Himamori Pota Pours Her First Drink in Two Months for a Winter-Feast Stream

VARIUM — Himamori Pota, a fifth-generation talent with the agency Varium, took her first drink in two months on Nov. 4, turning a stream billed around winter food and sake into nearly four hours of loose, wandering talk. The date was a fan favorite, a numerical pun on “ii oshi,” or “good favorite,” and some viewers opened by telling her she was theirs.

She showed her table before the first toast: oden, oysters grilled in butter and yellowtail sashimi, served on a bear-shaped dish she said could pass for a hamster. A frozen crab she had passed over at the supermarket became a running regret. Her drinks were beer and a 23-percent peach-scented shochu, which she sniffed, sipped and pronounced delicious. “Humans have lived to eat and drink things like this,” she told viewers, and at one point she called herself a chosen hamster.

“The winter feast is just a pretext. I wrote it because I wanted to drink together.” — Himamori Pota, midway through the stream

The talk drifted from topic to topic. She said she wakes her grandmother in the middle of the night when she drinks alone, described telling invented jobs to hairdressers to avoid awkward questions, and explained that her driver’s license goes unused because her hands shake behind the wheel. She also recalled a bean-picking test from her elementary-school entrance exam, her one boast, though she could not manage it drunk. She left twice for the bathroom, and later joked about playing a Pocky game with a piece of burdock root from the oden, ahead of Pocky Day on Nov. 11.

Chat followed along with toasts, laughter and teasing as her speech loosened, and the stream drew 104 Super Chats and Stickers. Near the end she read messages viewers had sent in beforehand and called out the names of those who had been commenting. She said she had named the stream after a winter feast mostly as an excuse to drink with them.

She said she planned to wake early on Nov. 5 to try to buy a Pokémon Center Online item, and that she would return to the game Utawarerumono the next day.