By nightfall, we were already exhausted and hungry from lugging all our luggage around. We were walking towards our hotel when we spotted this Japanese fast-food eatery along the road.

Japanese eatery along the road

Within the glass cabinet display were several plastic replicas of the food. The seller in the eatery didn’t understand a word of English, while we didn’t understand a single word of Japanese. We didn’t know how to go about ordering our food! Eventually, we realised there was a vending machine right outside the eatery that we had to use.

Of course, the vending machine was entirely in Japanese! Every button corresponded to a certain dish but we were totally clueless as to what the Japanese characters read!

(At this point, my friend Beni who’s working and living in Japan called me up. I whined that we couldn’t order our food from the Japanese seller. He laughed and said “Just tell him ‘Chicken! Chicken!’ before putting down the phone.)

In the end, we took the following complicated series of steps to get our food:

How we went about ordering our food without knowing a single word of Japanese

1. Capture a photo of the plastic food replica in the display window on my trusty LG Shine.
2. Go back into the eatery and show the photo to the seller.
3. Seller tells me, or rather, writes me the number “16” on the table counter with his fingers. (that’s when I learned that the dish I wanted was katsu don! Hey, I knew that in Japanese!)
4. Go to the vending machine, slot in coins and press the #16 button. Ka-ching!
5. Retrieve “food coupon”!
6. Give coupon to seller.
7. Seller serves food within 30 seconds.
8. Eat!

Katsu Don

My katsu don! That’s chicken with rice. I don’t know if it had anything to do with the fact that I was practically starving, but it tasted exceptionally good to me! The don and miso soup were awesome and quite different from the way they taste in Singapore.