My beloved @lionne and @poet returned from Japan a few weeks ago. With them, they brought a huge bag of barely-identifiable snacks of all kinds, colors and textures. They then scheduled a time and invited a few friends (including myself and @mrlightning) to play Japanese Roulette.

The game, which we invented on the fly, worked like this: every participant, on their turn, picked something from the pile in the center. Everyone then got a piece or one of their own (everything is individually packed and bite-sized) and we took a simultaneous bite into whatever it was. The winners are those who don't vomit or quit tasting until the pile has only previously tasted snacks. A kind of "last man standing" deal.

Spoiler: I won.

So once we got some water and prepared mentally, we began. Note that my "report" includes just the most memorable snacks. For example, Japanese poptarts are totally unexciting so they were not listed.

Rice Triangles

We started with the Japanese version of sandwiches: rice balls filled with tuna fish mixed with spiced yuzu with extra spices in the rice itself. These extra spices are called furikake, that are like bukake, but from seaweed. Except not really.

Made by the wonderful @lionne, these ranged from too spicy to "what is that flavor anyway" but were a helpful pallet cleanser later on.

Wasabi Kit Kat

This unnatural flavor for white chocolate is not what I expected, but it wasn't gross or spicy. Just weird to taste wasabi in sweet form.

Sizzly Hard Candy

What might it be in the bag making the egg (and Maayan in the photo) so sad?

Individually wrapped hard candy with drink flavors including grapes, cola and "blue".

Sukuru Gum AKA Looooong looooong maaaaaaaan

If you are not familiar with this Japanese ad, you will not understand why I insisted @poet and @lionne bring some of that weird candy with them from Japan. I just had to know what was so attractive about it aside from length.

To save the long long versions of the candy for @achiron, we tasted the "normal" sized versions of the candy.

These came individually wrapped in little packages that include various ways to eat the candy: cut it into stripes, make one long stripe, just bite into it, and our favorite: "Yell at unknown old person eating the candy".

We tasted both the melon and grapes versions and it's hard to pinpoint where this went wrong. Gummy is of interesting texture, the flavor is strong and the candy is sweet, but it's just not tasty.

Tiny cream puffs & Barbie food

I like small and cute things. So I was obviously excited by these tiny cream puffs with custard. They are cuter than they are tasty. Which is also true about the pink strawberry flavored cookies that tasted the way I imagine doll-food tastes to dolls.

Macha Pokeys

At this point, things got serious with our tasting of macha pokey sticks (crunchy bagel sticks with flavor on it) that look like incense. They also tasted like incense, but at least according to the box, were edible.

I did not enjoy it, but the macha yuckiness prepared me for the next trial, that broke a number of players in the game, making them quit.

Macha Kit Kat

White chocolate. Green tea flavor. What could possibly go wrong?

The vilest thing I've tasted.

Everything. Everything went wrong. It was so vile, I spat it out while screaming "WHY?!" in Hebrew. If you ask nicely in the comments, I may or may not upload it.

Single Serving Vanilla Pudding

This weird thing looked like an egg yolk and tasted like sweetened starch.

Pudding jelly custard that may or may not be made of plastic.

What the photo shows

I was wondering how it would be possible to put a whole strawberry in chocolate without it rotting. Apparently, you can replace all the water in the strawberry with sugar first.

Exact, down to the number in the bag.

Rice Marshmallows

It's very hard to describe the taste and texture of these traditional Japanese rice-balls. Rice marshmallow is the best description I have. I stayed away from the green ones, but didn't manage to stomach more than a bite from the "brown" one I picked.

Too bad you can't photograph textures

Puffed rice madness

Next up was a variety pack of puffed rice in a number of flavors ranging from cheese to grill to "rolled around grandpa's spice rack". The best way to describe the content of that bad would be "Processed food with the food part removed".

We don't know what these are, but we're brave!

It's important to note that some of the packages were downright scary.

Maybe cause spontaneous explosion into anime characters?

I don't even.

May contain frogs?

Bonus gift

Unlike the humans who got stomach aches and nausea, my cats got cute little hats. This is Grey, absolutely LOVING his.

There were a few other weird thing tasted that did not make it into this post: a pickled plum that tasted like expired farts, toffee (that was really good!) and random cookies and chocolates that did not merit mention nor made me ill enough to put the phone down and just gag in anguish.

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Yes yes yes I owe you more blog posts in the FOSS Marketing series, tutorials for my category on Utopian and maybe someday chapters of my sexy book. But I still barely find the time to post once a week. Blame @elear for having the coolest vision and infectious passion that keeps me working even when I pretend not to.