Category: Drinks

One of the first things that shocked me when I arrived to Japan was finding tons of posters in my dormitory dinning room with bikini girls holding a big beer mug. After the first shock I learned that it was not a weird thing of my dormitory, it is a pretty normal thing, it is like a “tradition” here in Japan. Asahi Beer, the inventors of the beer robot, is one of the companies who likes a lot to use this girl-beer-poster technique.

This is a really old Sapporo Beer poster. The “tradition” is rooted in the Japanese beer industry since a long long time ago…

We also have beer girls out of the posters, in the real world. You can find them almost in any big sports event, mainly beisbol.

Oden is a Japanese soup with many different ingredients floating in it. An “oden-kan” (おでん缶) is a can filled with oden, nothing special, you could find something similar in a supermarket almost anywhere in the world.

Roy explained in his blog that around ten years ago a little computer shop in Akihabara had a brilliant idea, they decided to sell oden-kan in a vending machine, so you could get hot oden and drink it while walking on the street. Nobody seemed to care about that vending machine, but since two years ago many shops in Akihabara started to copy them and boom! Oden-kan just became one of the most famous souvenirs in Akihabara. Isn’t it weird?, a can filled with soup it’s a souvenir in an electronics district!

This was the first oden-kan vending machine in Japan.

These are alll oden-kan inside a computer shop, changing the business model?

The first odeen-kan machine it’s so famous that it’s featured on TV sometimes. I don’t really understand why some stuff becomes a super-hit in Japan…