00:00:00 John Daub: This is an amazing amount of potato chips. Wow, we have seafood pizza, which just the concept of is absolutely disgusting, but it does look good. How bad can it be? We have chocolate almond potato chips, and this has some potential in being good. These are both made by Calbee, which is a big company here that makes potato chips. This one also by Calbee. They've done something really creative: spicy curry pan. Eh? Karamucho. Karamucho. This is like bacon with pepper. This looks really good. Now, these are some of the most outrageous flavors that you can come up with. Calbee seems to be the creator of most of these. I also have takoyaki. This is Frito-Lay. Frito-Lay is an American company. This is takoyaki. We're going to try this. Wow, Don Takos. Chris Pizza. Yeah, this is Don Takos. This one I'm definitely looking forward to: amazake (sweet fermented rice drink) potato chips. Amazake is like Japanese sake-flavored potato chips, while it's still sweet. We're going to try this. And wait, there's more. We have some edamame chips. And then this one has pieces of pizza baked into it. This is pretty authentic, and of course, this comes from Calbee. And we're looking forward to it.

00:01:41 John Daub: And joining me on this report is everybody. Hey! So we're having a hanami (cherry blossom viewing) party here in Yoyogi Park, and these are our reporters for this time. Over here, there's Douglas over there. Hey, everybody. How you doing? And then Mr. Amazake over here. Actually, I'm more of Mr. Beer. Mr. Beer. And I'm John. This is the Only in Japan Go channel. We're always live, and we're always doing something interesting. So definitely subscribe and pound that like button.

00:02:11 John Daub: So we're going to start here with seafood pizza, I think. We're going to go for seafood pizza. This is like Halloween where you get a bunch of candy and you open it up. All right. Who wants to help me eat the seafood pizza? Anybody? I need two volunteers. All right. Come on in the middle. Another volunteer. Bring it in. Seafood pizza. Andrew, hold this camera for a second. Here, I'll be your cameraman. Go. So pan down to the seafood here. So in Japan, when we open it up, we open the potato chips from the bottom back like this. And then everybody can share by opening it up in the back. That's why they have the seam here. Reaction. Tastes good? Flavor? Can you taste seafood pizza? No, not very much. You're from Michigan. Seafood pizza. Oh my god. Kind of a fail. We didn't really get that taste that you see on the picture here. So next one. Thank you very much. Good job.

00:03:42 John Daub: We're having a meet up here where people are coming to do hanami. So that's why we have this large group here. A lot of people wondering what's going on. This is a channel meet up. So the next one we're going to do is something that I'm really curious about. Boom. This one is the chocolate almond potato chips. Who wants it on this one? Come on in. Here we go. You're next up on the chocolate almond potato chip run. Anybody else? We need one more. I'm trying this one. All right. Okay. We got two people here. Wonderful. I shall try that one. Do you remember how we opened the chocolate almonds in Japan? Go ahead. You have to open it up in the Japanese way. Yeah, pull it up. Yes, yes, yes. Well done. Very good. Oh, you can see the chocolate in the middle of it. Oh, wow. This looks really good. Wait, is it past the expiration date? I got this like a while ago. I'm sorry. No, it looks like we're good. We're still good. I've been saving this for a while. All right. Put it down here. Let's try one. When did you buy this, John? A while ago. Wow. This is awesome. Check it out. They've actually done a really good job of getting the chocolate and little pieces of almond in there. All right. Let's give it a try.

00:05:10 John Daub: Oh, no. I'm sorry if this doesn't work. It doesn't work for you at all. Thumbs down. It's like an abomination. It's something you should not mix. Yeah, that's one of the flavors you should not mix. Well said. No. Thumbs down. Here we go. Good job. You know what? These are okay. It's not that good, but if you've ever had the Royce potato chips with chocolate, that is so good. Royce makes one. It's totally covered in chocolate. This one doesn't have enough chocolate. I think it suffers. It's too salty and not enough chocolate. And a bad aftertaste. Oh, Calbee. You're getting totally slammed. So, it's a good concept, but there's not enough chocolate. Royce makes a better version and it's five times the price of this, but has a better aftertaste. The aftertaste is really not good enough.

00:06:32 John Daub: Next up is amazake. Amazake flavored potato chips everybody. But do you know how I do this? Take your little potato chips. You know why I did this? Because you're Canadian? No, I learned this from Taisei. Taisei taught me how to do this, right? And then you have your own little bag. Alright, we need two testers. This is amazake. Alright, Douglas, come on in. Douglas, you're up on the prices right. We have three. I bid $1.29. That's how much this actually cost. I know the price because I bought it. Are these expired? No, who cares. I think you want it. Yeah, Andrew, come on in the middle. Yes, please. This is YouTube. You got to do it properly. You hit it in front of the camera. Potato cam. So this is amazake potato chips. You can see it has some flavoring on it, on the edges of it. It does look pretty good. Let's give it a try. What do you think? Amazake flavored. Thumbs up, thumbs down? Shit. Hey, hey, hey, censors. You said it, S-I, holy sit. Sit. City bank. What do you think? It's awesome. It's sweet. I like it. Very sweet. Wow. Sweet. It's a bit sweet. I don't really taste the sake. Well, it's the amazake taste. Yeah, you don't taste the sake, but yeah, it's sweet. I can taste the amazake. It's a little bit cloying, but not too bad. It's good. It's good enough to have another one? Yeah. The oil kind of kills the flavor. It doesn't help. Mm. My first, the first taste is the taste of the potato chips. The sake. It goes away really quickly. To pass it around here.

00:07:47 John Daub: This is an interesting one, the amazake. If you've ever had amazake before, have you had amazake before? So you don't even know what amazake tastes like. What a failure. It starts off like a very quick taste of amazake, and then it kind of dies very fast into potato taste. I like the idea. I apologize if the video is blurry. I don't know how the quality of the video is, but there's too many chips. We've gone Minecraft. All right, we're gonna try the next one. So amazake potato chips, would you say that amazake was a failure or a success? It's in between. It's not bad. It's okay. But it's not. If there's nothing else. So we give it a four out of ten. Yeah, yeah, that's good. We're gonna have five. I give it a five. Maybe a five. Okay.

00:09:47 John Daub: Next up on this live stream is the curry. Because everybody wants to eat this one. This is spicy curry pan aji (flavor). This is what the picture looks like. So, we're going to try this next. You eat curry pan for breakfast? That's hardcore. I'll be a good judge. Good job. There you go, ladies first. How's the coloring? It doesn't look like it has anything on them. This is good. Yeah. It looks fairly plain for a potato chip. This is a random one I picked out of the bag. Doesn't have a lot of flavoring on it. It looks pretty neutral. It's a subtle curry flavor about it. I love it. You like it? Love it? Whoa. Seven out of ten? Ten out of ten? Nine out of ten? I'd say eight out of ten. Eight out of ten? I'll give it a seven. It's actually not too bad. Yeah. It's very subtle. Alright, Caroline, what do you think here? Oh, I haven't tried it yet. My boyfriend's been... He's nice, so it's like I've been thinking. Oh, okay. I love Indian food, so... It's very good. It's not Indian curry. It's Japanese curry. I like the... It's good? Yeah, I like it. It's very good. So this might look better. This is a Minecraft chip. If the pixels are bad. I don't know how bad the quality is. Minecraft potato chips.

00:11:42 John Daub: Why is the resolution so bad? Hold on a second, everybody. Give me a second. I prefer not to be in HD anymore. Hey, everybody. My LAN auto connects to a really weak signal and that over drops. So now we're back onto Docomo 4G. So I hope that the quality is better. If it's not, I apologize. We're going to keep going. Yeah. Let's just get the detail of the actual chip. All right. This could even be more pixelated. I don't know if this is any better. And that's what it's supposed to taste like. And you know, it's not that bad, actually. I think it sort of works. I think it works. It's a good call for a curry thing. Yeah. All right. Thank you. We're going to try one more.

00:12:39 John Daub: And we're going to do this. If the quality of the video is bad, I apologize. This is edamame and this is takoyaki. And these are two chips. We're going to try them simultaneously. All right. Takoyaki and edamame potato chips. Who's in on this? Don't worry. You're not in HD. So that's a good thing. All right. So you know how to open it? I did not watch that. Okay. So you're going to do this. Let's do this. Let her rip. If you can do it right. I'm an American. I'm from Ohio. That's the saddest. All right. Go buck. Do you want to help? Let me help you. Nice. Look at this. I have a natural reason. I don't think it's shaped like takoyaki. Look at that. Oh, yeah. Look. Oh, that looks like little takoyaki. Yeah. They are so small. Well, I will take one. Thank you very much. Oh, they're so small and cute. Look at that. They are adorable. Okay. Let's do it. Here's one for you. Here's one for you. And then one for Tiffany. Ready? One, two, three. All right. Let's give this thing a taste here. I like the small feel. It has lots of layers, lots of texture. Very sweet. Very good. Very sweet. You really don't taste the takoyaki, the aftertaste. Yeah. It's really good. It's very nice. It's very good. Yeah, that one is good. It's good. Yeah, I like that one. It's very good. Good.

00:14:18 John Daub: All right. I'm not a big fan of edamame, but I'll try this anyway. It's got... It's like a puff. Yeah. So it's not a chip. It's a puff. Sort of like a Cheetos or something. Yeah. It's got that sweet takoyaki sauce to it. Yeah. I like it. It's a good combination. Definitely. Oh, wait. Show me what it looks like, the edamame. Oh, wow. That's an edamame chip. All right. Let her rip. Oh, my gosh. Thank you very much. I bought these at home. It's nice. Let me make some. You know, like, it's overwhelming, like, we've heard of them, but they are so good. They're good. They're so good. You won't get tired of them quickly. You know, you'll get the whole bag and not be sick. And a couple more bags. This is a good snack for the kids for lunch. Oh, it's good. It's not for lunch. No, I would get that. This is very good. Now, the first thing, I'm not a big fan of edamame, but I would get that. I love edamame. No. You know what? I'm going to have another. You're going to have another one. This is an edamame-shaped chip. It tastes like corn more than edamame. That's the dust on it. Not bad. Not great. It's interesting. And I think that's the purpose of some of these snacks. It's not about the actual flavor of it. It's more about the labeling and just trying something new.

00:15:43 John Daub: I think in Japan, here's the reason why Calbee has to do this. If you are not a company that is always consistently innovating and making weird stuff, then you're going to be passed by. Japanese companies, including Pepsi, including beverages, and chip makers, and a lot of these companies, they've got to continuously innovate and come up with new things because that's what a successful company does. And Calbee does a really good job of bringing great flavors for marketing, but do they taste like what they look like? Not really, but the bottom line is that it's so interesting, it makes me want to buy more chips. And if I buy more chips, I get addicted to that salty taste and I want to keep buying more chips. So it's actually genius in a way like that. Yeah. And they also have shops at like the Tokyo Skytree and they make the potato chips fresh for you. I do apologize for the quality of the video. I'm going to end it right now because I don't want you guys to suffer more than you have to. But I really appreciate everybody who has come to this hanami party. This is an Only in Japan Go episode. This is my fourth meetup for the channel. This is the second one here in Japan and I appreciate everybody who came out here.

00:17:33 John Daub: We do have more chips but we're going to eat it just ourselves selfishly. I'm not sharing it with you. But if the quality is really really bad I might redo a potato chip challenge in the future. This does look good. This for the record. This looks really good. Let's try it. Do it. Do it now. Ready buddy? I'm not prepared. Japanese way of opening it which I learned today. Thank you John. Itadakimasu (let's eat). Wow is there like chemical, is there like powder chemical stuff on it? Hold on a second. Oh this one's got a hole in it. You can see the powder. Maybe Minecraft powder. In the issue of Minecraft. The initial first like half second is a little offensive. A little offensive. But then the flavor spreads. And then there's this weird potato chip umami that happens. And it has a meatiness to the flavor. Yeah it's a weird meatiness. And if you can get over that first half second it's a good potato chip. I mean get over the first. I just liked it. It was good. Yeah. I like the pepper. We got some background action going on there. You made bacon or bread paper? Yeah you know I could have a little porkiness to it that's very nice. That's right I like that. It has some porkiness to it. Yeah it's a and not just any kind of pork. It's supposed to be like the pork belly. And so it does have a little bit of porky. It does have that kind of like that of the fat from the pork belly in the flavor. So it's not just a hard pork kind of thing like pulled pork. It does have that kind of like fattiness in its flavor.

00:19:27 John Daub: They're calling you the 8-bit guy because there's some pixelation. Here goes 8-bit guy. Very nice. Even if the quality stinks. We're still gonna have some fun. I appreciate you hanging out there with me and 8-bit guy. The internet. I didn't say the internet had dubbed you that. I didn't dub you the 8-bit guy. 8-bit boy. It works. All right everybody so that's it. We did one more for you so you can enjoy it. I want to thank everybody coming out for the Only in Japan hanami meet up. I'm gonna put a picture of the group on Instagram and Facebook. So you can check out to see who came and I appreciate you making the trip and joining us live. We're gonna do. I see you back there. Thanks for coming guys. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Yeah. We really had a good time here. No, no. Put that away. Danger. Danger. That's a seafood pizza. No. Oh that one looks better. 8-bit boy. So that's it. See you. Bye. Bye everybody. We'll have another live stream tomorrow. Hopefully we have better quality. But yeah once again really fun time in Yoyogi Park with everybody celebrating the last of the cherry blossoms which are now green buds on the top there. But have a good day or night everybody. Last 20 seconds of the pixelated sunset of Yoyogi Park. Bye bye everybody. Good times. Good times. Bye everybody. Nosh thank you for sharing the link for the Only Japan Facebook and Instagram. 8-bit boy is still out there.