Peter Lok: Cool Japanese Snacks

Japan produces some of the best snacks and candy. Here are some of the ones I've tried over the years. Their snacks and candy are so popular they are found all over Asia and can even be found in various oriental supermarkets in Canada and the US.

Nissin Cup Noodles. Nissin invented the instant noodle in the form of Nissin Chicken Ramen in the 1950s and then they developed the cup noodle in the 1970s. There are many flavours of cup noodles in Japan and in Asia, and they are much better than what you find in typical North American supermarket shelves.

Canned bread. This stuff comes in many flavours and is often branded with an anime series. They aren't bad at all considering it is canned bread and they remind me of those Italian holiday cakes you can buy in a box at Christmas.

Japanese Kit Kats. These come in an awesome number of flavours. Some are really good, some are kind of so so, but their Kit Kats rock overall. The Green Tea Kit Kats are very common and very tasty. There are regional specialty Kit Kats with exotic flavours like ponzu, red bean, Japanese strawberry, pear, soybean, etc.

Pocky. These are biscuit sticks covered with chocolate for the basic variety and they have many many varieties like the Kit Kat. There are special dessert Pocki and stubby thick Midi Pocky too.

Coconut Pocky and tropical Pocky shown below. Like many types of snacks in Japan, there are many limited edition and seasonal Pocky that are available for limited amounts of time.

Karipori Candy Sticks. There is cola and ramune flavours on the left, and grape and melon on the right with Pikachu.

Pretz. These are savoury biscuit sticks. The ones below are shoyu flavour, as in soy sauce.

Jagabee Potato Sticks. Many different flavours and eating these reminds me of eating really crispy french fries.

Look Chocolate and a couple of other ramune flavoured candies and gum.

Puccho chewy candies and whistle candy. Everyone likes the chewy candies with the little gummy bits embedded within. The whistle candies are fun as you can really blow through the little hole in the middle for a loud shriek and they come with a little toy.

Various kinds of rice crackers. Very delicious.

Different types of potato chips and snacks from Calbee. I really like their curry potato chips.

Hard candies and gummy candy that is ramune flavour (a type of Japanese lemon flavour - very nice). The Super Soda candies have a really sour coating.

Meltykiss chocolates. These are pretty deluxe little chocolates with an intensely flavoured center of green tea and strawberry in the boxes shown below. They come in individually wrapped cubes and are very good.

Instant miso soup. You have a dried ingredient pouch and another pouch holding the miso soup paste. Very popular in Japan.

This is another kind of instant miso soup that is freeze dried. This is from an American company and the little puck rehydrates almost instantly with boiling water. Quite good.

The rehydrated miso soup below.

This is a type of summer watermelon gummy candy that is pretty delicious, but available for the summer months mainly.

Puccho sour plum flavour chews.

Ramune soda. These are bottled like sodas were in North America in the early 20th century. The bottles are sealed with a marble under a cap and you have to push the marble in with a special tool that comes with the bottle. There are two notches in the glass on the inside of the bottle to hold the marble back when you sip.