Weird food

There's a lot of weird food in Japan. I mean a lot. I'm not just talking about things like natto with a raw egg mixed into it, or pizza with corn on it.

Japan is a country that loves its food. Every town and area seems to be famous for some specialty food item. Every season, cafes and restaurants bring out seasonal menus (for example, autumnal dishes feature mushrooms, chestnuts, etc). New and short-time-only! snacks are constantly coming out. And there are lots of little restaurants, cafes and shops focusing on selling a particular, niche type of product.

Let's look at some examples I saw last year.

Cone pizza

It's a pizza, in cone shape.

From the sign, it appears that this means much, much more pizza sauce and cheese can be added to the pizza. What a good idea.

Though I wouldn't expect it to be as nice as a regular pizza, I may actually try this just to see what it's like.

Canned oden

If you don't know what oden is, it's disgusting even when 'fresh'. Basically, take various unidentifiable processed cakes, made from fish paste, konnyaku, tofu - and eggs - and simmer them in a hot vat for hours until they are soggy and smell bad.

You'll find these oden trays, particularly in winter, sometimes even in convenience stores.

I guess someone found sodden fish cakes attractive enough to try to sell them in a tin.

By the way, underneath, it says 'atataka-i', which means this canned abomination comes heated.

Weird bakery items

Japanese bakeries are nice because you can find a wide variety of small snacks. However, a lot of those snacks have weird surprises hidden inside, which is one of the best incentives for learning to read katakana quickly.

Recently I bought a kind of hot dog from a bakery, and started eating it, when I realised it had fish eggs in it. FISH EGGS in my HOT DOG. 

Hamburger pizza

What I mean by this is a pizza with eight individual hamburger patties on the top of it.

I have seen many other examples of 'chucking random items of food onto a pizza'. Such as a pizza topped with chicken nuggets. Or potato wedges. Or an entire wheel of camembert cheese. >_<

Ice dogs

What this is is a cheap, low-grade hot dog bun, with cheap, low-grade soft serve icecream inside.

It's a SOFT SERVE ICE CREAM HOT DOG.

I might actually be up for this if the quality of the bread didn't scream '6 for 100 yen, reduced for quick sale'. But I could not eat that bread without anything more substantial on it to mask the taste...