Onigiri (Jee In Chung)

      Have you ever wondered why there is a convenience store on every corner in Tokyo?

The main secret of their success is their inexpensive “bento” lunchboxes and other delicious food‐to‐go. As a student on a budget, I have found that one of the cheapest convenience‐store offerings, the humble onigiri, makes a very satisfying lunch. 

      Wedge‐shaped and wrapped in plastic, onigiri may not look too appetizing at first. The “outside” ingredients – cold boiled rice covered with a sheet of nori (dried seaweed) – don’t exactly make your mouth water either. But when you bite into the wedge, the savory, salty filling ‐‐ salmon, tuna, fish roe, fermented egg, pickled plums, fermented soybeans, or one of a score of similar ingredients – gives your taste buds a blast. And there are so many varieties that it will take you a month to try them all.

      You need to be careful of the plastic wrapper, though. If you don’t remove it properly, the nori will come off with it and you will be left holding a wedge of sticky rice. The trick is to grasp the tape at the top of the triangle and pull it all the way down and up the other side. This will separate the wrapper neatly into two halves, which you can then slide off. The plastic wrapper lets you safely carry the onigiri in a bag or backpack. To complete your meal, most convenience stores can sell you a bowl of a warming soup called oden. Ingredients such as boiled egg, daikon, and fish cake swim in a fishy broth to make oden the perfect winter comfort food. I find that its liquid warmth dilutes the starchiness of onigiri.

      Convenience‐store food is a great social leveler in Japan. Businessmen and students rush

in and out of their corner stores at lunch and dinner time to grab their bento boxes, onigiri and
oden. Line‐ups are rarely longer than two or three minutes and the food is not only cheap but
well‐preserved and easy to carry.

Of course, if you don’t eat seafood, your choices will be very limited, since the Japanese

love seafood and almost everything is based on ingredients from the sea. And unless you read Kanji you might not be able to figure out what’s inside your onigiri. But go ahead and take a chance; it’s certain to be delicious.