“What’cha drinkin’?” – Drink Vending Machines of Japan

Two Pepsi machines decorated with leaves.

One of the things you may notice right away when you travel around Japan are the drink vending machines. These are one of the best things about Japan (unless one falls on top of you during an earthquake). “What’s so neat about vending machines?”, you ask. Well here’s a picture of one. They are much different from the machines in the USA.

A Drink Vending Machine

The first thing is the variety of drinks available in the machine. There’s your normal drinks, like cola, varying types of sodas, and water. Then there’s canned coffee, tea, yogurt drinks, sports drinks, hot chocolate (called cocoa here), and energy drinks. All of these drinks can be found in the same machine. Canned coffee is very popular here and many machines offer different flavors and blends of coffee in the same machine. I may do a future piece on the different types of drinks available in Japan (there’s a lot).

The second thing you’ll see is that some of the drinks are hot and some of them are cold. And yes, they’re in the same machine. The hot drinks ARE HOT; at least hot enough that you may want to wait a few moments to cool after grabbing from the machine. The cold drinks are cold; not ice-cold but cold enough. During the summer, most of drink vending machines offer only cold drinks, however some machines do offer a few hot drinks also. The vendors are very punctual about changing out most of the cold drinks with hot drinks once September starts. And then again changing the hot drinks to cold drinks around April.

Another thing you’ll notice after a short time going around, is that drink vending machines are EVERYWHERE! Sometimes it seems that no matter where you turn, there’s a vending machine nearby. I’ve even been on a lonely mountain road with no houses nearby and there was a vending machine on the side of the road. Along main roads, there are places to pull over and buy a drink from a long row of vending machines. (On a side note, public toilets are not so common.)

A long row of drink machines at a rest area.

Drink machines are, for the most part, wider than the machines in the U.S.A. Probably because they offer more kinds of drinks. Also, the display lights inside are bright; at night they are almost overpowering bright. Another interesting thing is that some machines also contain AEDs (automated external defibrillator) and a few have phones inside them for emergencies. Some have TV panels built inside that play drink commercials of that brand when not in use.

A cup vending machine

Another type of drink vending machine is the cup drink machine. It dispenses drinks in paper cups, not cans or bottles. And it makes and mixes the beverage at the time of the sale. Inside the machine, the different ingredients for the different types of drinks are kept in separate compartments. When someone selects a drink, say a coffee, it heats up the water, pours the water through the stored coffee grounds and into the cup size the customer selected (they usually offer two sizes, small or slightly larger than small), adds sugar and cream, and mixes. Then the machines notifies you that you can retrieve your drink from a small door. You can also customize your coffee drink with more or less cream or sugar. For iced drinks, it pours crushed ice into the cup before the drink is poured in. Pretty cool! These kind of machines are a little more expensive as you don’t get as much drink as is contained in a normal can or bottle, but the drinks usually taste better.

With all of the drink machines around, you can imagine the electric costs required to run them is pretty high. After the March 11, 2011 earthquake and the resulting nuclear accident at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, there was an electrical power shortage in and around Tokyo. We had rolling blackouts throughout the areas for a couple of weeks afterward. Many people were outraged that the drink machines used up electricity all day and night. They sucked up a lot of juice (pun intended), especially the more advanced types with TV screens and etc. The vendors quickly replaced these power hogs with simpler, “power-efficient” machines. Supposedly, these new machines will turn off or go into a stand-by mode at night.

Drink machines at night

One of my favorite things to do in Japan, as I travel around, is to look at the drink machines to see what drinks they offer and the prices. Most machines sell drinks for ￥150 for bottles (bottled water is usually ￥120) and canned drinks for ￥120. But there are some ￥100 machines that sell drinks that are close to big brand named drinks. But sometimes the big brand name machines are discounted. Close to my work, on the corners of two small streets with little traffic, there are a Coke machine, a Pepsi machine, and one of these ￥100 machines. For a while now, the Pepsi and Coke have been having a price battle and offer different drinks at ￥100. But just last fall, the Pepsi machine knocked down the price on some drinks to ￥90. Unfortunately, this is not the norm and I’ve never seen it in another location.

The drink vending machines is close to the top of my most favorite things about Japan. On hot, muggy summer days, it is very nice to have your favorite cold drink available and close at hand to cool down with. Or on cold winter nights, while waiting for a train in a cold, lonely train station, it is delicious to wrap your hands around the heated can of a hot drink; so not only is it a drink to warm you up inside, but it makes a great hand warmer.

The Great Northeastern Japan Earthquake (東日本大震災)

I moved to Japan over three years ago and I’ve felt many earthquakes, some small and a few stronger ones. But life changed for me, as well as for many other people in Japan, I’m sure, on Friday, March 11, 2011 around 2:50 PM when a mega-earthquake hit off of the northeastern coast of Japan. It was a magnitude 9 quake, but just outside of Tokyo, in Chiba, where I was at the time, it was about a M7 intensity.

I was at my company’s main school in Chiba City, preparing lessons for the following week when the earthquake started. At first, my co-workers and I weren’t alarmed as it felt like all of the other earthquakes that happen so frequently in Japan. But this one kept going on and on and the intensity kept getting stronger and stronger. When items on the top of shelves started falling off, we decided it was time to get under the tables. Then the shaking got much, much worse. The terrible shaking seemed to last hours but in realty, it lasted about four minutes. We were on the second floor of an old building, and my thoughts during the entire time was that the building was going to collapse in and I was truly going to die.

After the shaking seemed to have stopped, we put our shoes on (we took our shoes off and leave them at the entrance to the school) and went down the stairs and outside as quickly as we could. My heart was beating rapidly and I felt a little weak, as if I had just survived a traumatic accident. I guess it was adrenaline for the “fight or flight” reaction to danger. As we got outside, many other people were coming out of nearby buildings. Below our school is a small pub that had many bottles of Japanese sake that fell and broke during the quake. The smell of alcohol coming out of their door was overpowering.

After waiting outside for a few minutes, we went back inside the school to start cleaning up the potted plants, books, and other things that had fallen during the quake. But then the earth started shaking again, so we quickly went back outside. I tried to call my wife on my mobile phone to make sure she and my daughter were OK, but right away I got a message that the call couldn’t be connected. After the first big earthquake, I can’t be sure that the ground ever stopped shaking; it seemed that it was always slightly trembling but would occasionally have strong shaking.

The boss decided that we should go to a nearby park, so we grabbed our bags and things as soon as the shaking had lessened. I decided to leave to go to my next class at a school, which was a short bus ride away. I told one co-worker that I was going and I walked to the bus stop at the train station.

Let me just say, I knew it was a pretty big earthquake, but as it was Japan, where quakes are almost a daily occurrence (mostly small ones), I thought that business would resume as normal once the shaking stopped or at least decreased. This would have been before the tsunamis struck the northeastern parts of Japan and I heard nothing of a tsunami warning. Luckily no tsunamis came to the area where I was. I didn’t hear anything about the tsunamis until late that night. So I planned to continue working.

I went through the train station get to the bus stop and I found the train station was flooded with a couple of inches of water that I had to wade through. I assumed that a water pipe must have broken in the station during the violent shaking. Just as I reached the bus stop, another big tremor hit. Besides feeling the ground moving, I could see telephone poles whipping back and forth and I could hear metal creaking and groaning from all directions. The bus I was about to board was violently rocking back and forth, so much that I had a slight worry that it would tip over. Someone was shouting in the train station’s PA for everyone to get out of the station. But after a little while it was over and nothing had come crashing down.

Luckily the buses were still running and I rode it to the train station next to the department store where my next classes’ were held. All this time, I kept trying to call my wife, but would immediately get the recording that service was out. I couldn’t email from my phone as the keypad broken. Before I left my co-workers at our head school, I heard someone say that mobile email was working, but no phone calls from mobiles were. They told me that land line phones probably would work.  But the only phones my wife and I had were our mobiles; we didn’t have a land line phone at home.

When I reached my destination, I found that they had evacuated everyone from the inside of the entire department store that the school was located in. As I waited outside with other people, I found the school’s staff and they told me the building was closed for now. They soon disappeared into the crowd and I didn’t see them again that day. Thinking that the department store and school would open after a while, I decided to wait around. While waiting, I continued to try calling my wife, but managed only to drain the battery on my phone until it was dead. However, I did find an open wireless connection and was able to connect to FaceBook on my iPod Touch and we were able to communicate that way. Both my daughter and wife were OK, so that was a big relief for me. I also emailed my family in the US to let them know that we were all right.

By then, the sun was going down and it was getting colder. The train station had earlier closed (they actually closed their roll-down gates, first time I’d every seen it) with a sign that the trains weren’t running until further notice. I decided to walk to another train station to see if I could catch a bus. I walked the 30 minutes walk and found huge lines in front of a few bus lines, but none of them were going to where I needed to go. So I started walking home.

That night, I ended up walking the entire way home, 22 Km or 14 miles in about six hours. I stopped about halfway at a convenience store to get dinner, but pretty much everything was sold out and there were a lot of bare shelves. My dinner ended up being a package of peanuts, an ice cream bar, and a bottle of lemon flavored water. It was delicious! After finishing, I continued on.

There were many other people of all ages walking, both towards Tokyo (the direction I was headed) and away from Tokyo. I saw many men in ties and business suits (they wouldn’t even take off their neck ties) and women in dresses and high heeled shoes. I saw elderly people too, walking as fast as they could. I even saw some families with very young children that must have been at Tokyo Disneyland that day. The father and mother were carrying the young children on their backs.

But the people walking were arguably the lucky ones. At least they were getting closer to their destinations. The streets were congested with traffic that barely moved forward. I later heard from other people who traveled by car, of spending most of the night in traffic and finally getting to their destination in the wee hours of the morning.

By the time I reached home, my legs felt like rubber and I could barely move them forward. Fortunately, my iPod’s battery lasted the entire time and I had an audio book to listen to as I walked. It made the time and suffering go by much faster. I made it to up the stairs to our apartment, got inside, and crashed onto the couch. I didn’t move for an hour from it. It was at this time that I first heard about the tsunamis that hit Northeastern Japan and killed so many people. My wife and I watched on TV the videos of the tsunamis. We were horrified at the destruction we saw in the videos. And all through the night, we kept feeling aftershocks, some of them were quite severe and caused yet another rush of adrenaline.

The following days brought about the explosions at the Fukushima Nuclear power plant and the resulting panic and worry of radioactive fallout. Chiba/Tokyo was a good distance away, but we were still very worried. Many foreigners living and working in the area left the country, some temporary and some for good. For me, I wanted to stay but at the same time we were worried about the radioactivity. My family kindly offered financial assistance if we did need to leave. That was a great comfort. But we ended up not needing to leave. That next August, I got a job offer at a school on the other end of Japan, so we moved to Kagawa Prefecture on the island of Shikoku in Western Japan. Which is where I am now as I update this posting in Jan. 2012 and then again in Jan. 2013.