Drugstore Cosmos has been popular all over Japan lately, and now a branch has opened in Hamamatsu too. Once it gets this far, it basically means they’re everywhere.

The front entrance

It’s a pretty big store. The reason this place is famous is the prices, and right at the entrance it says “all items priced tax included.”

Medicines

If you look closely you can see the coin-shaped Roihi-Tsuboko pain patches going for 498 yen… searching Amazon’s lowest price right now gives 681 yen. It really was absurdly cheap. At this price you could come from far away and still come out ahead of the train fare.

Since we have no point cards and no cashless payments, we keep our prices low.

They’ve written it out confidently in huge letters… It was so cheap it genuinely shocked me.

Picked up some ice cream too

I also bought the black soybean senbei I’m fond of.

Buying plenty while it’s cheap is the smart move.

Usukawa milk cream buns

Apparently they use Hiruzen Jersey milk from Okayama Prefecture. The taste was pretty good.

An unagi bowl with no unagi in it

As everyone knows, the meat that goes into cup noodles is soy meat, and here they added unagi sauce to pull off the unagi flavor. The taste wasn’t strange at all, actually — perfectly edible. Japan has its own day for eating eel, the Doyo no Ushi no Hi, so something like this might be a fun thing to eat then.

Fujinomiya yakisoba

It was being sold as a Shizuoka specialty so I picked one up, and it’s decent. Normally a cheap drugstore doesn’t carry unusual products, but for some reason there were a few distinctive items here. So I gathered up a few and tried them.

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