Staff Room:wakiki’s “World’s End” Camp Recipe

Last Updated on 2026-07-13 by a-indie

Hi there! This is the BELONG Media editorial team.

Have you ever done something and thought, “If it’s come to this… we’re truly done for”?

This is the second installment of our four-part staff roundtable on the theme “Screenshots and photos we just had to take,” featuring wakiki (moderator), yabori, Takita, and Maririn. This time, it’s wakiki’s story about one very memorable camping trip.

wakiki’s “End of Century” Camping Night

The title I went with, based on pure gut instinct, was “End of Century.”

wakiki

yabori

What is this? Is that a banana with Pocky sticks shoved into it?

Exactly. The reason I called it “End of Century” is because it looked like the kind of spiky shoulder armor worn by the goons in Fist of the North Star — a classic Japanese post-apocalyptic manga and anime series. The phrase “End of Century” is directly associated with that franchise.

wakiki

The spikes! (laughs)

Maririn

Yes, the spikes! (laughs) And also this feeling of “if we’ve sunk to doing this… we’re truly done for” (laughs). We did this to ourselves, but let me explain how we got here.

This is a photo from a camping trip — my very first time camping. There was a guy at work who camps a lot, and at the time, a close friend and I were both completely burned out from work and desperate to escape reality, so we basically pleaded with him: “Please, please take us camping.” And that’s how the three of us ended up going.

wakiki

yabori

You were that exhausted?! (laughs)

We really were! We were saying things like “If we see a beautiful starry sky, I think we might actually cry” (laughs). We grilled meat, made s’mores — all the classics. But I’d found a recipe online where you slice a banana open, tuck in some chocolate, and grill it — and I was like, “That looks incredible, I want to try this!” Somehow though, during the shopping trip, the chocolate bar got swapped out for Pocky (a popular Japanese chocolate-coated biscuit stick snack) — and that was our fatal mistake.

wakiki

yabori

I see where this is going (laughs).

The idea was: if we slid Pocky in like the chopstick skewers on festival chocolate bananas, the chocolate would melt in and our hands wouldn’t get messy — perfect, right? But they wouldn’t go in properly at all. Pocky cannot structurally support a banana (laughs). Someone should have figured that out beforehand! (laughs) Then at some point — can’t remember who started it — we began snapping the Pocky and sticking them in sideways, and suddenly it looked exactly like a shōryōma — the cucumber-and-chopstick spirit horse made during Obon, Japan’s summer festival to honor ancestral spirits.

wakiki

yabori

Oh yeah, the Obon cucumber horse looks exactly like this! (laughs)

So we thought it was done, and we each plated one and tried it — and it was, well, not particularly tasty (laughs). The Pocky and banana hadn’t melded together at all, and you couldn’t really eat it without pulling the Pocky out first. Completely impractical. Everyone started pulling out their sticks one by one, and when it got to my last one, I decided to make a moment of it: “I will now remove this final stick. I draw this holy sword.” Everyone started riffing — “Ah, Excalibur!” — being completely ridiculous about it. All the others had slid out cleanly, but that one “holy sword” came out all floppy and sad, and the three of us, exhausted as we were, completely lost it.

wakiki

yabori

You were all so tired (laughs).

The campsite had a quiet time from 10 PM, so we were in the tent eating our banana, everyone trying to laugh silently — one person basically started hyperventilating, going “hehehehe” in a hushed wheeze. Absolute chaos. My friend and I agreed it didn’t taste great, but the camping guy kept insisting it was “delicious.” I figured maybe his had cooked properly, so I said “Let me try yours” — and it tasted exactly the same as mine (laughs).

wakiki

yabori

He’s the only one with broken taste buds (laughs).

Yeah, turned out he was the only one with broken taste buds (laughs).

wakiki

yabori

Is this even how you’re supposed to grill a banana? Does it actually taste good?

If you try it, I’d really recommend using an actual chocolate bar and making sure it’s properly grilled through. The problem here was that the chocolate and banana never actually combined — it never became a chocolate banana. There’s also a recipe where you just grill the banana on its own, which might be nicer, but ours was probably undercooked anyway. And the look of it… honestly it wasn’t very appetizing (laughs).

wakiki

yabori

It looks like the aftermath of some kind of ritual.

For some reason it reminds me of a herring pie.

Maririn

Oh! Stargazy Pie! That’s a traditional Cornish pie from southwest England where whole pilchards are baked into the pastry with their heads poking out through the crust — looking up at the stars. Amazing name.

wakiki

yabori

Yeah, I just looked up Stargazy Pie. That’s the one. It’s wonderfully surreal-looking.

yabori, did you just take a screenshot of that?

wakiki

yabori

Oh yeah, this one’s got something. Surreal in a good way. The visual is better than I expected.

It got you (laughs).

wakiki

I can’t believe people in the UK actually eat this (laughs).

Maririn

Though apparently it’s presented as a British icon, it’s actually a regional traditional dish from Cornwall — and if you ask a British person “do you eat this?”, the answer is usually “…what?”

wakiki

yabori

So it’s a rural local specialty then.

Exactly. And it actually does sound tasty when you think of it as a fish pie. There’s a herring pie in Kiki’s Delivery Service — the beloved 1989 Studio Ghibli film — as well. Kiki gets a request from a grandmother to deliver a pie she’s baked to her granddaughter, and the granddaughter says “I actually don’t really like this pie” in this really memorable scene.

wakiki

yabori

She doesn’t like it! It’s probably a bit like funazushi in Japan — an intensely pungent fermented fish dish from Shiga Prefecture that even most Japanese people find quite challenging. If someone said “all Japanese people eat funazushi,” you’d go “…well, not exactly.” I get the sense Stargazy Pie is that kind of thing. You’d really have to ask a British person to know for sure.

If I make it over for the New Year holidays, I’ll ask!

wakiki

And eat it while you’re there, if at all possible.

Maririn

yabori

The real thing! And it says right here it’s traditionally eaten in the village on December 23rd — if you’re going over New Year’s, the timing would be perfect! (laughs)

Hmm, where will I actually be at that point… I might be in a different country… wait, no — I’ll be in the UK. Okay, maybe I’ll make the trip down to Cornwall. Will they let an outsider try it, do you think?

wakiki

yabori

If anything, being an outsider might make them more eager to share it with you!

Alright — I just added it to my travel notes. “Herring pie in Cornwall.”

wakiki

Editorial Postscript

So, what did you think?

What started as a chocolate bar somehow became Pocky, the Pocky became a spirit horse, and then Excalibur showed up — wakiki’s “End of Century” camping trip was a night of completely unexpected turns.

What stood out: wakiki clearly took great joy in recounting how her exhausted, half-delirious declaration of “I draw this holy sword” ended up becoming the defining moment of that camping night. And yabori, listening along, couldn’t help taking a screenshot of his own mid-conversation — his instinct for absurdist content remains as sharp as ever.

Next up: a notification that stopped Maririn dead in her tracks.

BELONG Media Editorial Team
A music media outlet covering indie rock and beyond, from Japan, the West, and Asia. We have published 26 issues of our roots-rock themed print magazine, BELONG Magazine.

In 2021 we appeared as guests on J-WAVE’s SONAR MUSIC. In 2022 we launched our English-language sister site, A-indie.

Our editorial team runs primarily on shoegaze and dream pop.