Q8:Dagashi

The word "Dagashi" means Japanese cheap snack foods. It consists of two words, "Da" means futile or negligible and "Kashi" means a snack food or a sweet stuff. Most of them are priced very cheap because the main consumers of them are kids, especially elementary school students. There are hundreds of kinds of Dagashi and each of them has its own distinctive flavor.

Link to the Japanese Wikipedia:"Dagashi"

Generally, they are classified into chocolates, gum, corn(or potato) snacks, and sour or spicy snacks. Su Kombu, a pickled kombu, is a very sour Dagashi. It is popular not only among kids but also among adults because they eat it as a appetizer. Tirol-Choco is a very popular chocolate which has a wide variety of flavors such as strawberry, green tea, Mochi, pudding, and so on. Umai Bo is the Japanese most popular Dagashi. More than a million packs of it are sold every day. It is extremely cheap, at 10 yen a pack, and it also has a very wide variety of flavors such as cheese, curry, Natto, Mentaiko, and so on. Maybe you don't know Natto and Mentaiko, but they are very common and popular foods in Japan.

Stores selling Dagashi are called Dagashi-Ya. You can buy hundreds of kinds of Dagashi and some toys there. And some stores serve light meals such as Okonomi-Yaki and Yakisoba. In the 1970's and 80's, a number of Dagashi-Ya had had arcade games, which attracted many kids.

In the past, there had been numerous Dagashi-Ya in Japan, but most of them had closed in the 1990's and 2000's. There are several reasons why they had closed in a short period of time. The biggest one is , I think, the increase of convenience stores. The number of convenience stores in Japan had risen very rapidly in the 1980's and 90's. Almost all of them sell snacks, sweets, some toys and video games at all hours. So the number of Dagashi-Ya had fallen as the number of convenience stores rose.

Most Japanese people feel nostalgic when they think about Dagashi-Ya because it reminds them of their happy childhoods and their old schoolmates. But none of convenience stores bring such a feeling because they are standardized by its franchisor and don't have its own characteristics. Convenience stores improved the lifestyles of Japanese people, but also deprived them of precious experience.





View Larger Map

[Here's the answer]