Japan
Touring Japan’s Beloved Konbini (Convenience Stores)
Article & Photography by Jennifer Bain
Japan’s coolest souvenir is a pair of striped socks from a convenience store. Don’t believe me? Read the stories in Monocle, BBC and CNN about how FamilyMart partnered with Tokyo fashion designer Hiromichi Ochiai and sparked a “convenience wear” craze.
I first scored the iconic white line socks with green and blue stripes while exploring Hokkaido’s quirky islands and national parks. But when I returned for an Oku Japan walk along the Kumano Kodo pilgrimage trail, I went a little crazy and bought 20 pairs of socks in various styles.
Along the way, I fell in love with the convenience store culinary subculture in these “konbini” and even asked Arigato Travel/Arigato Japan Food Tours to design a custom tour for my last morning in Osaka.
“We are going to a total of seven convenience stores,” said tour guide Ronan Maynard Cancio, promising to show off the top three — FamilyMart, 7-Eleven and Lawson — plus “rare” and lesser-known chains.
“I’ve never offered this before,” Cancio admitted. “But right now, it’s like a big thing. A lot of people, especially tourists, they’re lost about what to get here. So they only know what they see on TikTok, on reels or the internet. They get the chicken, the egg sandwich. They get the rice balls — onigiri. But today of course you can get it too but I will show you some local favourites.”
What followed was a food and drink frenzy as we strolled the decidedly local side of the trendy Namba shopping and entertainment district for 3½ hours.
Cancio once worked night shifts at 7-Eleven, the Texas-born chain that arrived in Tokyo in 1974, went 24/7 a year later and is now a Japanese company. It’s credited with making konbini part of daily life for people searching for fresh, local food, umbrellas and office supplies while doing banking, paying bills and buying event tickets.
Japan’s FamilyMart and Lawson — which started out as a dairy store in Ohio before becoming a Japanese chain — are 7-Eleven’s biggest rivals.
It was easy to find Lawson’s white socks with blue and pink stripes created with Japanese retailer Muji. At FamilyMart, I lucked into special edition Stranger Things and Tokyo Marathon socks plus a glitter version of classic line socks. But 7-Eleven’s branded socks were sold out.
Anyway, Japan now has more than 55,000 konbini, including three “rare” chains I got to visit called Mini Stop, Daily Yamazaki and Poplar.
We sampled 20-plus things that morning, starting with FamilyMart’s best-selling “Famichiki,” boneless fried chicken that you put in a special bun already spread with tartar sauce for a pretty darn tasty “konbini hack.”
Lawson Store 100 was interesting. The Lawson spinoff embraces 100-yen discount store pricing and its makisushi natto makes slimy fermented soybeans wrapped in nori surprisingly edible.
To celebrate Japan’s strawberry season, we drank strawberry milk, feasted on a strawberry and whipped cream sandwich (for a change of pace from the globally adored egg sando), and made a strawberry banana smoothie from a cup of frozen chunks you put into a smoothie machine.
We had already eaten countless dorayaki (red bean pancakes) and 7-Eleven’s cold packaged pancakes with maple syrup and margarine while walking the Kumano Kodo, and so concentrated on new taste sensations.
Here’s some dangerous intel.
Hokkaido milk cream cake rolls from Lawson are impossibly soft and unforgettable. “This is the best dessert you can get from any convenience store,” Cancio declared. I agreed, until he found Ohayo Brulee, viral Japanese ice cream with a milk custard base and caramelized sugar top that cracks with a spoon just like crème brûlée.
No Japanese convenience store cuisine crawl is complete without these two desserts — and a pair of socks to go.
