Like this, only male. And middle-aged.

Hello, everyone. It turns out I'm not dead after all.

Honestly, I'm not. I've just been the victim of some bad timing recently. First, I became extremely ill last summer and had to be hospitalized for a little while. I followed that up with a lovely case of the stomach jimmies, and then followed that up with a nice cold. Viruses apparently adore me, although the good news is that I can no longer be killed by any diseases short of the Andromeda Strain.

The other aspect of the timing has had to do with my day job, which involves driving a flatbed semi truck all over the United States and Canada. This is an extremely difficult and physically demanding gig, and I have managed, in betweeen bouts with contagion and plague, to injure various parts of my body in many interesting (read:horrible) ways. I've also recently switched to a new truck, which is nice, but entails a bit of a learning curve.

Enough whining. Why am I doing all this? Well, when I moved back to the States from Japan, I didn't really have a lot of resources available to me, due to some more bad timing. Lincoln let me move back into his place and didn't charge me any rent for quite some time, until I was able to get back on my feet.

So, in return, I'm paying for a Big Trip to Japan that the two of us are taking in March. Partly, it's a vacation; partly, it's a fact-finding trip for an upcoming Big Idea that Los Hermanos Stax are developing; mostly, it's an excuse for us to geek out and drink heavily with loads of cute Japanese girls.

This is why I've been working like a fool and not writing much.

The Sign of Awesome.

In light of this upcoming journey, I'd like to discuss one of the too-many-to-list awesome aspects about living in Japan, namely, things you can buy at a Lawson's for about a hundred yen.

Let's start by taking a look at our two components.

Lawson Station is a chain of convenience stores located all over Japan, which is amazing when you consider that no Japanese person can actually say or recognize the spoken words, “Lawson Station.” I used to try to tell my Japanese friends to meet me in front of or near a Lawson's, only to be met with blank stares until I finally gave up and pronounced it Japanese fashion, to wit, “Ro-son-zu.” If you are in Japan, there is most likely a Lawson's store within shouting distance of your location.

One of these = One McDonald's cheeseburger.

The one hundred yen coin is the basic unit of money in Japan, in much the same way that a quarter is the basic unit of money in America. The “basic unit” is defined, by me, as “the minimum unit of currency that it's really worth your while to bend down and pick up.” The economics of the US and Japan are quite different. A hundred yen is equivalent in value, roughly, to a US dollar, but it spends about like a quarter. They even look alike.

People unfamiliar with Japan always say the same thing: “Isn't it an awfully expensive place to live?” Well, yes, and, then again, not so much. For one thing, most people, when they visit Japan, go to Tokyo and eat in tourist restaurants and stay at tourist hotels. If you go to New York City, eat at snazzy restaurants, and stay at top hotels, it's going to be expensive. I learned fairly quickly how to eat and live on the cheap in Japan, and Lawson's was a big part of that.

Aww, how adorable. Let's eat them.

The first, and my personal favorite, of the hundred-yen items is the onigiri. Onigiri are basically a fist-sized wad of sticky white rice with something delicious stuffed inside and wrapped in seaweed. Lawson make a variety of onigiri, but my own delicious snack fave is the tuna-mayonnaise flavor, which is, yeah, tuna salad. Damn, it's tasty. I want one now. I also liked the tuna-mayonnaise type because the name was written in phonetic katakana script, so I could read it and be sure I wasn't going to end up with squid menudo, or whatever.

Fish and sweet bean paste. Those go together, right?

Another nice little entree is nikuman, which is a steamed bun filled with goodness. (The Chinese version is called hom bow or char siu bow, which are also delicious.) I don't know why these aren't more popular in America. For about a buck, you get, again, a handful of steamed dough stuffed with BBQ pork, or pizza meat, or curry... Excuse me. Gotta wipe the drool off the keyboard.

If you're in the mood for sweets, you can buy some an-pan, which is a nikuman stuffed wuth sweet bean paste, or taiyaki, which are fish-shaped cakes stuffed with the same. Why are they fish-shaped? Why is sweet bean paste so tasty? Who cares? Don't overthink it. You can get taiyaki stuffed with other stuff too, but for some reason, they aren't always available.

Like this, only delicious. And cheaper.

How about some chicken? For another quarter-shaped pseudo-dollar, you can have a paper cup full of some really fine chicken, like McNuggets, only edible. (Every time I eat an order of McNasties, it seems like one of them is made entirely of gristle and tubes. Yak.) They come in different flavors, like Hot, and, um, Regular, I guess. They also do some really excellent popcorn chicken. If you have another coin, you can add a bag of “American Fried Potato,” which is, yep, French fries. They're okay, if you're looking for a chicken-and-chips-type of thing.

I can and will drink enough of this stuff to float a battleship.

Finally, let's get something to drink. A can of Coke is one hundred and twenty yen. It doesn't matter if you buy it from a grocery store, a vending machine, the airport newsstand, grandma's corner store, a guy in the street, or the Coca-Cola Company main office in Saitama: one hundred and twenty yen. For the record, this is called “price-fixing,” and has been illegal in the USA for a long time.

So forget the Coke. You can get a nice big paper carton of tea for a hundred yen. It's a nice big cold liter of different types of tea: green tea, Oolong tea, peach tea, berry tea... They are all delicious, and all worth trying. (Although, for the record, I used to grab the 1.5 liter PET bottles of green tea from the 99 Shop whenever I could.)

Convenience stores in Japan are just awesome, and I could devote a whole website to them if I wanted to, which thank Christ I don't. But they are a great way to get a nice lunch for cheap. I could get a onigiri, a bag of chips, and a carton of tea for about three bucks, which is a good way to save money for the more important things in Japan, like beer.