Last week oden returned to 7-11 and Lawson. This week it returns to FamilyMart. It’s official! Summer is over. Winter has begun.
What is oden? No one has ever been able to answer the question. Soup has soul. Oden has funk. If Famichiki is a hot, young TikTok influencer who dances for likes, then oden is a grizzled, chain-smoking war veteran who’s seen too much in life.
It’s a murky swamp only the bravest of us ever dare tread. It takes balls to grab that ladle and plunge it into that deep, dark sludge and fish out god knows what.
There’s no use memorizing the names of the items floating in that soup. They are just shapes of things. Bouncy triangles, chewy skewers, mushy sacks. It’s an abstraction of food.
Every bite yields the same question: what is this? And like a zen koan there is no right answer.
Some say that the soup served at all 7-11’s comes from a mother broth originally made in 1952 that’s stored at the central commissary. According to some Lawson owners they’re given two things why they buy a franchise: keys and oden soup ladled from all neighboring Lawson within a 5km radius. I’ve read on 4chan that some FamilyMart fanatics baptize their children in the conbini’s oden broth.
Your first trip to the conbini for oden represents a transition in your conbini life. A conbini-goer’s timeline is typically:
Child – milk tea and melon pan
Teenager — Famichiki and Strong Zero
Adult — Bento and Pocari Sweat
Elderly — Oden and 2-liters of Shochu
It took me five years before I could brave the oden tank. My fellow conbini boy Mike had been a fan of conbini oden for some time. Just as he had introduced me to the Famichiki he introduced me to oden.
I was living in a crappy apartment in Kanazawa. It was December. I had yet to purchase a kerosene heater thinking I could make it through the winter without one. I remember calling my family on Christmas nearly shivering. To warm myself up I walked to the nearest conbini and purchased a bowl of oden. I piped a bit of mustard on the rim of the bowl, pinched a stewed daikon, softly dipped it into the yellow mustard, and took a bite. It was perfect. The rank stew gushed from the waterlogged daikon and washed over me like a warm hug. With every bite I got a bit braver. Next I tried the hard-boiled egg, then the mochi sack, the fish cake, konyaku triangle, the clump of konyaku string that’s shaped like an octopus, and finally the gyusuji!
What a journey it was! And everyone should go on it.
We asked our Twitter followers how long it took them to finally dip into the oden tank.
🐥🖊Conbini Haiku🖊🐥
My God! What’s that smell?
Stinky pool of unknown things
Oden for dinner
Item of the Week
From the Dumpster
Think that’s a matcha doughnut? Think again! That’s a Nori Salt “Potato Ring”.
The conbini is full of tourist traps. The infamous curry doughnut has ruined many tourists’ breakfasts. You think you’re about to bite into a tasty jelly-filled snack only to find out it’s a fully loaded dirty diaper.
This guy may be even more pernicious because a green ring always means a matcha doughnut. Who is putting salt and nori on a…wait…what is a potato ring?!
This is pure madness. At the very least, its sufficient incentive to learn hiragana and katakana.
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