After watching Samurai Champloo I was kind of obsessed about Dango. I looked everywhere for Dango, but couldn't find it. I dreamed about eating Dango. When I saw some Mochi ice-cream at the asian grocer I thought it was Dango! Can you imagine my degree of distress? An attentive friend Ritee picked some up from the store for me when I stayed with her last year in Tokyo. She said, “Dude, this is Japan; you can get these everywhere.” But I wasn't listening because I had opened the package and proceeded to gorge myself. It was kind of more doughy than I imagined, kind of like a really chewy Mochi…but chewier. Anyway, I took a picture of my very first Mitarashi Dango.
Then, the inevitable happened: time passed; flowers withered; winter came – I forgot about Dango…
Until today: while I looked at some Flickr stats and saw that less than 1% of my traffic was referred from a curious http://cs.mitarashi-dango.slot.kuru2.st/. My curiosity was piqued. It didn't look like a blog URL. I clicked on it and what did I see, but a digital slot machine of course! Except there were no fruit – only pictures of Mitarashi Dango. It made about as much sense as the last episode of Evangelion where everything turns to goo.
And, I felt a slight thrill for Dango once again.