Most first time visitors to Japan remark on the amount of vending machines in the country. I surely did. Like pubs in England, there appears to be at least one, and sometimes more, on every single corner. Across the street from where I live, there were actually two, until a few months ago when one day we discovered they were no longer there, having been spirited away in the middle of the night presumably by whatever vending company had put them there in the first place. And I must admit that what had always struck me as a blight on our neighbourly landscape had suddenly overnight turned into a gaping hole, something missed, a symbol of Japan ripped out of the ground as if it were a cherry blossom tree. Nevermind that I had never partaken of its riches save for one desperate morning when there was no time for brewed coffee and I was trying to stave off the impending caffiene headache (yes, many vending machines carry both hot and cold canned coffee).
I remember having to learn the kanji for “vending machine” in one of my Japanese classes at Soko Gakuen in San Francisco. I’m not sure what took me aback more: actually having to learn what surely can’t be one of the, say, thousand most important kanji in the Japanese language, or the sheer length and inpenetratability of the compound (yes, I’ve reproduced it here so you can see this for yourself). Made up of 5 separate kanji characters, I think the only reason I actually bothered to learn how to read and write the thing was some sort of imagined ego-stroking I might later gain by being able to scribble it for native Japanese (needless to say after the course was over I quickly forgot it). Being in Japan, I have seen no need to reaquaint myself with this kanji save for this here post. It’s not like I need for the actual vending machines to display signs letting me know what is already quite obvious — that they are, in fact, vending machines. (I’m being somewhat apocryphal here; of course the individual kanji are eminently worth learning).
I do find it curious — but heartening, I should hasten to add — that in a language that everyday seems to add a new “loan word” to its vocabulary, the Japanese actually organically created their own word for vending machine, complete with its own kanji: ji-dou-han-bai-ki. I’ve broken it up here along the lines of its 5 kanji characters, but in reality the word should be broken down into 3 kanji compounds, as follows:
I haven’t been able to determine when or exactly how this word started to appear in the Japanese lexicon, although the Koujien dictionary seems to suggest it had its origins in Automat, the name of America’s first fast-food joint, which served food via coin-operated machines in waitress-less restaurants beginning in 1902.
The history of the actual machines is a bit easier to trace. According to this site (in Japanese), the first patent for vending machines in Japan was filed in 1890, but the first working machine was not introduced until 1904, when the Japanese Postal system used wooden machines to dispense stamps and postcards.
It wasn’t until the 1960’s, however, that vending machines began to really make an impact on the Japanese consumer landscape, due largely in part to American soft drink makers led by Coca-Cola who needed a way to quickly saturate the Japanese market with their product. (This site attributes the rise of the vending machine to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, but I haven’t found other sources backing this up).
In 1967, with the introduction of a new nickel-based 100-yen coin into circulation (replacing the prior silver-based coin), vending machines started to take off. A year later, Japan National Railways (presently Japan Railways) introduced ticket vending machines into all the stations in Yamanote Line in Tokyo, further solidifying the proliferation of automated machines.
According to this TIMEasia.com story from last year, there are now over 5.5 million vending machines in Japan, pulling in more than $56 billion (USD) in sales annually. America has more: according to this story in Nipponia, in 1997 there were 6.89 million in the US. But of course, there are twice as many people in the states. Going by these figures, in America there is approximately one vending machine for every 39 people; in Japan, one machine for every 23 people.
Looked at another way, in Japan, which has a total land area of only 374,722 square kilometers, there are approximately 14.5 vending machines per square kilometer. By contrast, in the United States, with its vast total land area of 9,158,160 square kilometers (5th in the world just behind Canada, in case you were curious), there is less than one vending machine per square km (.75 or three-fourths of a machine to be exact).
I think it’s this sheer volume and the ubiquitous nature of these automated wonders that impresses the visitor most, much more so than the endless variety of goods found in them, including those near-urban legend used panties worn by Japanese schoolgirls that were briefly available in 1993. There’s just something a bit disconcerting about jidouhanbaiki propped up against garages or sides of houses in residential neighborhoods. However, if you manage to be in Japan during hot and humid summer season, it’ll all start to make sense, and you’ll be thanking whoever put them there. But if only they’d be stocked with more bottled water and less Pocari Sweat…
