Samurai of the Sev

Classy Seven Eleven, in the basement of a high-rise
office building across the street from Imperial Palace.

At my first professional newspaper job, in Logan, Utah, there was a 7-11 on the corner of Main and 400 North, just through the back alley behind our shop. At my current job in Bremerton, there's one on Sixth and Park, less than two blocks from the back door. I'm not sure if the green-and-orange sign can be found down a skeezy alley from The New Yorker, but if there is not one, consider that career dream dashed.

Where I didn't expect my tendency to intersect with The Sev, as I learned to call it from a great Sev connoisseur and former city editor Darrel Erhlick, was in Tokyo. But the week Timm and I spent there at the end of July/early August taught us many things — and one was how indispensable Seven Eleven is to Japanese customers of all stripes.

The trip came about coincidentally. Timm and I travel well together, as this blog noted three years ago, and this summer two friends from different chapters of our lives happened to both move to Japan. That's a good enough reason to dust off the passports and to revive this blog to share some stories, show some photos, and offer my half-baked and probably culturally insensitive observations. (I mean, just look at what I titled this post...)

"An American family eats Tokyo," by Matthew Amster-Burton.
Of course we tried octopus...

Then Timm and I each read a book called Pretty Good Number One, and we had another strong pull: we weren't really living until we'd tried authentic Japanese food.

Pretty Good Number One had a chapter about Seven Eleven, so telling the world that, *gasp*, Japanese people love the Sev!, wouldn't exactly be breaking news. The company's international division is based in Tokyo, after all, and there are more 7-11's —15,000 — in Japan than any other country in the world.

Which becomes obvious after you visit. Less obvious is how much nicer they are than the running punchline on Park Avenue, how many people eat lunch there regularly, how there are no Slurpees or nacho cheese, and how often a Gaijin — the word for muzungu in Japanese, or us — will depend on the Sev during his or her visit.

All alone, abandoned in Seoul, no rice balls to snack on...

Our July 26 flight to Tokyo snarled the trip's beginning. A delay leaving Sea-Tac meant a missed connection in Seoul, which meant a rerouted flight to Haneda Airport rather than Narita Airport, where we had hotel reservations, which meant that by 1 a.m. Timm and I, bleary eyed and exhausted, were standing outside Haneda's Customs Desk, being told by a grump at the Hotel Reservations Desk that, on a Sunday night in a city of 30 million people, there were no hotel reservations available. None. And should we have desired a taxi ride to our booked room, it would run us 300,000 30,000 yen (note: corrected that number and a  figure below that grossly overestimated our means, for those of you doing currency conversions), which was approximately all the cash we had for the rest of the trip. (Remember that detail.)

After another hour's worth of begging, polite argument, whining and sweet talk (one of the four airline employees we dealt with was a big fan of Grey's Anatomy and was thrilled we came from Seattle, and maybe that helped!), by 2 a.m. we ended up with two very small rooms at a high-rise near Haneda — right across the street from a Sev. Our first retail stop in Toyko on Monday morning it was!

Have you tried the ramen? This little place near Ueno Park was the best
 we found: maybe three two-person tables inside, rich soy broth with nice sliced pork
bellies in the ramen, a large piece of seaweed for no extra charge, and the
proprietor took our order when we couldn't figure out the vending machine. To
generalize, even in a nice place you order from a vending machine. 

Pretty Good Number One is a book about food, so we had an itinerary. Authentic ramen was on the list, sushi made in front of our eyes, cold soba noodles, tempura, gyoza, miso soup for breakfast. We checked them all off.  We added Japanese hot dogs at a Yakult Swallows baseball game, seafood curry at a Japanese-Indian restaurant, greasy little fried chicken balls that seemed really popular, and even lousy Chinese food at a place we stumbled into that had no English sign, no English menus, and no English speakers — which we incorrectly assumed would have meant good non-English food.

The best restaurant of the trip. This is the whole place, room
for no more than seven. The chef works on his schedule, not yours,
and there's no menu. He orders you the special, you wait an hour and fifteen
minutes (no exaggeration) and you get the most delicious plate
tempura pork, shrimp, ham, carrots, apples and salad imaginable.

The Sev's specialty (at least at our price range) seemed to be rice balls, so the ubiquitous line-up of them on every refrigerated shelf became our go-to place to find snacks. A rice ball is a tennis ball-sized handful of sticky rice, wrapped in seaweed, with a surprise fish option in the center or just a generous soaking of soy sauce. Walking down the street and see a Sev? Rice ball it is! Going on a day hike? Let's first have a rice ball! Hiking Mount Fuji in the middle of the night in a thunderstorm? Three rice balls! At least that was the working, and delicious, theory.

It's a jelly, eh?

The Mount Fuji story is one that will be told soon enough, but here's the key plot twist for now: an unexpected expense meant we left the mountain with no yennies in our pocket, and two of three American credit cards that, up to that point, had been denied when we tried to use them. The Fujiyuka train station wouldn't accept our ATM cards to make a withdrawal, and save for the round-trip train tickets we had purchased, we would have been a couple of out of luck gaijin.

We made it back to the city thanks to those train tickets, but we were penniless. The plan was to meet friends at the Yakult Swallows game, where we'd need some yen to get in, buy hot dogs, and then a little more for subway fare to our beds that evening. We looked all over the Harajuku subway station — only Japanese ATM accepted. We stopped at a Family Mart (kind of like a 7-11), and our American banks were no good there. We kept walking toward the stadium, and on a quiet little street there's a — yep — a Sev. How could we resist?

I stood at the door while Timm went to the machine, tucked back behind the newsstand, and asked for another 200,000 20,000 yen. He turned around and smiled: "The Sev saves us again."

Mike instructs his daughter in the ways of the Seven Eleven on
our trip to the Boso Peninsula. Arrigato gozaimasu.