Latest news with #Japanese-British
Buzz Feed
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Buzz Feed
This Celeb-Approved Convenience Store Hack Is Genius
Spending $1000+ on a plane ticket to Japan and living off $3 convenience store foods when you get there is a tale as old as time. How could you not? You can see why it's possible — the convenience store game is GOD-TIER. From Family Mart fried chicken and assorted 7-Eleven sandwiches — to LAWSON onigiris and packed baked goods, you're spoilt for choice. But what should you actually pick up? After chatting about her music comeback and presenting at the Crunchyroll Anime Awards, I needed to ask Japanese-British singer Rina Sawayama this very question (along with any tips). Rina strutted onto the Anime Awards stage in a velvety Marc Jacobs dress to present 'Film of the Year'. Before the show, she sat down with us to chat all things new music, anime and film projects — read the full interview here. Her recommendation, which she credits to manager, Chikara Kasahara, is the best way to ensure you get steaming-hot curry buns before you walk through 7-Eleven's doors. Rina says that the secret is to "call [7-Eleven] ahead" of your visit, so you can experience "the freshest" Kare pan. Inspired by the simplicity (and effectiveness) of Rina's advice for a 10/10 eating experience, I've sifted through other viral internet faves and recommended combinations to find the best of the best kombini hacks. Basic I know, but adding a piece of boneless fried chicken into an egg salad sandwich (or, pancakes with syrup and margarine) is A1. Whenever I describe the experience of eating this for the first time, I can only compare it to the moment in Ratatouille when Remy combined strawberry and cheese for the first time, which caused him to shift into another dimension. The salty flavour from the chicken mixed with the sweet, yolk-y flavours of the egg salad sandwich is really, really good. Grab the egg salad sando from the fridge or pancakes from the baked and packaged goods shelf and the fried chicken from the window at the front counter. Mixing coffee jelly to a Royal Milk Tea Frappe is a budget bubble tea alternative with a caffeine hit. No boba stores around? Pull an Afternoon Tea brand milk tea frappe from the fridge and take it to the coffee dispenser. Then add the pre cut coffee jelly to the cup and stir for a creamy, coffee flavoured afternoon treat. Make a chicken parmi sandwich with just two convenience store items — pizza buns and front-counter fried chicken. At your nearest konbini, TikToker, Okinawa RV suggests grabbing two pizza buns and a piece of fried chicken to create a burger. When you bite into the pizza buns you'll get an ooze of marinara sauce with melted cheese that'll give you the parmigiana flavour to pair with the chicken. Have a creamy matcha latte frappe at any time of the day using drinkable ice cream. Three things are needed to pull this off — a 7-Eleven matcha latte from the drinks fridge, an ice cup and Coolish drinkable ice cream. Squeeze a good amount of the ice cream into your ice cup, tip the matcha over the top and stir! Ta-da you have a matcha frappe without the café prices. A well-known hack but one to A FRUIT SMOOTHIE! The food scene in Japan is a goldmine, from mochi and pork katsu to ramens and yakitori — it's sooooo good. However, you might find it's hard to get your fibre in and keep your bowel So, these all fruit smoothie from 7-Eleven are an easy and yummy way to put some fibre back into your indulgent food when it's hot, these icy bevvies will help cool you down. Still feeling a bit blocked up? Grab a yogurt drink of one of these Fibe-Mini drinks that have a healthy amount of dietary fibre. If you're lucky enough to be around a konbini with a hot cookie or baked goods window, grab yourself two pieces and an Ohayou Brulee in the freezer for a DIY ice cream sandwich. Warm, gooey cookies with a crackly, sugar topped ice cream centre? Sign me up. This looks Nikki Eats Japan only picked up one cookie to make her sandwich, which might help if you want to take the sugar content down a notch. Not super sure about this one but it seems easy enough. Grab yourself a duo pack of Yukimi Mochi Ice Cream from the freezer and make sure it's vanilla. Then pull a cup of curry ramen from the shelf and prepare it (at home or in-store). When the noodles are cooked to your desired bite texture, add in the vanilla mochi ball and stir until combined enough. Enjoy, I guess? And finally, when you're feeling sick during your trip and need something lighter on your stomach, grab a plain rice ball and instant miso soup. Broth and soup is a healing combination. Usually, miso soup is used a side dish with a bigger meal but in this case, IT IS THE MEAL. The gentle, salty flavour with the plain rice ball is comforting and easy on the stomach. What are you favourite convenience store hacks in your country?
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘A Pale View of Hills' Review: The Supple Ambiguities of Kazuo Ishiguro's Novel Stiffen and Seize Up in an Unsatisfying Adaptation
Kazuo Ishiguro's 1982 debut novel 'A Pale View of Hills' is an elegant, slippery examination of lives caught between identities both national and existential: Its tale-within-a-tale of two Japanese women living eerily overlapping lives in post-war Nagasaki, as related to the mixed-race daughter of one of them 30 years later, is rife with deliberate, subtly uncanny inconsistencies that speak of immigrant trauma and disassociation. Such lithe literary conceits turn to heavier twists in Kei Ishikawa's ambitious but ungainly adaptation, which mostly follows the letter of Ishiguro's work, but misses its haunting, haunted spirit. Attractively and accessibly presented, this bilingual Japanese-British production aims squarely for crossover arthouse appeal, and with the Ishiguro imprimatur — the Nobel laureate takes an executive producer credit — should secure broader global distribution than any of Ishikawa's previous work. Viewers unfamiliar with the novel, however, may be left perplexed by key development in this dual-timeline period piece, which strands proceedings somewhere between ghost story and elusive, unreliable memory piece; even those more au fait with the material may well query some of Ishikawa's storytelling choices. On more prosaic fronts, too, the film is patchy, with multiple subplots drifting erratically in and out of view, and an uneven quartet of central performances. More from Variety 'Eagles of the Republic' Review: An Egyptian Movie Star Is Forced to Make a Propaganda Film in Tarik Saleh's Catchy but Muddled Age of Autocracy Thriller 'The Disappearance of Josef Mengele' Review: A Post-War Study of the Nazis' 'Angel of Death' Lacks Dimension 'Fuori' Review: Jailtime Revives a Middle-Aged Writer's Mojo in Mario Martone's Uninvolving Literary Biopic Ishiguro's novel was narrated firsthand by the character who bridges both its timelines. The melancholic Etsuko appears in 1952 Nagasaki as a timid, dutiful housewife (played by 'Our Little Sister' star Suzu Hirose) pregnant with her first child, and 30 years later, in Britain's genteel home counties, as a solitary widow (played by Yoh Yoshida) preparing to move from a house filled with pained memories. In between there has been a second marriage, a second pregnancy, a seismic emigration and more than one bereavement. Our access to Etsuko's inner life is limited, however, as her story is filtered through the perspective of her younger daughter Niki (Camilla Aiko), an aspiring journalist who has grown up entirely in Britain. Visiting her mother in 1982 with the intention of writing a family memoir of sorts, Niki struggles to square her westernized upbringing with a Japanese history and heritage that her mother is loath to talk about. Etsuko's reticence is partly rooted in grief: The elephant in the room between them is the recent suicide of Keiko, Etsuko's Japanese-born elder daughter and Niki's half-sister, who never adjusted, culturally or psychologically, to her new environment after emigrating with her mother and British stepfather. Keiko is never directly seen on screen, though there may be an analog of sorts for her childhood self in the film's 1950s-set section, where the young Etsuko — lonely and brusquely neglected by her workaholic husband Jiro (Kouhei Matsushita) — befriends single mother Sachiko (Fumi Nikaido, recently seen in FX's 'Shōgun' series) and her sullen, withdrawn pre-teen daughter Mariko. Sachiko is a glamorous, modern-minded social outcast, marginalized both for her rejection of Japanese patriarchy and the scars of her and Mariko's radiation exposure following the 1945 Nagasaki bombings. (The stigma of the latter is such that Etsuko maintains a lie to Jiro that she was not in Nagasaki at the time.) But she's planning her escape, having attached herself to an American soldier willing to sweep her and Mariko back to the States. As the two women bond, the meek Etsuko begins to wonder if this life of traditional domestic servitude is really what she was made for. Though we are never party to her early years of motherhood, nor the transition between her first and second husbands, the mirroring between these unseen, imminent life changes and Sachiko's situation grows ever clearer — as the women themselves even begin to resemble each other in costume and comportment. Is Sachiko merely a model for Etsuko to emulate, a phantom projection of what her future could be, or the older Etsuko's distanced reflection of her past? DP Piotr Niemyjski's heightened depiction of midcentury Nagasaki — sometimes a postcard vision of serene pastels, sometimes luridly bathed in saturated sunset hues — suggests some embellishment of reality, but Ishikawa never finds a narratively satisfying way to present ambiguities that can shimmer more nebulously on the page, building to a reveal that feels overwrought and rug-pulling. Back in Blighty, shot in drabber tones outside a flash of red maple foliage in Etsuko's lovingly maintained Japanese-style garden, the drama is more straightforward, but stilted and inert nonetheless. The script musters scant interest in Niki's career ambitions and romantic complications, and her halting conversations with her mother keep chasing a climactic point of mutual understanding that never arrives — a poignant impasse, perhaps, but a difficult one to structure a film around. There's more interest in the past, and in Hirose and Nikaido's delicate performances as two women living parallel lives in full view of each other. But 'A Pale View of Hills' commendably resists nostalgia, as it brittly sympathizes with immigrant identities unsettled in any place or any era. Best of Variety The Best Albums of the Decade
