Mystery treats at the konbini

One of the games I play in Japan is "mystery treat": At the konbini (convenience store), I buy random things without knowing exactly what's in them. I search the label for English clues, decipher Japanese hiragana when I can (like finding the word oishi, which means "delicious"), look for color clues (among soy milk boxes, for example, I've learned that yellow is banana flavored, pink is strawberry, green is green tea), and buy it anyway.

Sometimes it works, like when I found green-tea flavored milk or honey-flavored milk with tapioca in it. Sometimes it doesn't, like when I bought ume (sour plums).

Tonight I found an unusual ice-cream treat at our local AM/PM konbini. The only English was "White Taiyaki," and because it was in the ice-cream freezer, it seemed logical to guess that it would be a fish-shaped ice-cream dessert.


This is what it looked like inside: a palm-sized fish, very lightweight. The outside layer was made of very thin, styrofoam-y, edible wafer material.


I've seen fish-shaped treats lately at the grocery store, which led me to believe there were greater cultural forces at work in the design. I was right... Wikipedia tells me that a taiyaki is taiyaki is a "fish-shaped cake" that is usually filled with azuki (red bean) paste. I think they must also be an expression of autumn, because the Japanese love seasonal variations in food. Here's the taiyaki from Wikipedia.


I'm not a huge fan of azuki because it can be thick and bland; today's other "mystery treat" was azuki-bean-flavored soy milk that I bought for Lucinda. Not a big hit. So I took a bite and...


Delightful! Inside the fish, there is vanilla ice cream and a thin layer of sweet red bean jam.


So delicious that after Blaine finished writing about the new Japanese prime minister, he rode his bike to the konbini to get one, too.