Boss Coffee and Other Stories

I don’t know what you’ve been told about Japanese vending machines but it’s all true. There are machines that dispense toilet paper, and cigarettes, and beer, and tea, and soft drinks, and who knows what else. Some vending machine beverages are simply necessities of life, whereas others are Pocari Sweat. Pocari Sweat (so labeled in soothing blue-and-white roman type) is some sort of absurdly sweet sports drink; think of it as Gatorade without the flavor. Yes, it’s really called that and people actually drink it.

I was drawn to the ever-present Japanese tea, while Ryan availed himself of his two stimulants of choice. Now, vending-machine beer is fairly easy to wrap your mind around; cheap beer is supposed to come in a can, after all. Ready-to-drink coffee is not. And yet there we were, staring at a vending machine filled with about ten varieties of Boss Coffee. There’s original Boss Coffee, and Mild Boss Coffee, and Boss Coffee Au Lait, and Boss Decaf, all emblazoned with the warm yet commanding image of the pipe-smoking, mustachioed Boss mascot. I think Ryan and I were both a little spooked by coffee in a can, even if it was available in your choice of hot or cold (as indicated by the English inscriptions HOT and COLD above the buttons). But Ryan needed his coffee, so he deposited a hundred yen or so and pushed the button for a hot original Boss.

And out came a warm aluminum can. If you’ve never experienced this before, there’s no way you can be prepared for it.

Ryan’s instant review of Boss Coffee: “Sweet enough to kill a horse, but otherwise surprisingly drinkable.” I think he tried most of the Boss varieties before we left the country, and also discovered the coffee vending machines’ virtue as a source of heat as well as caffeine: wandering around the cold streets of Sapporo without mittens, he found that two coat pockets with a hot Boss can in each one made an even better hand-warmer.