Today’s featured food is a staple of fast-food life here. But this ain’t no greasy hamburger. For only ¥100, you get a tasty, healthy snack. Onigiri is a rice ball, usually filled with one ingredient and wrapped in seaweed. All convenience stores offer a large selection, ranging from ¥100 to ¥150 (one U.S. dollar is currently about ¥117). My favorite is the one with smoked salmon in the middle. The convenience store (“conbini”) versions are cleverly wrapped to prevent the seaweed from touching the rice until you unwrap it. This keeps the seaweed crisp and fresh.
I’ll be eating the one in the picture as soon as I post this.
Yum. It looks like each one of those snack treats is shaped like a pyramid… but maybe they’re flatter than that.
Can you read what’s inside, or are you playing conbini roulette each time you bite into one?
I’m hungry…
They’re only two-dimensional triangles, and are about an inch thick. I recognize the kanji characters for the ones I like (the onigiri in the picture shows the character for “salmon”).