The weird machines get the photos. The wagyu, the bug snacks, the canned oden. They are real and worth finding, and I wrote about them here. But they are not what I actually buy. Most days, from most machines, I buy the boring-good stuff. The drinks a local rotates through without thinking about it. Here is the rotation.
Pocari Sweat
Start here. Pocari Sweat is Otsuka's ion supply drink, pale blue label, faintly sweet, somewhere between water and a sports drink and not quite either. It is the practical one. Tokyo in August takes everything out of you in a ten-minute walk, and Pocari is what puts it back. It is also the hangover drink. The post-karaoke drink. The thing you buy at 7am from a machine outside the station because your body is asking for something and you do not know what. Pocari knows.
Hot BOSS, and which one
BOSS is Suntory's canned coffee. It has been the number one canned coffee in Japan since 1992, and the cans are made of steel for one specific reason. So a machine can heat them and sell them hot. That is the whole magic of a Japanese winter. You put in 130 yen, the machine drops a hot can, and for the next two blocks your hands are warm.
The one to get hot is the BOSS Cafe au Lait. Sweet, milky, the comfort version. It is not trying to be a serious coffee and it is better for it. If you want the serious one, BOSS Rainbow Mountain Blend is the flagship, Guatemalan beans, a doubleshot of espresso in a small can, blacker and stronger. Tommy Lee Jones has played an alien reviewing humanity in the BOSS ads for almost twenty years. Once you know that, you cannot unsee him on the can.
Ito En Oi Ocha
If Pocari is the body drink and BOSS is the cold-morning drink, Oi Ocha is the default. Unsweetened green tea, the everyday standard, the one that tastes like nothing and everything at once. Ito En makes it. For years the label was just the label. Now it has Shohei Ohtani on it. He is the global ambassador, he has said he has been drinking Oi Ocha since he was a kid, and he still drinks it in LA. So there is a real chance the green tea you pull out of a Tokyo machine has Ohtani's face on the label, in a Dodgers cap, looking calm. The most Japanese drink there is, now sold by the most famous Japanese person alive.
The supporting cast
C.C. Lemon is the vitamin-C lemon soda, bright yellow, crisp, more tart than you expect. Calpis Water is the one foreigners find strange and then cannot stop drinking, a milky yogurt-soda that should not work cold and does. And when it gets cold out, the machines switch over and start selling hot corn potage in a can, which is exactly what it sounds like, sweet corn soup you drink standing up, with the eternal problem of the last kernels stuck at the bottom that no amount of shaking will free.
There is a quieter rivalry running under all of this. BOSS versus Georgia. Suntory versus Coca-Cola. The two canned coffees every machine carries and every person has an opinion about. I am BOSS. Most of the country is split. It is the closest thing vending machines have to a derby.
And then, sriracha
One machine in Ikebukuro sells sriracha from a vending machine. Not a drink. Not really a snack. Hot sauce, in a bottle, out of a machine, for reasons nobody has fully explained. It is not part of the rotation. Nothing about it is everyday. But I think about it more than almost anything I actually buy, and that is the whole thing with these machines. The boring-good stuff is the texture of a day here. The strange stuff is why you keep looking.