10 Japanese Sandwiches You Should Know About

In my five years living in Japan, food was my North Star. I wrote about it, traveled for it, worked in many of Tokyo's izakayas to understand it. I ate plenty of great things, make no mistake, but did I ever eat anything that was better than a convenience store sandwich? No. No, I did not.

Japanese convenience store sandwiches, or konbini sando, have captured the world's attention in recent years. What would be written off in any other country as a simple, quick snack has found a foothold in Japan and evolved into a significant food experience. This should come as no surprise, of course. A dedication to quality, flavor, and innovation courses through the country's veins. From the heights of multi-course omakase meals to the 200-yen sando at 7-Eleven, exemplary dining is the expectation in Japan. 

The fundamentals of all sando are basically the same. Neat, crustless triangles of fluffy milk bread called shokupan serve as a vehicle for the sandwich filling, which is left to the imagination. Seasonal flavors and regional specialties abound, but it's the konbini staples that are the most beloved. Let's be very clear: All konbini sando are good. 7-Eleven, FamilyMart, Lawson, Mini Stop, Daily Yamazaki — they're all stocking a great product worth your attention. Yes, certain kinds are better at certain convenience stores, and some are just too bizarre to write about, like the inexplicable yakisoba sandwich. But this is a love letter to the greatest food on Earth. What follows are 10 Japanese sandwiches you should know about.

What is it like to taste perfection? To know that no moment in time can eclipse your joy in the present? That is what it's like to eat an egg salad sandwich from a Japanese convenience store. If you've ever heard of or had a konbini sando, it was probably this. The king of all sando, the egg salad sandwich, or tamago sando, knows no rival. Its secrets have been well documented, but its simplicity still has the power to mystify. Kewpie mayonnaise, rich egg yolk slurry, and a dash of monosodium glutamate all converge to form a golden panacea that can cure whatever ails the weary soul. A revelation for the senses and a rush-hour rarity, to find one in your local convenience store at 9 a.m. is nothing short of a miracle.

A bestseller in practically every konbini chain, the tamago sando rarely deviates in form. 7-Eleven adds a few chunks of egg white, while Lawson opts for extra-thick bread. Daily Yamazaki's is the exact opposite, with overly fluffy egg yolks and nearly paper-thin bread slices. The supreme iteration, however, is certainly FamilyMart's. Boasting thin slices of milk bread and double the sodium content of any of its rivals, it is far and away the most flavorful take on this hallowed sandwich expression.

If there was any sandwich capable of rivaling egg salad in the realm of popularity, it would have to be tuna mayo. This often comes as a surprise to Western travelers, who frequently chuckle at its inclusion amongst the konbini sando lineup. Finding tuna salad in a Japanese convenience store has a way of pulling tourists out of their fantasies of escapism. Reviled by many, ways to upgrade this mundane sandwich filling are well documented. Yet, in the Japanese convenience store, the simple tuna sandwich is revered.

It's easy to find evidence of its importance in Japanese convenience store culture. Tuna mayo is so quintessential to konbini sando selections that it is regularly paired and packaged with egg salad. The two flavors do not seemingly work in tandem at first glance, but their composition is the cause for their combination. Kewpie mayonnaise, the constant culprit in all the best Japanese sandos, is present here as well. Enriched with egg yolks and sharpened with rice vinegar's acidity, it lifts tuna salad to new heights. Light on crunchy vegetable additions like celery or onion, it mirrors the creamy, smooth texture of the egg salad. Slathered in between pillowy slices of shokupan, it's a sensory sensation.

Egg salad reigns supreme at all hours of the day, though it's the breakfast rush that sees it flying off store shelves at a breakneck pace. This often leaves late-rising tourists and straggling salarymen with limited options in the sandwich aisle. With no tamago sando to speak of, what is one meant to do for breakfast? Calorie seekers, fear not, for there is always a secret hero in plain sight: the teriyaki chicken sandwich.

The sandwich's namesake — grilled chicken glazed with a simple blend of soy sauce and sugar — is enough to make this a viable egg salad alternative, but a peek under the hood of this sando reveals you're not sacrificing anything in this selection. The teriyaki chicken sandwich proudly holds its protein in place with the very egg salad you so desperately seek. Though you don't receive as much egg salad as you would on a fully fledged tamago sando, you still get enough to satisfy even the most voracious craving.

The teriyaki chicken sandwich has a tendency to be a bit sweet, especially the one sold at 7-Eleven. Consider adding a smear of yellow mustard to the inside of your shokupan. The acid rips through the syrupy teriyaki sauce and kicks this sandwich into high gear.

Let us acknowledge a rarely spoken truth: Sometimes, an egg salad sandwich just doesn't cut it. After a long night of izakaya-hopping and clanking highball glasses with salarymen, the body craves a calorie bomb. For this, we turn to the tonkatsu sando. This sandwich has exploded in popularity in recent years, leading to a collective curiosity and confusion overseas surrounding its name. While many iterations and riffs on this sandwich form exist — from chicken to wagyu and everything in between — we'll focus on the standard-bearer: pork.

A tonkatsu sando is a fried pork cutlet slapped between two slices of shokupan, with a little bit of shredded cabbage and tangy tonkatsu sauce. It sounds quite simple, but if we've learned anything, it's that the simplest things are extraordinary in a Japanese convenience store, where everything is refreshed throughout the day. The tonkatsu sandwich benefits greatly from this practice, ensuring that your pork cutlet is never without a top-notch crunch. The tonkatsu sando can also be more difficult to find than the triangular sandwiches that populate the refrigerated snack aisle. Traditionally served on small, rectangular slices of shokupan, this squat sandwich often requires some digging to uncover, especially after a busy lunch rush.

With different takes on the tonkatsu sando ever expanding, it's surprising that any particular variant could carve out its own place on the konbini shelf, but ham katsu has done just that. Ham katsu is old-school — not as old as tonkatsu itself, but it's certainly associated with a time long past. The postwar period, called the Showa era in Japan, was a time of reformation and discovery for the country's culture. Japanese interpretations of foreign cuisine, called yoshoku, garnered widespread appeal. One of the early entries into the postwar yoshoku menu was the ham katsu sando.

The panko-fried ham slice between pieces of shokupan is immediately comparable to the tonkatsu sando, though with a few notable changes. Cabbage is often left off this sandwich entirely, the tonkatsu sauce tends to be a little thinner, and karashi (Japanese spicy mustard) is commonly added as a condiment in diners, though you'll usually just find a meager spread of a Dijon dupe in convenience stores. While the very best versions of this sandwich are found in diners and snack bars throughout the country, many people still turn to convenience stores to deliver a cozy hit of nostalgia.

The final entry in our trio of katsu sandwiches is a bit of a misnomer. Shrimp cutlet, or ebi katsu as it is called in Japan, is not exactly a cutlet, nor is it truly a katsu. Its origins lie in the croquette boom of the early Showa-era, in the 1930s. As with traditional croquettes, its composition was mostly cream flecked with bits of shrimp. It held that form until the early 2000s, when McDonald's introduced the Ebi Burger, featuring a monstrous reimagining of the shrimp croquette. Effectively a panko-fried patty of minced shrimp between two buns, it launched a new sandwich category into the stratosphere.

While McDonald's popularized the sandwich, the chain still recognizes it as a seasonal offering. It's the country's convenience stores that have assumed the mantle of shrimp cutlet service and carry the title proudly. Of course, as to be expected with konbini, the buns are swapped out for triangular slices of shokupan. The condiments that topped the original Ebi Burger — shredded cabbage and tartar sauce — are still present on the convenience store equivalent and even more enjoyable. The shokupan for the shrimp cutlet is always sliced very thinly, ensuring that no flavor gets lost under the tyranny of excess carbohydrate.

There's a perennial practice in Japanese convenience stores of reimagining sandwiches. For seasonal holiday celebrations, fluffy slices of milk bread get swapped out for a dense, waxy bread roll. Beloved flavors like egg salad and tuna mayo that shine on shokupan become shells of their former selves in when placed in the middle of this sickly sweet roll. There is one flavor, however, that works incredibly well when sandwiched between two sides of the classic konbini roll: smoked salmon.

The smoked salmon sandwich is an outlier in that you cannot find it served on shokupan, instead it's exclusively prepared on bread rolls in Japanese konbini. That is not a cause for complaint, however. In fact, the joy of this sandwich lies in the way the roll mirrors the texture of a classic bagel. The contents of the sando are what you'd expect from a lox-style bagel: smoked salmon, thick slabs of cream cheese, lettuce, and capers. Despite its cult status among sando enthusiasts, this sandwich has become increasingly rare on convenience store shelves. If you ever come across one, don't miss the chance to try it.

It is at this point that we kiss savory sandos goodbye. Long have debates over the world's best sandwich been dominated by savory entries. In fact, you too may have never considered that a sweet sandwich might, in fact, be the best sandwich in the world. While largely a foreign concept in the West, dessert sandwiches are well established in Japan. Perhaps none are more beloved than the fruit sando.

Essentially just sliced fresh fruit mixed with whipped cream and capped with shokupan, the fruit sando's simplicity is what makes it an art form. Specialty shops dedicated to the craft exist throughout the nation, all hand-whipping their filling, sourcing and artisanally slicing the best fruit, and custom-fitting the perfect thickness of shokupan slice to make their fruit sando the best money can buy. While independent shops feature fruits ranging from pears, kiwi, passion fruit, and mango, you can still get an impressive array at any convenience store. Depending on seasonal availability, strawberries, blueberries, bananas, mandarins, and muscat grapes can all find their way to konbini shelves.

Fruit sandwiches aren't the only sweet treats to grace convenience store sando shelves. Many dessert-inspired sandwich slices have come and gone over the years — often as limited-time offers or regional exclusives. Who could forget the Hokkaido-exclusive mint chocolate chip sandwich? The sweet custard sandwich also had its moment in the sun several years ago. Red bean, matcha, even sweet potato — the flavors of dessert sandwiches in Japan stretch from well-worn to weird. In the case of sugary sandos, however, you're best served to play it safe. Something as simple as a whipped cream sandwich, a mainstay on konbini shelves, can be revelatory. One riff that exceeds all others, however, is the chocolate pudding sando.

This sandwich is a curiosity. The bread that builds the base of this sandwich is often infused with cocoa. Yes, fluffy brown milk bread serves as the canvas on which whipped chocolate pudding is painted. Many iterations of this konbini highlight also include whipped cream, which lightens the sandwich and adds an intriguing layer of milk fat flavor. This sandwich can be enjoyed right off the convenience store shelf, but don't be afraid to stick a slice or two in the freezer. Your efforts will yield a delightful confection that tastes just like a Western ice cream sandwich.

This one is special. Of the Japanese sandwiches we have discussed, they all have one thing in common: They are found in the konbini sandwich aisle. There is one sandwich, however, that is not. Buried amongst the bakery shelves, beneath piles of cod roe loaves, baguettes, and croissants, you will find one of the world's greatest joys: the pancake sandwich. This sandwich has nothing to do with the inflated souffle pancakes of contemporary Japanese fame. Two Western-style griddlecakes — thin, velvety, and weightless — are smeared with maple syrup and margarine and smashed together. 

It is as magical and indulgent as you might expect. This sandwich, more than any other, is built for a late-night konbini crawl. After izakaya-hopping, with drinks driving your stomach further toward unusual cravings, this is nirvana. Sweet, salty, and with cloud-like textures no mortal hands could create, it is another one of the world's great food experiences. You can eat the pancake sandwich at room temperature and be perfectly content, but if you ask politely, the convenience store cashier will microwave your sandwich for you. Believe me, you want that.