Tokachi Kinako Caramels

One of my students recently visited Hokkaido. She brought back a plethora of pictures of flowers, green fields, and nature. She also brought me back a souvenir, as is commonly done in Japan. Though the item was supposed to only be available in Hokkaido, it was a very familiar item to me. Yes, it was the wonderful Ezo Brown Bear caramels that I had reviewed previously.

There seems to be a never-ending supply of Hokkaido-only caramels that are sold all over Tokyo as that is what the kinako caramels that I'm reviewing today are supposed to be. I found these at the local discount snack shop for 100 yen (about a dollar). Dounan, which makes both these and the Ezo Brown Bear caramels, seems to get around.


In case you don't remember or are a new reader, kinako is toasted soy flour. It has a nutty flavor which can be similar to peanut butter, but it doesn't always carry much of a peanut flavor. It's just the toasting process. These caramels carry the scent and flavor of kinako and are nicely sweet. The kinako is neither too strong nor too weak. It's really very nicely balanced. The caramels themselves are easy to bite into and stick to your teeth a bit. Because of their size, they vanish all too soon. If you want to savor them, sucking on them might be a better bet.

It took me a long time to consume the 18 caramels in the box and by the end they had picked up some moisture and gotten a bit soft and sticky. They still tasted great, but the texture lost some of its luster. Each caramel is 17 calories and quite small. They make for a nice little sweet, but I think most people wouldn't be satisfied with just one.

If you like kinako, it's nearly a lock that you'll enjoy these. I really liked them and would definitely buy them again if I wanted some caramels. However, I would either keep them in the refrigerator or only buy them if I could share them, eat them faster, or if it wasn't summer in Tokyo when it's hot and humid.

Super Sweet Corn Baked Snack

I'm not sure if the name of this snack, which is literally "super sweet corn" in katakana (スーパースイートコーン)" and not a Japanese translation of the English words, is meant to imply that the corn is super sweet tasting or if the corn is able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. I'm guessing it's because the corn they use is the lollipop of the corn world.

At any rate, I can't resist something which is actually corn-flavored, as opposed to corn-based. Corn flavored snacks in Japan tend to be buttery, nicely salty, and feature the best flavor that corn as a food has to offer.

These corn snacks have the added bonus of being baked. If you're health conscious in Japan and looking for snacks, you can seek the characters for "non fry" (ノンフライ) written on the package. Of course, if you are really health conscious, you won't be buying this sort of stuff anyway. It's not that this is all that bad really. This bag has 50 grams (1.7 oz.) of corn goodness and only 230 calories. It's also got bits or real corn flattened out and pressed into the chips, so you may actually get some sort of infinitessimal benefit from the embedded corn. It's just that snacking and health rarely go hand in hand.



Because these chips are baked, they are lighter than your average chip. They are crispy, but have a softer snap than a deep-fried chip. Even though they look a bit puffy in spots, they're relatively thin. The spots with actual corn in them are a bit tough and chewy, but it in no way undermines the overall texture and eating experience.

These smell like fresh corn on the cob. They taste like corn cream soup with a bit of added chicken extract for added savoriness. You can really detect that they are made from fairly sweet corn. The salt on them is just right, though rather inconsistent at times.

If you enjoy corn potage soup in Japan, you will almost certain like these as much as I did, which is to say quite a lot. They're seasonal though, so you'd better grab some while you can. I know I wouldn't hesitate to have them again.

Akagi Mikan Ice Pops

When I was a kid, my mother used to buy enormous boxes of Popsicles with a variety of flavors in them. I recall there being at least 4, possibly 5 flavors - grape, orange, cherry, and lemon or lime. The only thing I know for sure is that the kid-preferred first choice was grape. Once grape was gone, orange was second. Grudgingly, cherry came third and whatever that last flavor was was only consumed in absolute Popsicle desperation.

As an adult, I favor orange over grape, though I hadn't had anything resembling a Popsicle for decades before buying this box of Japanese tangerine (mikan) ice pops. I was drawn to them both because the box was entirely made up of orange flavor and each pop only has 48 calories for a 63 ml. (2.1 oz.) bar.

These bars are made by Akagi, a company which I was unfamiliar with until I did a little research on the web about them. Their web site has an extremely annoying flash-based interface which my Mac was a bit flaky with, but I tunneled through it nonetheless. They also have an extremely obnoxious-looking mascot named "Gari" that dances all over their web interface with his huge maw gaping at you like some deranged pervert. Anyway, Akagi makes a wide variety of frozen confections similar to these mikan pops. The best known is likely their pop version of the chocolate milk beverage, Milo.


There are five ice pops in the box and each is a good size for a frozen treat. They're neither too small nor too big. Really can't smell much from them if you give them a sniff, but you can see pulpy bits of tangerine embedded in the bar as darker orange spots. The fruit flavor is quite subtle and realistic. The first ingredient is tangerine juice and the second is "fruit". This is followed by grape sugar (which is essentially fructose) and sugar. The fact that juice and fruit are listed as greater components than any of the sugars is probably why these aren't sickly sweet and have such a refreshing real fruit flavor.

I really liked these and will definitely buy them again. They are a very adult version of a Popsicle and relatively healthy for a frozen confection. The only reservation I have about them is that the pulpy parts can be a bit distracting if you like to suck on the bars instead of bite into them. Once you run across the fruit pieces, you really have to bite into the bar and that shortens the pleasurable experience. If you like mikan, I wholeheartedly recommend giving these a try.

Oreo Banana Bar

One of the reasons a brand grows to become the pinnacle of its product type is that it manages to strike the majority of people as the best in show for its particular breed. When it comes to the chocolate sandwich cookie competition, most of the judges have voted the Oreo as top dog.

For me personally, I didn't grow up eating Oreos like most kids. As I've mentioned in other posts, we were too poor for the more expensive brand name products. We were too poor for the second rate sandwich cookie, Hydrox. No, we were stuck with the store brands which had bland, soft cookie exteriors and overly sweet, chalky interiors. Such was the "deprivation" of my youth.

It wasn't until I became an adult, and indeed, when I came to Japan, that I occasionally indulged in authentic Oreo cookies. Here, they come is small packages with about 18 cookies per bag. They're not available at all stores. Indeed, in my area, you're hard-pressed to find them when the craving hits. At any rate, the main selling point of the Oreo is that the cookie outside is just the right combination of crispy bitter chocolate cookie to pair up with the sweet evil of the creamy center. This is its strength.

The whole notion of Oreo candy bars and those flavored with fake fruit seems to fly in the face of the simple perfection of the sweet and bitter cookie combo. Nabisco can't resist trying though. After all, if you've got a popular brand, it's pretty much an obligation to exploit it. Hence, we have this dubious candy bar and a few of its siblings, the green tea Oreo and macadamia Oreo bars.

I should note that my husband wanted to buy this as part of his sampling of all of the banana-flavored sweets that are crowding the shops this year. We found this for about 130 yen (about $1.25) at an AM/PM convenience store. Needless to say, there are more banana food reviews to come in the future.


The bar smells strongly of fake banana flavor. This completely overwhelms any possible chocolate scent, if indeed there is any. The coating on this looks, feels and tastes like mockolate, but cocoa butter is the second ingredient so I'm guessing it's the real deal. The coating is relatively thin compared to the crumbly, crunchy interior mess. Though it is nice and crispy, the inside crumbles too much. It's as if the grains are highly compressed to hold the interior together rather than it being some sort of cohesive cookie center.

The taste is a little bit of the usual Oreo bitter cocoa cookie flavor mixed with super strong fake banana which oddly had a bit of a watermelon type finishing flavor. I think this was simply a byproduct of the chemicals used in the flavoring. Note that real banana flavoring is supposed to be a part of this so I could be saying "fake banana" when it's actually real. That being said, it tastes to me like some of the worst fake banana crap I've ever had.

The bar weighs 36.5 grams (about 1.3 oz.) and contains 199 calories. I ate just a smidge off the end and my husband ate about half of it and put the rest away for future consumption. He actually liked it. On a scale of 1-10, he gave it a 6 with 5 being an "average" candy bar eating experience. As for my rating, if he weren't going to eat it, I'd have simply thrown the rest away. I give it "unhappy" instead of "very unhappy" because I figure someone who loves banana flavored treats (like my husband) might find it more palatable than I did.

Kirin Cola Shock

Wouldn't it be cool if "Cola Shock" involved actual shocking? I'm not talking about a cattle prod to the tongue or anything, but just enough of a juicy jolt to wake you up at the end of a long, hard day.

Unfortunately, there is no actual shocking of any kind involved in Kirin's Shock. And when I say none at all, I mean it. Kirin could be sued for false advertising if it operated in a country where that sort of thing happened. As it is, the Japanese are not litigious sorts, so Kirin can imply any sort of experience they like through misleading naming and there's not a damn thing we can do about it.


I do not drink alcohol of any sort, so you can thank my husband for the existence of this review. He came across this at the local 100 yen shop for about 100-150 yen ($1.05-$1.44), but he can't remember exactly. As an impulse buyer who doesn't write a snack blog, keeping costs in mind is not really a priority for him.

I did a sniff and sip of this just because I'm writing the review and I felt obliged to do so. If you knew how much I hate the smell and taste of most booze, you'd know I made a supreme sacrifice. When I opened the can, I got a strong scent of nondescript booziness. After pouring it into a glass and sniffing it, I mainly smelled the familiar bouquet of cheap cola drinks. I'm talking about the store brand stuff that no one likes and parents buy for kids who haven't yet developed a refined cola palate.

The taste was horrible to my tongue. It tasted like cola-flavored cough medicine. It seemed like someone mixed too strong cola syrup with some sort of alcohol and didn't carbonate it very much. This was decidedly on the flat side and I strongly prefer very bubbly drinks. However, to get a more reasonable sense of how tasty this was, I went with my husband's response. When I asked him if he'd buy it again, he laughed and said, "not even close." Even though he has drunk rum and Coke, wine, and beer and enjoyed them, he really didn't care for this. He said he couldn't taste the alcohol very much and it simply tasted like bad cola to him.

This is pretty terrible, and at 5% alcohol, it's not going to buzz you more than beer. It's also 224 calories per can which could be spent on something far more enjoyable. Obviously, I wouldn't recommend this because the only "shock" is that it's so awful.

As a side note, several bloggers who have seen this in shops and advertised in public spaces have done some hand-wringing about this in terms of marketing to minors. It clearly says on the can (in the sizable black box you can see on the picture above) that you must be 20 or older to buy this. In fact, it says it in two places and has the characters for "o-sake" (alcohol) on it in the white circle. Add to that the fact that many markets that sell alcoholic beverages have an alarm on the register which tells the check-out person when someone buys this sort of thing that they can't sell it to anyone under 20 and you can see that there's no attempt being made to trick people into thinking this is a soft drink.

And another note, Kirin has desktop pictures of their ads featuring a Japanese babe. If you're into that sort of thing, you can download the pictures here. One interesting point about these pictures is that I had to say that I was 20 or older to even gain access to the wallpapers. Kirin is clearly being careful, even if they are selling a horrible drink, so they deserve props for that.