00:00:01 John Daub: There's no denying the weirdness of Japanese drinks. This vending machine bank here in Ginza, Tokyo, of course, probably has something that's so bizarre that it will blow your mind. Well, at least I hope so, because this is the focus of today's episode. Behind the rain in this vending machine is what is called Pudding wo Nomu (drinkable pudding). Maybe I've seen this before, I don't remember. It even has a happy face in there, so this live stream should definitely make you smile.

00:00:39 John Daub: Sangaria (beverage company) here in Japan makes some unusual stuff, and today we're going to try it, because it's not sold out, thank goodness. And it's also cold. You can see they've taken out all the cold, all the hot drinks, changed them to cold because we're almost in summer. But the problem is that it's in the middle of the rainy season, and the rain is starting to come down really hard right now. This is what you get on a rainy day. You get me drinking pudding on the side of a street. I promised everybody I'd be back. I made an episode on what to wear during the rainy season, how to pack for June, July.

00:01:23 John Daub: Let's just go ahead and do this. Just stop delaying. Let's just get it done. There's all these kinds of machines here, as I continue to delay. I'm going to go over this after I drink this drinkable pudding, because that's why you're here. 140 yen is about a dollar right now. And there you go. Drinkable pudding.

00:01:57 John Daub: It's hard to do this with an umbrella. Oh, this is a fatter can than I thought. Pudding's supposed to jiggle here in Japan. I'm kind of afraid to open the can and see what's inside. And this pudding has been brought to you by our good friend Michael Sassano. Mahalo, my friend. Livestream finally made it. You did. Alright, let's crack this open here. Oh my gosh, it's really coming down, the rain. Perfect day for— Oh, I can smell the pudding! Oh my— Does that look congealed to you? Holy smokes. Oh my god, that looks like soup!

00:02:54 John Daub: Hold on, let me turn to the main lens here. Alright, here we go, main lens. Oh my gosh. Was I supposed to— I think I was supposed to shake it first. Oh my god, okay, let's just— we gotta drink this here. As we say, down the hatch. Haha! It's hard to get a position here with the umbrella. I have only one hand. Ah! Ah! There's my eye! Alright, let's do this. Pan down. I'm not gonna get wet for this. Itadakimasu. Just do it. Alright, itadakimasu. Oh my god. You won't believe it. There's chunks of pudding inside. What? There are chunks of real pudding inside this thing. You can kind of make it out, right? There's a chunk. You see the chunk? Oh my gosh. They put chunks of real pudding inside.

00:04:32 John Daub: What the heck is this stuff? Alright, I'm just gonna put my umbrella down. To hell with this. Alright, I can't— I can get wet for you guys. Ponko Tsubete is in the house. I'm looking onions in Nagasaki-ki. Nothing at the time of the main transi— oh! You're in Nagasaki— yeah, that's right! I might be coming down to Nagasaki later in June. Just a heads up for that. And thank you to Cobra Bebop. Anything drinkable if you put it in a blender long enough. If I was a kid, and I was like seven years old, let's just say, and I sometimes act like that, like, this is the dream come true. Basically, you would take the pudding and you would get a spoon, and you would mix it and mix it until it was drinkable, and then you would drink it. Every kid has done that, right? Or you put the pudding in your mouth and you're like this. It turns into mush, and then you drink it. And you're like, Daddy, look, I drank my pudding! This is this! It's bizarrely good! But it's a pudding-flavored jelly drink.

00:05:44 John Daub: I do not dare open my mouth with this in here. Because I know there's gonna be trolls who will go all, like, how rude of you to open your mouth and show you the food inside. But it's not food, it's drink. So I guess I can do it. There's no other way. I can't, I can't do it. It's raining. Is it considered rude if I put it on the ground here? I, there's a gutter over there. Maybe I can do it at the gutter. You have to see the chunks. It's for science. All right, hold on. I think this is like a rain gutter. Okay, hold on a second. I'm just gonna put a little bit there for science. Oh my, it's not even coming out. There. And the pigeons are gonna get it. That's a chunk of the pudding. I'm really starting to get wet. I'm gonna go get a towel. All right, I gotta get back to the umbrella. It's coming down. Oh my goodness. Big mistake. Okay. Oh my goodness. Yeah, I heard that too, Peso. It's okay. I think they're talking about someone else.

00:07:16 John Daub: Anyways, I don't know how long this is gonna be around. It's worth it. What is this? It's good cold. Five times more pudding chunks. It's just weird. What are the ingredients? Milk, of course. Sugar from Thailand. Thai sugar. Um, flour. What? No, that's not right. Caramel sauce. Coconut oil. Dextrin. Eggs. And table salt. It looks like it, and stevia is also in here. And vitamin B2. Are they thinking about our health? I'm reading the label on the back here. Made in Osaka. Of course it was, because that's where all the weird stuff is. 450 grams, uh, calories. So, it's basically your breakfast. It's a lot of calories in there. 450 calories. Stevia is good sugar replacement. Um, it says that there's, on the back here, the first ingredient is sato from Thailand and, right, is that sugar? Right there. So, I don't know, stevia and sugar.

00:09:02 John Daub: Over the course of the last 25 years that I've been in Japan, I've seen some weird drinks. The drinkable mayonnaise, I don't know if it's still at Lawson's anymore. That was probably the weirdest. This one was my favorite. This is hot ginger ale from the vending machines. It actually tasted, it came out hot. It actually tasted like hot apple pie with bubbles. Very unusual taste. This was about 10, 11 years ago. Uh, I haven't seen it since. But this is my favorite drink out of a vending machine so far. It was just so bizarre, it blew my mind. Um, this is my favorite, um, non-drink from Pepsi. They had cucumber flavored before. They had cucumber flavored before, but the salty watermelon, kinda weird. In a good way. I actually have one of these left in the basement of my house in my apartment complex. So, we could pull that out here. Here's the ice cucumber from Pepsi, which was also a really weird one. Um, ice cucumber. I don't think it tasted like cucumber, but I had this, but I can't remember drinking it for some reason.

00:10:11 John Daub: And probably the most bizarre one of them all was this one. It was a hot pancake flavored drink. And says, like, milk seki. It's a hot cake flavored. I actually couldn't find this. Um, it was served hot, this drink. It's made from a company that makes the pancake batter. And it was a drink, hot pancake in a can. I guess it had syrup flavored. I don't know, I wish I could find this. They had, um, Holi Shitake might have had this. He's writing in So Good. But it looked really good. Lipton even got in on this and had a Morinaga hot cake kocha latte. So they kind of combined Morinaga and Lipton's tea to get something of an original flavor there.

00:11:08 John Daub: But this is what makes Japan, Japan. It's like the bizarreness of flavors that you can get. You just can't get any. The clear Coca-Cola was also revolutionary. You'll find that on this channel. I went and got this about seven years ago. And a lot of the YouTube people who steal comments and repost it just took it over. I think got several tens of millions of views actually. Because I put it out really quickly. The clear Coca-Cola was pretty weird. Um, but when it comes to flavoring and when it comes to artificial flavoring, Japan is the king of fake flavoring. They have something called coffee extract. And they put that in just water. Coffee extract in water. And it creates a coffee drink. So, and they sell that. And it costs them like pennies on the dollar compared to regular coffee. So coffee were ever to become a very hard to find commodity, Japan has an extract in copious amounts right now. Probably in a storehouse somewhere where they could make coffee even though they didn't have any coffee anymore. It's just, Japan is like the king of making artificial flavors and coloring and all this other stuff. So when it comes to like healthiness stuff, Japanese cuisine is very healthy. But it's also really not good for you too. Like there's both sides of the spectrum in this country. It's fascinating. And it's your choice too whether or not you want to take it or not.

00:12:39 John Daub: Uh, take a look around. Um, you can see Ginza is super wet today. This is a nasty, nasty day. I might be able to get one more drink because we did get our super chat goal. But it's gonna be hard to top this one. It's just chunky. That pineapple soda looks good. Matcha, which is basically melted Pez candy into a soda. Uh, Schweppes melon soda looks interesting. Look at that. Does it taste like real melon? Cause it looks like there's a melon in that Schweppes. Right? That looks interesting. Aquarius, which is a Gatorade in Japan basically. The Pepsi shot. I think they have that in other countries. You'll find some weird stuff here. Um, this water is salty. Uh, tasty plum water. Flavored water. This is a craft tea. Uh, there's ume soda from Daido, which is, I think that was pretty good. Some of these weird supplement drinks I kind of stay away from as well as the monsters and stuff. Like this energy drink. You'll never find me drinking that. I got already too much energy.

00:14:01 John Daub: Peach is now coming out. So you'll get the peach nectar, which is really good. I think that's from Fujiya, which is odd to see. The peach nectar, very good. The plum soda water, it does look good. There's Red Bull in this machine here. And you'll see some more coffee. Fire is Kirin, which also makes beer. They're also a beverage company. So you'll find all these different kinds of, and Mountain Dew, which we saw last time, which is really weird. Here's a Kyoto green tea, which looks really nice. And then there's matcha, which is the melted Pez soda. Uh, in a pet bottle. A lot of Monster. What's the deal with that? Why is that so popular? Monster drink. I don't understand. I rarely see Japanese drinking it. I guess it's because there are a lot of foreign tourists here. But Red Bull has this spring edition too. Which is a little weird. But these energy drinks, I don't understand why anybody drinks them. Yeah, Root Beer. A&W Root Beer. They have restaurants in Okinawa. But I'm gonna try this melon soda. Cause I'm just kinda curious. I think we hit our Super Chat limit here. It's just a dollar. It's a 100 yen coin.

00:15:41 John Daub: Oh, it sang a little song. I think was hard to hear the jingle. Hit the microphone up here. Alright, I'm not gonna be finishing this drinkable pudding. If anybody wants this drinkable pudding, you're more than welcome to finish it off for me. I, I'm more here for science than anything else. People love Monster because it's a meme and M.O. scene, kid, culture, and some people just really like the taste. I get that. You can develop a taste for all sorts of stuff. It's really sweet, you know. Alright, Schweppes, which is a— I think it used to be a British company? I never knew that they had melon soda. And I love soda water just without the sugar. This comes from Hokkaido. It's like certified Hokkaido melon. That's why I got it. Oh, wow. Oh, wow. That smells like real melon. Melon in Japanese is actually cantaloupe, right? This smells like Hokkaido melon. It really does. Holy crud. This is actually really good.

00:17:05 John Daub: It's got a— It's not like a sugar sweetness to it. It's got, like— I'm sure that there's sugar in it. Yeah, it's grape sugar or something. But it's not strong. It's not super sweet. I guess that's what Schweppes is famous for. It does taste— It's got the sweetness of melon, but no more than that, right? It's not trying to smack you in the face with sugar. Oh, this is better than the pudding. Oh, my God. Well done, Schweppes. It tastes like there's real— Oh, it says there's no fruit in here. It's seasonal. This just came out. It has a melon extract. As I said to you, Japan is really good at making extract. It has melon ekisu, which is extract. It's so darn good, though. Oh, my goodness. They really got a winner here. Artificial melon soda. But— Well, extract. I don't know what exactly that means. That's good. And the color is like this green color. Do you see that? You see that? That's not so good. But in Japanese, no melon soda, it's kind of a part of the culture. Melon soda. And it's always green. So I think would have to be green just for the domestic market. But there you go. It's a little sweet. I think that this drink is 9 out of 10. Yeah. I like that the fact that it's not overly sweet.

00:18:47 John Daub: So here is our lineup for today. Not too bad. The pudding, I'm going to give this one a 9 out of 10 because it's weird. And it's not a drink, but it's not pudding. It's something else. This is so worth it to do a live stream on this. And the Schweppes gets a 9 out of 10 because it's surprising. And then I got to get rid of these drinks. I can't drink them all. So let's walk in this direction then. As you can see, it's really a miserable day to be outside. It's chilly. Chilly-ish because of the wind and the wetness. But it's not exactly...

00:19:33 John Daub: Beyond Lover, 4 out of 10. Did I not give enough of an impression of the pudding drink? There, is that a 9 out of 10? No? Christian, there's like no homeless people in this area, okay? It's not going to get drunk. I don't know what else to do with it. I'm just going to 86 it. I can't even 86 it. It's not even coming out of the can. This is a hard drink to get rid of. And then I was going to wash it away with the melon soda. I can't drink this stuff. Alright. Okay, now I can... What am I doing? I'm not going to put all these sugar drinks in me. I don't want them. I'm just trying it for science. Is that not a storm drain? It's for water and whatever's on the street. It gets processed and then put back in the river. So it's okay. You know what gets tossed down the storm drain? All the pigeon poo-poo too. So everybody who's freaking out, take a chill pill. It gets processed before it goes back into the river. Tokyo's storm drains are incredible. Here's another one right there. They do get blocked up. But, yeah.

00:21:49 John Daub: Alright, there you go everybody. It's a really lousy day. I hope you enjoyed this. I kind of learned a lot. I learned that melon soda doesn't have to taste bad. And drinkable pudding is not that bad. It's actually quite good. It's just I don't want to drink my pudding anymore. Because I'm not 12. But if I did, this is probably a pretty good deal for 140 yen. Alright everybody, take care. I'll see you in another live stream a little bit later on. Bye from really wet and somewhat miserable Tokyo today.

00:22:37 John Daub: Matt writes in here, off-talking but I'm planning to attend the Nagaoka fireworks in August. Have you been? I already put my name in the lottery for the tickets. Yeah, you probably don't need to get tickets. Sometimes it's not necessary to sit so close to them. Sometimes sitting further away from the fireworks is a better experience. But I think the Nagaoka fireworks is one of the best in the country. The fireworks at Katakai, I found that you can get the seats in there. But it's so crowded and it's kind of still far away. Sometimes buying the seats is not the best way to go. You just sit anywhere outside around it. The fireworks is something that's enjoyed without having to pay for them most of the time. Edogawa fireworks is one of the best. You don't have to pay for the seats. You just get a spot on the grass and you can sit down and enjoy them. Alright guys, take care. I'll see you in another live stream. I gotta go get dry again. Maybe wash this away with a hot coffee. See you. Bye.