The machine that pours it hot: reading a Japanese vending machine in winter

The last light has gone off the platform at Kōfu and the train is four minutes out. You are cold in the way that only a country railway station in February can make you, and there is a machine glowing against the wall — twenty drinks behind glass, each with a small band of colour under it. Some bands are red. Some are blue. This is the first thing worth learning about a jidōhanbaiki (自動販売機), because in winter the same machine will hand you a can hot enough to keep in your coat pocket, or a bottle cold enough to hurt your teeth, and nothing on it is written in a language you read.

The red band and the blue band

From roughly November to March, a drinks machine runs two temperatures at once. The band beneath each product tells you which: red means atatakai (あたたかい), warm, and blue means tsumetai (つめたい), cold. Suntory's coffee line prints it as あったか〜い on the red and つめた〜い on the blue, stretched out like someone saying it slowly, and once you have seen that pairing you can read any machine in the country. The hot cans sit around 55 degrees, warm enough that you shift them hand to hand for the first few seconds. The cold ones are kept near 5.

The same drink often appears twice, once in each colour — a can of black coffee hot on the left, cold on the right — so the colour under the price, not the picture on the can, is what you are actually choosing. In the warmer half of the year the red bands simply vanish and everything goes cold. If you are standing at a machine in July looking for a hot one, that is why there isn't one.

Feeding it, and getting your change

Coins go in the slot on the right: 10, 50, 100 and 500 yen are all taken, and the machine keeps a running total on a small display until you have enough. Notes go in the thin horizontal mouth below, but only the 1,000-yen note reliably works; most machines refuse the 10,000, and a fair number won't take a 5,000 either, so a folded 10,000 is the quiet way to strand yourself with no drink and no change. If the machine has an IC panel — a flat pad marked with the Suica or Pasmo logo — you tap the same card you use at the ticket gate, and the fare comes straight off the balance with no button-pressing at all. The lever or button for otsuri (おつり), your change and any coins the machine rejects, is at the bottom left; the drink itself drops behind a hinged flap you push inward at the base.

What is actually in there

The staples repeat nationwide. Canned coffee — Boss (ボス) in its stubby 185-gram can — runs about 140 to 160 yen; a 500-millilitre bottle of Pocari Sweat (ポカリスエット), the pale-blue sports drink, is closer to 160 to 180. The winter oddities are the reason to look twice: corn potage, kōn potāju (コーンポタージュ), a hot can of sweetcorn soup for around 130 yen, famous for the last few kernels that cling to the bottom no matter how you tip it; oshiruko (おしるこ), warm sweet red-bean, thick enough to be a snack; and hot lemon that tastes like a remedy. Near big stations you will sometimes find a discount machine with everything at 100 or 110 yen, its prices handwritten on paper strips, and out past the ticket gates in a few older neighbourhoods, a machine that sells one-cup sake, wan-kappu (ワンカップ), in a glass tumbler with a foil lid.

The rule nobody prints on the glass

You drink it there. Beside almost every machine stands a bin, sometimes a pair — one round hole for cans and PET bottles — and that bin belongs to the machine: it takes the container you just emptied, and nothing else. Japan has almost no public rubbish bins on its streets, a fact that catches out most first-time visitors, so the space next to a vending machine is one of the few honest places to finish a drink and be rid of the can. Walking off down the road sipping as you go is not done, and you will notice you are the only one doing it. Finish the coffee while it is hot, drop the can in the slot that fits it, and carry nothing.

Where they are, and the one thing to get right

There are somewhere over four million of these machines in Japan, and they cluster where you least expect help: outside a shut post office, at the foot of a mountain shrine's steps, on a rural road with no shop for a kilometre in either direction. Nearly all run 24 hours. Two mistakes cost foreigners a drink. The first is the 10,000-yen note, which most machines will spit back out — carry coins and a couple of 1,000s. The second is assuming the IC pad reads your card from home; it reads Japan's own transit cards, Suica, Pasmo, ICOCA and their siblings, not the contactless Visa in your pocket, so unless you have loaded a local card, feed it metal. Do that, watch for the red band, and the coldest platform in the country turns survivable in the length of one train's delay.