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駅弁 — the lunchbox that tells you where you are
A 駅弁 is a boxed meal sold on a station platform, and the point of it is that it is local. There are something like two thousand varieties, each tied to one station: grilled beef tongue at Sendai, pickled mackerel sushi at Toyama, rice with crab in Tottori, and a famous one at Yokokawa served in a clay pot you are meant to keep. They are not souvenirs — they are lunch, eaten on the train, and the design assumes it will be cold. The institution is over a century old and survives because the Shinkansen made journeys shorter without making them short enough to skip eating, which is also why a 駅弁 wrapper is a reasonable place to learn that the snow is early.