And then there’s Japanese junk food.

You may think that junk food is junk food, no matter where it’s made and sold, but the Japanese do it a little differently. Soda, candy, fast food and other junk food might not have been invented in Japan, but the Japanese have been able to put their own twist on these low-end foods.

A lot of these foods are only available seasonally or for some limited time so when they’re gone, they’re gone for good. Here’s a roundup of some of 2012′s most enticing, disgusting, weird, and delicious Japanese junk food.

Fast Food

Japan is a great place for fast food. Aside from Japanese-style street food that’s ready to go in a jiffy, there’s also home-grown Japanese fast food chains (which we’ve written about before) and American chains.

These American chains usually offer food in Japan that you won’t be able to find anywhere else.

KFC’s Bacon Potato Fritter

It’s pretty surprising that KFC Japan would offer a dish more American than its American counterpart, but then you haven’t seen the Bacon Potato Fritter. Full of all of the heart-stopping cholesterol-filled goodness that we Americans hold near and dear.

Domino’s Prestige Quattro

Pizza pricing is usually a race ot the bottom — get three medium pizzas for $15! Two large pizzas for $20! Add another pizza for $5!

But Domino Japan’s Prestige Quattro isn’t cheap. In fact, the gourmet pizza that has crab, shrimp, and Mangalitsa pork, is $50.

Burger King

After a six year hiatus in Japan, Burger King has returned to the country with a vengeance. It seems like every other week I’m hearing about some new, novelty product from Burger King Japan that’s unavailable anywhere else.

Black Burger

Even though a black burger looks like it was left in the oven for too long, it’s only colored by bamboo charcoal and squid ink. Fortunately though, the flavor of neither of those are very prominent in the burger, so just close your eyes and imagine you’re eating a Whopper.

Pumpkin Burger

As we wrote about earlier, Halloween is quickly becoming an absurdly commercial holiday in Japan. To cash in on that, Burger King Japan released a burger with kabocha pumpkin slices. Nothing says Halloween like fast food!

Candy

Coffee Gum

This year, Suntory’s Boss Coffee celebrated its 20^th anniversary by collaborating with various other Japanese companies, including Lotte, who created the unholy abomination that is Boss Special Coffee Gum. I thought gum was supposed to make your breath smell good?

Soda

In Japan, it seems like you can’t walk more than a block without passing handfuls of vending machines stocked with some of the most delicious and delectable sodas you’ve ever seen. The availability of these sodas means that it’s even more important to stand out among the crowd.

Espressoda

The linguistic genius at Suntory who came up with the portmanteau “Espressoda” should be given a raise, a corner office, and a bonus. Unfortunately, the beverage itself isn’t as genius as the name. Eryk from This Japanese Life reviewed it for us and gave us this verdict: “The result is a kind of a totally unsweetened root beer . . . Not awful, but unpleasantly confusing. Would not drink again.”

Pepsi

Pepsi, more than other western soft drink companies, really seems to get the Japanese market. Instead of pushing things like Mountain Dew that do well in the US, Pepsi has adapted to Japan’s tastes and comes up with seasonal and novelty products.

Salty Watermelon Pepsi

Eryk from This Japanese Life also reveiwed this oddball summer selection from Pepsi for us in a guest post earlier this year. The verdict? “[I]t’s a liquified watermelon Jolly Rancher with seltzer . . . Too sweet. Would not drink again.”

Pepsi Special

Pepsi Special helps you poop.

Well, kind of. It’s marketed as a fat-blocking soda but in reality, it’s chock-full of of dextrin, a soluble fiber. The theory is that you won’t gain any weight because all of the food you eat basically passes right through you. Bon appétit

Pepsi White

The yet-to-be-released Pepsi White is a special winter variation of the cola. It’s white, has snow people on the label, and tastes like mandarin oranges, a seasonal favorite.

And that was just this year. Who knows what these Japanese alchemists have in store for us next year!

There was the legendary Cucumber Pepsi, and a soda that tasted like Menthol. There are yogurt drinks and sodas with slimy chunks of aloe. Late-night carousers can snag a turmeric-flavored energy drink, while tee-totalers can take some nicotine juice along on that smoke-free train ride.

There are sodas, milk drinks, experimental beers, canned coffees, canned teas, canned tea-coffees, soda-beers, milk-sodas, coffee-milks and coffee-milk-sodas (but as of yet, no coffee-milk-beers).

Most drinks come and go with the seasons. Companies can (and do) throw anything they’ve got onto the shelves when product runs are limited to a few weeks. Whenever the temperature drifts up or down a few degrees, food fans scour konbini shelves for new formulas or pop-up brands before they disappear.

Summer is prime time for scoring a can of Japan’s weirder drinks: Sales of cold drinks rise, and companies race to find the most “refreshing” formula to beat the summer sweats. I popped down to my local konbini to sort out this summer’s batch.

Salty Watermelon Pepsi

I’m a totally voracious consumer of Kit-Kat and soft drink news. When I first heard rumors about this drink on the Internet, I was skeptical but intrigued.

I’ve got a peculiar fondness for flavors that sound kind of revolting. Delicious soft drinks are easy, but it takes an especially whimsical product manager to whip up something truly risky. Take the brilliant tobacco company employee who thought carbonated menthol – a terrible drink, but a beautifully ambitious one.

Salt, watermelon, and Pepsi? Yes, please. Every day I’d scour the konbini shelves. I was distracted by the gruesomely named (and somewhat flavorless) alternative, the low-calorie &lduqo;Pepsi Black Lemon.” Finally, on an ill-timed jaunt to Thailand, a friend Instagrammed a photo of my great white whale.

Unfortunately, Salty Watermelon Pepsi is not a mixture of salt, watermelon and Pepsi. In fact, it’s not Pepsi at all. Much like this winter’s variety, “Pepsi Pink” – a strawberry-milk flavor – the only thing “Pepsi-ish” about it was the carbonation.

Really, it’s a liquified watermelon Jolly Rancher with seltzer. Green melon soda is a fixture of fast-food chains here, so watermelon soda was a pretty tame offering.

The flavor wasn’t even salty. In Japan, and across Asia in general, people salt fruit to bring the sweetness out. It’s also suggested to help if you’re sweating a lot (and we are) – the idea is that you lose salt when you sweat. Traditionally, people here eat salty plums (ume boshi) that are sour and salty. This summer, salt is everywhere – we even have “salty chocolate” Kit-Kats.

Verdict: Too sweet. Would not drink again.

Asahi Red Eye – Tomato Beer

If you love gazpacho but hate that it’s not beer, you’d have been delighted for the six or seven days that Asahi Red Eye was available. It’s literally tomato juice and beer. It’s red. Bits of tomato float around. The slogan may as well be, “We dare you.”

This isn’t the first beer that’s taunted me into drinking it. Last February, “Red Romance” hit the market, a seductive blend of red wine and beer that sold for 100 yen per can. No Valentine’s Day is complete without a cheap, experimental mix of undrinkable wine-beer.

Red Eye is a confusing name. A Red Eye is a cup of coffee with a shot of espresso, or the last overnight flight. It seems like tomato beer is recommended for breakfast, like a Bloody Mary with beer instead of Vodka, or a tomato omelette with beer instead of eggs.

But I was shocked by how much I liked Red Eye. It was sweet and vinegary, a very Japanese flavor combo (I don’t see Japan’s carbonated-apple-vinegar shops taking off in America). The flavor was more tomato than beer, but the tomato had a sharp taste that cut into the beer flavor and made this beer almost dangerously easy to drink.

Tomatoes are valued for their sweetness in Japan, particularly cherry tomatoes, and have a strong summer connotation. A shop in my town was selling cherry tomatoes wrapped in chewy mochi and served cold, which were delicious.

If you come to Japan, you might be able to find a few discount cans of Asahi Red Eye around, but tomato season is waning. Even the mochi shop is switching cherry tomatoes out for grapes. Let’s hope Asahi doesn’t take that as a hint.

Verdict: Pleasantly surprised. Would drink again, if free.

Suntory Espressoda

The pun-derful “Espressoda” is, as the label says, “A twist of bold coffee and refreshing soda.” The cap twisted, excited bubbles rise to the surface, delivering the scent of fresh coffee grounds before mellowing into a light fizz.

Canned coffee is a Japanese vending machine mainstay. The coffee is universally unappealing – I can never escape the (probably imaginary) aftertaste of aluminium, and the scent of coffee residue lingers on your breath for hours.

I expected Espressoda to be canned coffee with bubbles. Shockingly, the coffee base for Espressoda is actually better than the coffee inside most canned coffees, probably because it’s “Espresso.” It’s in a plastic bottle, so there’s no tin-can placebo effect on my taste buds.

The result is a kind of a totally unsweetened root beer. You know how root beer tastes a bit like sarsaparilla with vanilla? Imagine sarsaparilla with coffee, and you’d have Espressoda nailed.

I got through the entire bottle, but not without second-guessing my commitment.

Verdict: Not awful, but unpleasantly confusing. Would not drink again.

Lazy Afternoon Root Beer

Root beer is an endangered animal in Japan. You can find some A&W in import stores, but I have never met a born-and-raised Japanese person (outside of Okinawa, where it’s basically everywhere) who enjoyed the taste of root beer. I’ve even heard it described as “America’s Natto.”

For what it’s worth, only North Americans and Okinawans seem to like Root Beer. It disgusts Europeans as much as it disgusts Asians. No one seems to know why, but most people think it tastes like medicine – which was precisely why I hated Menthol Soda. It was like drinking Vap-O-Rub. I couldn’t get past it.

So it was surprising to find that there’s a company making micro-batches of root beer in Kyushu. Lazy Afternoon is only lightly carbonated, but it’s a creamy brew with what I’d call “deep textures,” if I knew what that meant. And unlike the imported brands, Lazy Afternoon lacks the throat-burning sweetness of High Fructose Corn Syrup.

It also, notably, smells like a richer, deeper root beer than most canned root beers, which may be an attempt to shift it away from the medicine-ey flavors reviled by the Japanese.

Verdict: Will drink again.

For more, check out This Japanese Life!

Header photo by uzaigaijin