Tokyo: things that look like sweet potatoes

This is not a sweet potato.

It’s an homage to a sweet potato: a sweet-potato-shaped bread roll with sweet-potato filling. In the novelty-filled world of Tokyo, it fits right in.

Here’s another one: sweet-potato-shaped novelty ice cream (available from Lawson convenience stores). Sweet-potato-flavored soft-serve ice cream is also pretty easy to find around the city (sometimes orage, sometimes purple).

Alas the sweet-potato-shaped outer wafer on this particular specimen doesn’t line up exactly, but you get the idea.

And then, perhaps the greatest novelty of them all: actual sweet potatoes.

This particular sweet potato was purchased from the sweet potato man, who drives his sweet potato truck around Tokyo blasting the sweet potato song (Yakimooooo! Yakimoooooo! Ishi Yaaaaa-aaaaakimo!). To hear the song (one version of it, anyway), see this.

This is the back of the yakimo truck. Sweet potatoes roasting over a roaring fire, being driven around a metropolis of 35 million people in the back of a tiny truck. Beats the ice cream man hands down.

In case I haven’t mentioned it recently, Japan is too delightful for words. Go there now.