Hello from the 7-Eleven

Hello from Tokyo, or more specifically, hello from the 7-Eleven. I’ve been in Japan for a week now and lived so many small, delightful lives in that time. I’ve been meaning to make a newsletter forever! Look at us, right here, together.

For the next five weeks I am traveling in Asia, so this will be a travelogue for now, but later it might be a photographylogue or a gardenlogue or a doglogue, even. (The cats have their own newsletters and I don’t want to encroach on their brands, they’re very litigious.) This newsletter will need a proper name eventually but for now it felt more important to have a newsletter than to have the perfect name for a hypothetical future newsletter, a decision my therapist would agree with.

I am writing to you from Tokyo, the greatest city on Earth! Okay, I don’t believe in a greatest city on Earth, there are a lot of amazing cities and I’ve only been to a handful of them but I do love Tokyo. I also love New York City which I lived in for a lot of my 20s and felt pretty monogamous about for a while. But I really fell in love with Tokyo when I visited Japan in 2017 with my sister, who was studying Japanese at the time and is approximately 100x better at the language than me. I planned to go back but then pandemic and life and work, but mostly the pandemic.

In the process of planning my Tokyo trip, I came to realize that being a city person is not a universal experience. I guess that’s obvious but on some level I figured everyone would love the city if they gave it a chance. While I do love being alone in a tent on a mountain somewhere scraping at freeze dried stroganoff noodles, I am equally a city mouse (city rat?) who loves a big, chaotic immersive urban experience. I am coming to appreciate that about myself, now that I am aware that not everyone longs to be surrounded by say eight to thirty seven million of their closest friends.

For the last decade-plus I’ve lived in Portland which is neither a big city place nor a country place, but a mostly charming in-between option. At home, I often miss Big City Life. I enjoy the garish neon glow and smashing my body onto various public transportation modalities with a kajillion other people and unlikely lush urban green spaces and delicious, greasy late night food smells mixing with more dubious smells all wafting around an intensely dense area that doesn’t require a car. In a big city there are endless things to do and look at just walking around on your two feet and that’s all great by me.

I’ll be here in Tokyo for a month, with probably quite a few day trips and other smaller trips during that time to places like Takayama and Hakodate. Then Evie is coming to visit and we’ll pop over to Kyoto together and I’ll be headed on to some other places, possibly Fukuoka, definitely Kanazawa and Osaka and Taipei. Part of the reason I’m in Tokyo for so long is a) I am a vibes-based traveler — I don’t rush around with a checklist or try to do everything, I like to kind of steep myself in a place’s whole thing instead but also b) I found a wonderful place to stay and booked it way the hell in advance, which is unusual for me.

I’m writing to you from an intensely charming restored former teahouse in Shindaita, a tree-lined neighborhood one stop west of Shimokitazawa and a quick ride to Shibuya. There are traditional sliding doors (shoji) and tatami mats and a lofted futon with a steep wooden ladder I almost fall down every morning — it’s perfect. I’ll take pictures of it soon and hopefully get more of the building’s story to share.

I booked this trip earlier this year after quitting my job. I’ll have to make some more serious ~ work moves ~ eventually but I didn’t want to look back on my time without a full-time job and regret not traveling while I had the chance. It’s also a good opportunity to work on learning Japanese. I took a class and a half back in 2019 but I am very rusty and very early in that journey still. (If you’re in the Portland area, PCC has an excellent Japanese program, so check that out.) I will say that even being able to read two of the Japanese alphabets is extremely helpful and if you’re visiting and wanted a starting place, you should learn hiragana and katakana. Now I’ve just got to memorize the remaining 2,000+ most common kanji (characters that represent a word/concept instead of a sound), should be no problem at all.

Doing my best to speak bits of Japanese every day is fun and stimulating and people are generally very kind about both that and my funny “samurai haircut,” which they like to point out. While I am worried my dog Bow will forget me, Evie is holding down the fort and reassures me that he is as handsome and intelligent as ever (extremely, not very) and probably remembers that I exist.

So that’s why I’m in Tokyo. And that’s why I’m in the 7-Eleven seemingly at all hours, doing the hard work of choosing the right snacks to suit the moment. If you follow me on Instagram, which I have very mixed feelings about devoting much time to, you’ve probably seen my chaotic 7-Eleven stories and treat hauls. I’ll keep those up because they are fun and easy and it’s nice to chat with people online while I’m traveling. I love the city and I love to eat and here I am, eating in the city. On to the snacks!

Okay Okay the Snacks Already

You may not be here for the previous nonsense, you might be here for different nonsense altogether and here is that particular nonsense. Today is a very exciting day because I visited the 7-Eleven and scooped up three special seasonal treats. They’re in the picture above but let’s take a closer look.

A of all, the cream puff. 7-Eleven cream puffs seem to be bestsellers and I can see why. I eat excellent cream puffs regularly at home at Beard Papa’s in Beaverton but this packaged, special seasonal puff held its own. The pastry was moist, though I don’t know what the flavor was, if any. The cream was delicious, subtle, not too sweet. Could have probably gone harder on the chestnut flavor though tbh I can’t say I really remember what a chestnut tastes like. Good, reliable. 8/10

The 7-Eleven pancake with sweet potato paste I expected to enjoy the least… but it immediately rocketed to the top of the stack (pancake joke). This one was SO good… the sweet potato puree situation was very subtly sweet and combined perfectly with the “butter cream,” which seems to be firmer and a different than cream I’ve had in their other desserts but still doesn’t really taste like what we think of as buttercream per se. 7-Eleven does an excellent funny little snack pancake and here they were well-served by not being ruined by margarine, objectively an abomination. Instant classic! 9/10

Let us not forget the humble rice cake with chestnut paste! This had a mochi outer shell with that same chestnut cream from the puff inside. Was also on the fence about this one and again, another surprise winner. Very tasty, probably my least favorite of the three but only because the other two were such strong options. Still yum, 7/10

Conquering my admitted skepticism, all three of these were winners. I’m honestly a little surprised. I wasn’t sure if I even like chestnut flavoring, but these aren’t artificial flavors — unlike the 7-Eleven apple pie, what’s going on there? The nuttiness was subtle and natural and so good! Not too sweet, all three autumnal treats were just right.

What’s the deal with 7-Eleven [or in this essay I will…]

If you‘re not familiar with Japanese 7-Eleven lore, I will attempt to briefly explain that phenomenon and why it is so interesting. This is getting long but if you’ve read til now, well, you’re really in it.

In Japan, the convenience store or “konbini” — the romanized version of コンビニ, short for “convenience store” — is more than just a place where hot dogs go to die. In Tokyo at least, konbinis are busy most hours of the day, with people ducking in off the street and popping off their bikes, spending about 30 seconds inside and then flying off, back into the city.

There are two konbinis (both 7-Elevens!) within a four minute walk from where I’m staying in Tokyo and four within a ten minute walk — three 7-Elevens and a FamilyMart. I’m staying in Tokyo for a month and every day I visit one of these stores within 30 minutes of waking up. That means every day begins with a special treat — literally a treat I pick out but also the treat of browsing for treats among so many delicious and affordable choices. The biggest konbini chains are 7-Eleven, FamilyMart and Lawson and these are absolutely everywhere in Japan.

As an American, getting delicious food from a place that looks a gas station feels very strange and exciting. Part of it is the cost. So far, I maybe spend $10 a day at a konbini if I’ve really gone all out. But you can find a solid meal that’s much more delicious than anything you’d eat in the average U.S. suburb for less than $5. Japan is already more affordable as a U.S. tourist than most people realize and the yen is still weak, so trying a bunch of stuff at the 7-Eleven is an alluringly cheap endeavor. But more than being cheap, the stuff is often so good.

My theory on why the konbini is a nexus of so much cultural conversation is because it demonstrates how the bar for quality in Japan is so high that the floor, the corporate corner store where you pay $2 for an onigiri (little rice triangle with fillings!) on the way to work or an iced coffee or whatever, is exceptional.

This is intensely foreign because, broadly speaking, in America, a corporation’s whole ass raison d'etre is to ratchet down consumer standards over time, slowly wringing more profit out of the people who buy and use stuff to determine the exact threshold of how much misery they’ll tolerate. This is where I would go on a many words long rant about social media companies but I won’t because a) I quit my job earlier this year after doing that every day for a decade and we’re taking a little breather and b) I have Japan things to do and those are much more fun.

Bearing in mind that I am truly just an all-American dumb dumb, spending time in a society that intrinsically values craftsmanship and creating thoughtful experiences feels very different indeed! These are generalizations and reality of all this is much more complicated, of course. There are delightful, thoughtfully crafted things in America (many in Portland) and there are many slapdash and cynical products in Japan. But at its heart I do think this philosophical departure is what makes Japanese 7-Eleven a complete marvel to most people encountering it for the first time. The konbini is a powerful symbol of cultural difference beckoning tourists like me beyond its sliding glass gates.

Japanese 7-Eleven could be less good and it would still be very good. Instead, it is excellent.

All photos by me, Taylor Hatmaker.