The Starbucks green tea frappuccino - and how to get one that actually tastes Japanese

Japanese matcha frappuccinos and a matcha and chocolate danish.

One of my favorite American/Japanese mashups is the Starbucks green tea Frappuccino. The funny thing is there are still regular Starbucks visitors in the US who don't know this exists! It's not on the menu at most Starbucks, and the other day at my local store, a girl saw the barista handing one to me and exclaimed in shocked disbelief, "a green tea... FRAPPUCCINO?!?" But yes, they make them, and they've made them for probably a decade now. I swear for a while it was on the actual menu, but it hasn't been for some time now anywhere I go - but that doesn't mean you can't still get one.

(According to the Starbucks web site, some locations do apparently list a Tazo Green Tea Frap on the menu, but none of the locations I frequent do, and anyway I'm not talking about the Tazo version, which is apparently "infused with tropical fruit flavors".)

The green tea Frappuccino did actually originate in Japan - it is not an American interpretation, I mean ignoring the fact that Starbucks is an American company and "Frappuccino" sounds like a perverted interpretation of a faux-Italian drink. But the green tea Frap was invented by Starbucks Japan, in Japan.

When they brought it over to the US, they originally put it on the menu as a "raspberry green tea Frappuccino", apparently thinking that plain old green tea was just too sophisticated for Americans, who have to slather everything in some kind of sugary syrup to kill with sweetness the actual taste of whatever they're actually drinking. But they found that so many people were ordering it without the raspberry syrup that they eventually relented and gave us the pure green tea Frap. (Hint: if you are in a location that offers the Tazo version, you can probably ask for it without the tropical fruit flavors!)

The Japanese version is still a little different, though. I like their version even better (what did you expect?) - it tastes more like real green tea. I'm not convinced it's possible to really get an American one to taste exactly the same because I think the Frap base itself is probably different, but if you want to approximate the taste of the Japanese version, you can come pretty close now that Starbucks lets you make Fraps any way you like. Here's how to order:

American green tea frappuccino made to approximate the taste of the Japanese version

If you can't read that, the important parts are "1/2 CL" and "X Macha". I confess I'm not up on the advanced Starbucks terminology, but I basically order half sweetness and extra matcha. Japanese green tea Fraps are stronger and less sweet than American ones. 1/2 sweetness is still plenty sweet! I'm thinking of trying unsweetened next time, which they actually offered me a while back, before I realized I could go halfway. I gave the barista a pretty incredulous look myself at being offered an unsweetened Frappuccino, but apparently there are people who order them that way.

UPDATE! Unsweetened is definitely even closer to the original. The frap base is sweetened already, so there's no need for extra sweetness. Also, 6 scoops of matcha (in a grande) will get you almost 100% to a Japanese green tea frap, although I will admit that this will be a little strong for Americans who aren't used to the taste of real green tea.

Incidentally, if you're in Japan, you're actually looking for a "Matcha Frappuccino". Matcha is a particular type of powdered green tea (it is not a term interchangeable with green tea). I'm guessing they use the same powder here, which is why the barista wrote "X macha" on mine - but they actually put it on the menu that way in Japan. It's got a little more cachet than just calling it "green tea" there; "green tea" being a more generic catch-all term, like if Starbucks here were to just put "black coffee" on the menu, instead of listing the different roasts and bean varieties that they have.

Also!  Here's one more little thing I wish they'd bring over to the US:

Those are black sesame and matcha macarons.  (Not macarOOns... macarons).  Black sesame is kind of an acquired taste, but once you've acquired it, there is no better base for any sort of sweet food.  (I say "food" on purpose, not drink; I did have a black sesame bubble tea once and it was... how to put this... challenging.)  And it's the perfect little complement to a green tea Frap... unlike that matcha and chocolate danish I tried to make it through up in the pic at the top.  Green tea and chocolate... ugggghhhh!

Is Tokyo radioactive?

So I brought my geiger counter with me to Japan last month, half serious about wanting to make sure nothing I ate or nowhere I went was going to kill me with radiation. By this time, though, I think most people's fears have justifiably waned a bit, but I do still see paranoid people in various Japan-themed forums I read that are stuck under their tinfoil hats and insisting that the government is lying and Tokyo is really just a glowing post-apocalyptic hellhole of nuclear fallout and radioactivity, and everyone there is facing a slow and painful burning, flesh-eating death.

So here's my informal little test. I think it pretty much speaks for itself.

By the way, background radiation normally induces one or two clicks per minute even in the United States, so the one click you saw at the end is totally, 100% normal. (Probably should have noted that tidbit in the video itself.)

Riding in a Joban Line Green Car

I previously blogged about my experience in a shinkansen green car - basically the closest thing the Japanese have to "first class" on most trains.  But did you know they also have green cars on some commuter trains?  My wife's family lives on the Joban line, and luckily it's one such line.

She had never taken one before and every time we visit, we lug all of our luggage into a standard car and either leave it sitting in the middle of the car or have to stand with it for 45 minutes because the trains are so crowded.  I unfortunately have never taken a photo of a regular Joban line car but usually they look something like this:

(That photo's from urbanneighbourhood.com, but I'm sure it's a stock photo.)

You can imagine riding a train like that with three or four large suitcases in tow, for up to an hour.

This time I pretty much insisted that we take a green car both to and from Tokyo.  Well, the inbound leg didn't quite work out as planned - we ended up barely making a Hitachi Limited Express train instead, and we stood in the vestibule halfway to Ueno.  We did manage to make it to the "green car" at the first (and only intermediate) stop, but it was just like any other car on that train.  On the plus side, it was pretty empty, and the train was fast - about 20 minutes to Ueno instead of the usual 45.

Our "green car" on the way in to Tokyo - not bad for a Japanese commuter train, but we had to pay extra both for the express fare and the green car, and there was just nothing special about this alleged green car.

We finally made it into a proper green car on the way back out.

Just compare that with the photo at the top.  It's a completely different world.  The seats face forward (and recline!), there's plenty of legroom, and for some reason, almost nobody else uses these cars!  Forget about people standing in the aisles - through most of our trip, we had the entire end of the car to ourselves.  This was the real reason I wanted to ride in one - just to get out of the crowd.  I knew from previous experience that whenever I've seen a Joban line train pull into a station, the green cars are basically empty.  I can't believe they make any money off these cars.

The green cars on the Joban line are bi-level cars, but they do have single-level seats at the ends.  Since we had four heavy suitcases plus a bunch of paper bags full of stuff with us, we went for the single-level seats.  I don't know if I could even stand up in the bi-level section of the car - the cars aren't any taller than the regular single level cars.  Unlike in American bi-level commuter trains, the single-level section has a door, so you feel like you're in your own little room when you're in this area.

Here's where we sat from the outside:

The unexpected bonus: like on the shinkansen, car attendants come through the Joban line green cars with snacks and drinks!  Remember now, this is on a commuter train.  This is like getting at-seat snack service on the LIRR - imagine such a thing.  My wife didn't even expect this, and she lived in Japan for 28 years.  It was brutally hot outside and we were loaded up with stuff so I quenched my thirst with an iced green tea bought from the car attendant.

The cost for our green car seats?  Only 550 yen - about $6 extra over a standard ticket.

Totally worth it.  I would ride this way every day if I lived on this line, or at least a couple times a week.  It's a much more civilized way to travel.

You can get a green car ticket at any ticket machine - and you can buy it separately from the main ticket.  (In other words, if you aren't sure and decide to buy it later, you can do it even after buying your original ticket.)  On some platforms, there are machines just for buying green car tickets for those making last-minute decisions.

Look for this option on any JR train you happen to take in Japan.  Not all trains have it, but most commuter trains with a lengthy run do, as do the vast majority of shinkansen trains and most "express" trains.  As our experience on the Hitachi Express demonstrated, it's not always worth it, but two out of the three green cars I've ridden in so far have been 100%, totally worth the extra money.

Japan 2011 The Food: Breakfast

This was our western-style breakfast at our hotel.  I'm always amused by "western-style" breakfasts in Japan, because there's always some weird element that we would never, ever have in the morning.  In this case, it's a salad with raw onions.  I had to brush my teeth again after eating this!  (Yeah I ate it... I was feeling vegetable-deprived at that point, since almost all of our meals this trip were meat, meat and more meat.)

The first time I ever went to Japan, in 1999 or 2000, I had my first western-style breakfast, and the pattern was set.  Included in my breakfast that day were... (drum roll)... french fries!  Not hash browns, not some other, more commonly accepted breakfast form of potato, but full-on french fries, like you'd expect to get with your Whopper with Cheese at Burger King.

I think this all stems from the fact that Japanese breakfasts are more or less just another meal with the same ingredients as lunch and dinner.  Traditionally they're based on things like fish and rice, like any other meal.  So they don't quite get that western breakfast is a whole separate thing from the later meals in the day.  If they feel like some element's missing, they'll just grab it from some other meal.

Anyway, a lot of people go to places like Japan and get western stuff there because they don't really want to feel like they ever left home.  Me, I get western stuff specifically because I enjoy their interpretations of it.  Not everybody understands this, and my parents used to yell at me for not immersing myself in the local culture whenever I went somewhere new.  But to me these somewhat off interpretations of western culture are a part of Japanese culture, in the same way that "Engrish" is Japanese culture and not really English.  I have fun with the little manglements.

Tokyo Sky Tree

I'd forgotten they were even building this thing until our second to last day in Japan, but I had seen it from a distance and wondered what the hell it was. I looked it up and suddenly remembered reading about a "new Tokyo Tower" a while back - well, it's now the Tokyo Sky Tree.  And it's the tallest free-standing tower in the world.

That's a stitched panorama, so I know there's a little weirdness at the seams.  (Autostitch seems to want to match the wires rather than the tower.)

It's not really in such a dumpy neighborhood, I just liked this juxtaposition as we walked around it.  It's actually in Asakusa, which is both an area with a famous temple and from where we took the Himiko boat to Odaiba a few years ago.  And they're building a whole new tourist destination around this tower, but it's not done yet.

It's kind of impossible to convey how tall this thing looks in person.  Here's a side view:

It is the tallest structure in Tokyo by far.  At 634 meters (2,080 feet), it is currently the second tallest free-standing structure of any kind on Earth, next to the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.  (It doesn't get included on lists of "world's tallest buildings" because it is a "tower", not a "building", though that's kind of a meaningless distinction when you're talking about a tower like this.)  It probably won't hold that distinction for long, but in any case, it's freakin' tall.  It's kind of weird that hardly anybody outside of Japan seems to even know about it.

One reason may be that it's not finished, but then everybody knew about the Burj Khalifa or CN Tower before they were finished.  But you can't go up in it yet; all you can do is walk around it and take pictures like I did.  When they do open the observation deck, they're apparently going to be charging around $30 to get up there - kind of a ripoff, but I'll bet people will pay it.  It's not like views like that are so easy to get in Tokyo.

If you're wondering what's wrong with Tokyo Tower (other than the fact that it's bent) and why they need a new huge tower like this in Tokyo, apparently you can blame it all on HDTV and other digital broadcasts; Tokyo Tower is too short and in too congested an area to carry those kinds of signals.

Japan 2011 The Food: Teas' Tea New York

I have a lot of little food-related posts to make about my recent trip - my wife and I are the kind of people that take pictures of everything we eat.  So I'll just sprinkle a few of these in with the rest.  I'll start with...

This tea does not exist in New York.  I repeat: it does not exist in New York.  We were pretty annoyed by this, actually, because the ads for this tea run on TV about once every five minutes, and they feature a woman slowly sipping this tea in what's supposed to be a penthouse apartment in New York City.  We have never heard of this tea in New York City.

It's honestly pretty good tea, though.  Uses stevia as a sweetener.  Also has 90% less caffeine.  Just call it something else!

Tokyo area earthquake damage

I wrote earlier that while the Great Tohoku Earthquake of 3/11 wasn't really the knockout blow in Tokyo that some westerners still seem to think it was, there was still some damage that's visible even today. Here are a few more photos of that - I actually can't be 100% sure that this is all earthquake damage, but in some cases I know it is.

First, here's a reprise of the damaged houses I posted earlier:

A little different photo, but you see all the blue tarps covering the damaged roofs. This was in Ibaraki prefecture. I also passed by a building that had collapsed completely and where one person had died, but I didn't take a photo of it. Mostly the area is intact, but you do see a few things like this here and there.

This is one of the gates to the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. We asked the security guard and he said yes, this is earthquake damage. There was actually a lot of this around the palace, which isn't really too surprising given that many of the buildings on the grounds were built around 400 years ago. (Well, I guess that makes it surprising in one way, if they've survived that long.)

This may or may not be earthquake damage - we didn't ask - but it's weird if it isn't. I'm not sure what else they could be doing here other than fixing a giant hole that opened up in the stone palace garden walls.

This is a random patch in the walls of the subway. Not a common sight in the Tokyo subway, and it looks fresh. I'm assuming there was a minor collapse here that's been fixed.

And of course, the most oddly disturbing and symbolic visual - the tip of Tokyo Tower is bent. This was easily visible from our hotel. (I shot this photo from our hotel window.) Last I heard, there are no immediate plans to fix this. I don't know - it seems a little dangerous to me to leave a big piece of metal that high up bent like this - but apparently they don't really know what to do about it.

Well, that's all I saw. That's all I saw. I know from experience that it's easy to look at photos like this and get an idea that the whole city is a shambles, but only a tiny percentage even has so much as a crack. Up north is a different story, but Tokyo was mostly spared.

I also mentioned before that I hadn't experienced an aftershock yet by my second day - well, now I can say I didn't feel a single one the entire time I was there.  There was one, but it was up north and you couldn't feel it in Tokyo.  My stay for the week I was there was peaceful.  Things seem to be calming down a lot.

AKB48: they finally got me. Also, home.

As I mentioned before, Japan is currently being overrun by AKB48. You can't get away from them. Flip around on the TV and you will find them. Walk on any commercial street and you'll hear their music blaring from somewhere, and probably see a poster or two (sometimes a hundred feet tall). They are, by far, the biggest musical act in Japan right now. And there's nothing equivalent in the US - I've never seen anything like this. Lady Gaga does not come close to this level of popularity, or maybe just promotion. And I'm embarrassed to admit that their marketing finally worked on me.

On our last day in Japan - literally at the Narita Airport Tsutaya store - I bought their Blu-Ray disc that was released this week, "AKB ga Ippai" ("Lots of AKB"). There was no way not to. My defenses are only so strong, and I can only hold out so long against this kind of assault.

That's a pretty big box for a Blu-Ray disc.

I don't think I'm going to become a fan - this is obviously not music to take seriously. But every trip to Japan I take ends up having a soundtrack. I always buy some CD or DVD that puts a backing track to my memories. Once it was Kimura Kaela's "Scratch". Another time it was Utada Hikaru's "Kiss and Cry" CD single. This year I figured it may as well be AKB48, considering they were pretty much in the background of every single photo I took anyway. This is the soundtrack to Japan right now, for better or worse.

Their marketing is pretty impressive, though. In addition to just saturating all the traditional media, they do things like putting one of three different sets of postcards in each DVD, so that if you want to collect them all, you need to buy at least three DVD's. They just had an "election" for the first leader of the group, and to vote you had to buy a CD to get a ticket. You could vote as many times as you wanted, but there was only one vote per ticket. Obviously, this meant that a lot of their fans bought multiple CD's just to vote more times. My wife heard about one guy who bought ten of the same CD just to get ten tickets, then he gave the CD's away to kids.

My Blu-Ray disc set came with three postcards plus one big plastic thing that's like a little laminated mini-poster (complete with fake signature). I had to pick this at random - you could get one of any of the girls on the front cover (I don't know how they picked who is on the front, they have 58 members!). That also means that if someone wants a specific girl, he/she would have to buy multiples. And people do it! Not me, though.

btw, this is not my first brush with AKB48 - despite not really being a fan, I seem to cross paths with them pretty often. They were at the Tokyo Game Show when I was there in 2007, and here they are walking by my store's booth at the New York Anime Festival a couple of years ago (they're the blurry mess wearing school uniform-ish jackets in the middle of the photo):

Oh, also? I'm back home. I've got a lot of other little posts I want to write about the trip, so watch for that this week!

It's HOT in Japan

I took this video from our hotel this morning. Keep in mind this was about 8:30AM, and half the kids here are already fanning themselves!

I am burned to a crisp right now. Yesterday was 95 degrees and the humidity... the humidity in Japan is like being in the tropics. NO ONE in New York can understand this feeling unless they've been out of the region - there just is no equivalent in the northeast, I don't care what the thermometer says even on the hottest day of the year. The soup you walk through in Tokyo makes it feel like it's about 140 when it's this hot out. I was drenched with sweat when we made it back to our hotel - my pants were literally soaking wet. I had to pay $15 to have the hotel wash them. And today wasn't much better. I'm going through at least two changes of clothes per day.

It's supposed to be like this until we leave. Ugh.

I've been taking lots of pictures - I actually do have some more things to post soon.

I'm in Japan!

Well, my pre-trip post appears to have bitten the dust (probably a victim of an errant auto-save from an outdated tab), but my wife and I are in Japan!

This is the view from our hotel window.  (That's a stitched panorama with about a 170 degree field of view; the original's huge.)  We're staying at the Grand Arc Hanzomon, which is a really nice hotel for a pretty cheap price.  I gotta say, I know how to pick hotels, and I always pick based on the view.

I know that the first question people are going to ask me when they find out I'm here is "but what about the earthquake??" or some variation thereof.  Is there any electricity?  Are there aftershocks all the time?  Are there rubble and bodies in the streets?  Is Tokyo a ghost town as everyone flees nuclear disaster?  Is anything open??

The answer is pretty much what I expected before I got here: a few things are different, most things are the same as always.  Obviously that's not completely true further north, but down here in Tokyo not a whole lot has changed.  Japanese TV is as insipid as always, for example.

There are a few reminders of what happened/is happening, however.  Enough so that a western news outlet hellbent on telling a dramatic story could find enough material if they looked.  To whit:

This is a roof covered in blue tarp.  (You can see a second one in the left side background.)  Traditional houses like this dot the landscape; the blue tarps are covering roof damage.  There's not enough roofing material to fix them all, so they sit like this.

This, however, is not earthquake damage.  This is just an interesting building.  It is important to note the difference.

This ticket machine in the Tokyo subway is out of service to conserve electricity, given that the Fukushima nuclear plant #1, which supplies power to Tokyo, is out of commission permanently.  You do see signs like this in various places either talking about things that are out of service or asking people to conserve.

But I was kind of expecting to see lights out everywhere, no air conditioning and maybe even rolling blackouts, and there is just none of that.  Tokyo's never had very good air conditioning so it's hard to know whether they're conserving or it's just generally crappy climate control, but I don't really detect much difference in a/c use versus any normal year.  As I look out my hotel window right now at 8:40PM, I see lights on all over the city (including Tokyo Tower being lit up like a Christmas tree).  And there hasn't been a rolling blackout since I've been here.

I also haven't experienced an aftershock yet, although my wife says there was a 4.0 before I got here.  Still, the ground doesn't seem to be shaking much anymore.

Mostly, everything is normal, including Tokyo's questionable taste in music:

That's just one of the many thousands of displays for the all-girl pop group AKB48 dotting the landscape right now - they apparently have a new album out and everyone needs to know this.

A little hard to see (sorry), but that's Don Quixote, a sort of mecca for geeks in Akihabara, where AKB48 is ostensibly "from" - they've got a wrap all around the building, and signs all over it.

Also intact is Japan's vending machine research and development.  They are decades ahead of us in vending machine technology.  This is a full touch-screen LCD vending machine - first time I've seen one of these here. I personally like the machines where you can see the actual can or bottle of the thing you're ordering, but I know that touch-screens are all the rage with the kids these days.

And let's not forget Japan's often unfortunate incorporation of English slang, which is intact as always.  (Obviously this has nothing to do with surviving an earthquake; I'm just looking for an excuse to post this picture.)  Oddly enough, this is not the only questionable use of the term "titty" that I have seen on this trip.

This is Omotesando, one of the main streets in Harajuku - looks like a pretty normal, functioning city, doesn't it?

One thing we did notice, and this is kind of a sad self-fulfilling prophecy, is that there are almost no other westerners around right now.  Usually about half the people milling around Harajuku are western; today we saw maybe three or four.  Hopefully as reports from regular people like me trickle out, more westerners will realize that Japan is open for business and is not a big panic-filled mess of debris and nuclear fallout.

As for any potential radiation issues, I actually brought my goddamn Geiger counter (that is its official name, according to me), and it's not registering anything out of the ordinary.

One sign of normalcy, and this will bring me back to my earlier post that got nuked (for anyone who read it): we simply could not get a reservation on either of the overnight trains we wanted.  They were booked solid.  Oh well, we'll try again next year.  Seems like the kind of thing where you have to know someone who works for JR.  But we'll be staying in Tokyo for the entire trip.

Well, I'll post more tomorrow!  I think I'm probably past the point where I can or even want to post every little thing about Japan anymore, but I will definitely have some more updates while I'm here!  Right now, though, jet lag has caught up with me again and I'm about to let my head fall into the keyboard here and sleep.