April, 2015 (Page 12)

We’ve talked before about some of the cool extras that’ve come bundled with girls’ manga anthologies in Japan, but they’re not the only publications that dangle the offer of freebies to help drum up sales. In Japan, fashion magazines for adults also occasionally come with promotional items, such as day planners, scrunchies, or other goodies they think their readers might be interested in.

Women’s fashion magazine CanCam recently ran a special feature on Pokémon-related apparel and accessories, so the publishers thought it’d be the perfect opportunity to package the issue with a Pikachu-shaped fuzzy cloth pouch. To make it seem extra special, they decided to pass on his usual vibrant canary yellow and instead produce a chic monochrome version of the series mascot.

But “unique” doesn’t always mean “good,” at least according to one reader who came up with a morbid interpretation of Pikachu’s lack of color.

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Otaku ears-New line of earphones is designed specifically for listening to anime songs with

For anime music fans, the appeal of the songs is more than just their connection to the shows they serve as anthems for. Over the years, anime songs have evolved into a genre in and of themselves, often employing fast, even frantic tempos and an even greater proportion of young female vocalists and electronic sounds than Japanese pop music in general.

So now that there are certain baselines the anime music scene has established for itself, it’s time for the hardware end of the musical experience to catch up, which is the promise made by these new sets of earphones specifically designed for listening to anime songs with.

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What do you eat when you catch a cold? We asked 11 of our Japanese reporters

The answer to the question “What do you eat when you catch a cold?” is probably different depending on where you live in the world. For me, nursing a cold conjures up images of sitting in bed wrapped in blankets and sipping chicken noodle soup.

But we were curious to know which foods and other remedies are commonly consumed in Japan when someone gets sick, so we asked 11 of our colleagues over at the Japanese edition of RocketNews24 and our sister site Pouch to share what they eat when the sniffles start creeping up on them. Think you can guess how they answered? Some of their responses might surprise you!

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