Walker’s Pure Butter Shortbread

Brand: Walkers

Cost: Gift

Found at: Lawsons

I am sad to say that I will soon be leaving Japan and its wonderful snacks. I’m off, instead, to Scotland. I need to go to graduate school, after all, and what better place to pursue an expensive degree than to a country where the local currency is beginning to falter. So as a gift, and in preparation for a new vista of snacks to come, my coworker gave me these – a little two-pack of shortbread cookies.

And she could not have picked a better tribute to a change. Lightly sweet and crunchy and made to pair with a strong cup of black tea, these cookies are excessively Scottish – at least in the minds of Japanese consumer. After all, they’re wrapped in more tartan than a typical Scottish highlander in bagpipe season. But it nevertheless fits in perfectly with the Japanese tea sensibility, which calls for a small sweet snack to be served with a cup of thick matcha tea. These small cookies speak in the language of high tea and tea ceremony and grandma’s cookie tin back home. They are familiar and foreign, exciting and mundane – and for me, at least, they are hopeful. That this next chapter, this next country, this next great adventure will not be so vastly different from my last one. That at the end of a long flight and a culture shock, there will still be Walkers cookies waiting for me.