Japan is Awesome: Cheese Sand

I’ve been in Japan a long time, long enough that I can’t see a lot of things that used to stand out. Oddities everywhere, bits and pieces of culture that tilt your head like a puppy. Twenty plus years here, and everything seems normal. It’s like my filters are broken, letting the signal pass through without setting off the alarms.

Enter Ebi Cheese Sand, a snack. Doesn’t sound appetizing, does it.

There’s a nice tradition in Japan. If you go on vacation, you come back to work or to friends with a gift, an omiyage. The ebi cheese sand was one of those gifts. I looked at it, and suddenly my filter clicked back on—sand in my cheese snack?

Sando is the word for sandwich in my adopted language. Saying the whole word sandwich in Japanese is a handful. In English, it’s two syllables, sammich (to me anyway, your mileage may vary). But in Japanese, you gotta pair every consonant (except “n”, don’t ask) with a vowel. And vowels can be their own syllable too. So sammich becomes sa-n-dou-i-tt-chi (trust me on the double “t”, it’s kind of a syllable too, sort of).

Five syllables, maybe. You could write a letter to your Mom with five syllables. Five syllables is a mouthful, which means someone’s gonna simplify, create an acronym. So they shortened it.

Sando

And it’s cool too. Using English in product names is foreign branding. Like Crème vs. Cream or Gelato vs. Ice Cream. So a Cheese Sand is a cool snack with cheese between two wafers.

It tasted great. No grit.

And “ebi” means shrimp. So really, I was eating a Shrimp Cheese Sandwich—and that sounds more normal to me than Cheese Sand.