review or approve this article. Stories are based on merit; The Globe does not guarantee coverage.
