“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.

Help Wanted Ads on Craigslist

Among the many websites I watch daily through RSS feeds is Craigslist for job postings. It is suppose to be for Tokyo and Japan but some postings for the USA and other countries sometimes appear. Accidental mis-postings or lazy posters who don’t bother checking the appropriate setting or who want to spam the world, I’ll never know why some of these are posted.

Besides these mis-postings or spammed postings are others that are obvious scams. Like this one I saw this morning.

Live Web cam Video Chat Performers Wanted (worldwide)
craigslist | all jobs in tokyo 2月 25, 2011 06:09
Wanting to do something extra from daily routine which can give mental satisfaction with some extra money? Weekly payouts. Free Payoneer Master Card.
Lets see, is it ok for you? Its the greatest opportunity to do something as web cam mOdEl for xBiz-2010 winner company by working at home without
any interrupt in regular routine. Its the easiest way to earn almost doing nothing at home.
Start now > http://www.freeregistercam.com

Not only is it an obvious scam (what the heck is a Web cam Video Chat Performer anyway) but the language used is hilarious as well as full of grammatic errors such as “Mental satisfaction”. Evidently, the person who wrote this doesn’t know English very well; so bad in fact, that some of it doesn’t make sense. I wonder if anyone ever responds to badly written postings that are so bad it takes guess work to figure out what they mean sometimes.

There are also those postings for some weird jobs like this one I saw yesterday:

Surveillance Specialists (Worldwide)
craigslist | all jobs in tokyo 2月 24, 2011 05:49
Small special ops team based in the US available for domestic and international operations.

-Military and Law Enforcement background
-Professionally trained with 20 years experience
-Specializing in: surveillance, fire arms training, executive protection, asset protection and maritime security.
-Operations on Contract Basis ONLY
-All expenses paid by client on domestic operations
– All expenses paid and equipment provided by client on international operations.

Others I’ve seen include someone wanting to hire bodyguards, beat someone up, and to sue the US government. But the most outlandish, funniest posting was a posting to hire a ninja:

Wanted: NINJA (South Korea)

from craigslist | all jobs in tokyo

WANTED:NINJA

I need a ninja to help me with some personal problems. if you are a go getter and take initiative and have throwing stars i would like to meet you.

This person has seen too many American ninja movies, that’s his personal problem. So they think that they can post to Tokyo and find ninjas because it’s Japan and ninjas are everywhere and they have throwing stars. HAHA!