Coffee Jelly Frappuccino and the Meaning of Personhood in Japan

This is Starbucks Japan's newest product offering. It looks kinda like a Frappuccino, but there's something weird going on in the bottom, right?

According to their website it's, "a jelly-filled cup of Frappuccino fun." I worked for about 7 years at Starbucks before and during my college years and so I had to try this.

My initial hope was that it would be like a Frappuccino and bubble tea, y'know? I love Frappuccinos (that's how I ended up working at Starbucks, oh the magic of the Rhumba Frappuccino) and I love taro bubble tea - put the two together, it must be delicious, yeah?

Well, the jelly is exactly that. I was hoping this was an artifact of translation (since I've yet to learn what you call those "bubbles" or "pearls" in bubble tea in English) and was really not prepared for the coffee jelly. They scoop it into the drink and then add Frappuccino to it. The jelly is not very sweet, and that's a good thing because the Frappuccinos are terribly sweet.

For those of you wondering about Japanese cuisine, this drink is a great entry point. The Japanese love texture, seemingly above all else. That's why you can have a beautiful-looking meal and bite into it and realize it's cold (which is what happened one morning when I ordered the French breakfast at a lovely hotel here). The point is not that the flavors together enhance one another - unlike in Chinese cooking or in Italian sauce making - but that each ingredient really speak for itself and being brought together it is aesthetically-pleasing.

The site, then, of what is good and beautiful in Japanese food is not primarily in the mouth. Or maybe more true, the palate is not so simply localized and instead exists throughout the body in a manner that we simply don't understand as Westerners on first encounter (we've yet to develop our palate). This lack of refinement is already known when the Japanese deal with Westerners, that's why we can completely blunder our social interactions - they have the same attitude of permissiveness when they raise their children. But, at some point, just as with Japanese children, we will be expected to start behaving properly and demonstrating our cultivation of what it means to be Japanese, their mores, their language (verbal and nonverbal). This social sense of who we are, I would argue, is fundamentally more of an aesthetic ordering than what we in the West are expected to demonstrate as we become who we are.