It was launched as Mac Burger in the 1970s, but changed its name after legal action from McDonald’s Japan. Gutenburger was a particularly memorable brand. “They had a high water content, which made them soggy and not at all tasty compared with McDonald’s,” he comments, but still he felt an attachment to the machine products. The first burger machines appeared around the time McDonald’s opened its first Japanese restaurant in Ginza in 1971, and by the start of the 1990s, when Nomura was in high school, they could be found here and there around the city. He began a quest to find new vending machines, taking particular pleasure in tracking down those selling hamburgers. Toast, hamburgers, miso soup, ramen, kakigōri (shaved ice)-this unexpected bounty gave birth to a lifelong obsession. He was amazed by the lineup of vending machines in the eating area. “It didn’t look like somewhere I’d want to go inside,” he says, but even so, one day he was sufficiently overcome by curiosity to investigate further.
Along the route to school, a 24-hour game center caught his eye.
He now runs a fan website dedicated to the devices, but back then he was just a typical high schooler, commuting from Saitama Prefecture to Tokyo. Nomura Makoto was 17 when he got the vending machine bug.
