The Soft Drink Incident

After a long time of life more-or-less as usual, another culture shock. A bad one. I'm still traumatised as I'm writing this.

Yesterday, I was in Akihabara Donki, and I found Ramune in their fridge.

Ramune is a soft drink well known to many anime otaku, so being at least somewhat related to them, of course I've been wanting to try it. But so far I've only found it in two restaurants so far, never in a shop - so I immediately decided to buy it. However, it was just next to the cash register, and I was next in the line, so I just grabbed the nearest bottle - the red one.

When I came back home, and realised I was thirsty, I remembered the Ramune I bought, and started to open it. Now the Ramune bottle is a bit strange, and there are numerous Youtube clips demonstrating the proper way to open it. Basically, it has a marble inside, and you have to push it in with a provided instrument; then you turn it so that the marble gets stuck between two "reefs" in the bottle before tilting the bottle to drink or pour (otherwise the marble gets in the way again and stoppers the bottle from the inside). What I forgot was that Ramune has a tendency to spray when opened. It of course did, and I did the only thing I could think of - I popped the top into my mouth, in order to avoid spraying Ramune all over my room (or at least mitigate it, since I was not quite quick enough).

Bad mistake.

My reading is still quite slow - in Croatian or English, I can't not read something if I see it, reading is automatic and subconscious. Not so with Japanese - I have to invest effort and time, even if it is just a couple of words it will not be automatically processed. So only then I finally paid attention to the label, and what I saw horrified me, almost as much as the one gulp I got.

キムチ風ラムネ

or, Kimchi-style Ramune. Who does not know what Kimchi is, look it up on Wikipedia or something.

Next to that, a picture of garlic and chili - and yes, you can taste them both, and very strongly.

Anyway, it's the most godawful drink I've ever had the misfortune to have in my mouth. It's positively vile. I've even done some research on the net, and most people agree that even people who like kimchi (I'm not one of them) think it's vomitworthy. Some people probably remember the dream tea that Oz brought back from America. This is worse. If I had to choose between a glass of dream tea every day for a month or a glass of Kimchi Ramune once, I'm going with the tea. So you people who remember that can kind of get the intensity of my feelings on this subject.

Now I'm quite pissed off, because, a) how can anyone produce something like this? and b) since it's being sold, some SOB is actually buying it!

That's not the end of the story though. Today I related the story to one of my lab friends, who is kind of an experienced Japan-dweller, Nihon-sensei kind of person. When I came to the middle of my story, he started smirking and saying he thought he knew what happened, but fortunately it wasn't it.

There is a trend in Japan of hiding things that could be embarassing. For example, a third of the people you see on the Metro are spending their time reading a book, and half of those have the said book in an opaque paper book cover. The book cover does not serve to protect the book - it serves to prevent other people from seeing what you're reading. Of course, it does not really work - if it's really a book, fine, but in many cases it's manga, and if there's nekkid girls inside, people do not need to see the title page to realise what kind of book it is. Still, the book covers are widely used. Also, you can find sex toys that look just like deodorant bottles - you would not look at them twice in the shop. In the same vein, apparently, some companies have started packaging lubricants in bottles with the same imagery as popular soft drinks and teas - including Ramune. The name differs a bit, but the shape and colours are quite similar. I also heard someone tried the matcha lubricant, and that it even tasted of matcha. But it was not matcha.

So in the end, I count myself lucky, I guess.