Vending Machines

As I already mentioned, Japan is the vending machine Mecca of the world. You can find vending machines everywhere, mostly for drinks and ciggies, but also for beer, sake and whisky, porno mags, underwear, (new and soiled! YUUCK!), and of course, snacks. If you are freezing your hands off in the midst of winter, you can get a hot can of coffee or tea or cocoa or soup or... well, almost anything.

In the scorching summer, with your throat as dry as a Billabong in the dry season, there is your vending machine, stacked to the gunwhales with all manner of icy cold refreshments. If you walk for a hundred yards in Japan and don't see a vending machine, you are seriously out in the sticks somewhere. Reiko and I have climbed remote peaks only to discover a cold drink waiting for us at the top for the princly sum of sixty pence.

Mind you, you need a few words of warning about some of the drinks available. Cider in Japan is tasteless sugary soda water, not a seriously alcoholic apple drink. Energy drinks come complete with alluring names like 'Calpis', (Cowpiss?), and 'Pocari Sweat', who the heck wants to drink sweat? (They also sell coffee creamer called 'Creap', but that's in the supermarket).

If you're Scottish and you miss Irn-Bru, you might find melon soda a reasonable replacement, although the change to a milky green colour might take a bit of getting used to. Personally, I like Lipton's lemon tea and in winter, hot Royal Milk tea, which is milky and sweet, very strange as I don't normally take sugar in my tea. For connysewers of coffee, the variety of canned coffee is almost endless. Barely a week goes by but they seem to bring out a new blend for your delectation. Japanese workers are so overburdened that they need some serious inputs of caffeine to get through the day, (even then, I've never seen so many people asleep on trains and buses in my life)