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Casey Baseel

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Casey Baseel spent his formative years staring in frustration at un-subtitled Japanese TV programming shown on Southern California’s international channel. Taking matters into his own hands, he moved to Tokyo to study the language, then found work in Yokohama a decade ago teaching, translating, and marketing hotels he can’t afford to stay in. When not participating in the eternal cycle of exercising to burn the calories form his love of Japanese food, Casey scours used comic and game shops for forgotten classics, drags his wife around the country in a quest to visit all its castles, sings karaoke not nearly as well as he thinks he does, and counts the days until the summertime bars open on Enoshima Beach.

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Posted by Casey Baseel (Page 444)

“My son didn’t look back when I waved.” Toyota ad will leave you choked up, wanting to call home

You might think that Japanese advertisements are all Hollywood celebrity endorsements or surreal tales of busty schoolgirls with nose rings, but when it wants to, Japan can make commercials that yank on the heartstrings as strongly as anywhere else in Asia. Getting the waterworks flowing today is Toyota, asking the question, “Do you care about your parents as much as they love you?”, and while the video is short on cars, it makes up for that with plenty of tears.

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Samurai Studio: Tokyo’s new photo studio where you can get your picture taken in samurai armor

Even in the modern era, you’ll find plenty of occasions in Japan to dress up in kimono, such as for festivals, fireworks exhibitions, or other special events (and considering how relatively easy it is to do, it’s something you really should try at least once). But as much as Japan may love its traditions and history, there aren’t too many occasions when you get to strap on a set of samurai armor, so when life gives you the opportunity to do so, like at this new photo studio in Tokyo, you won’t want to let it pass you by.

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Nintendo has a squeaky clean image. Its titles are family-friendly, and no other company does more to make quality video games accessible and enjoyable to inexperienced or casual players. The company managed to create a hit team-based shooter that’s completely devoid of the sort of violence that’s so commonly a selling point for the genre, and even its two most committed rivals, Mario and Bowser, regularly take time out from fighting to play golf or tennis together.

So you might expect Nintendo to have nothing but friendly affection for anyone and everyone, but its official Line account shows that rival Sony’s PlayStation is strictly excluded from the circle of good vibes.

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Compared to some of the cooler or more elegant-sounding parts of Tokyo, like Jiyugaoka (“Freedom Hill”) or Akihabara (“Field of Autumn Leaves”), the Shinagawa neighborhood has a pretty dull name, meaning essentially “Merchandise River.” Still, you have to admit it’s appropriate. Located near the mouth of the Sumidagawa river, for generations Shinagawa has seen plenty of cargo ships sail past as they ferry goods in and out of Tokyo’s ports.

The name even works in a figurative economic sense, as Shinagawa Station is a major rail hub that thousands of workers pass through every day on their way from their homes in the suburbs to their offices downtown. The facility is designed to keep passengers efficiently flowing in and out, but this morning the “river” got blocked due to a problem with the trains, resulting in perhaps the most crowded scene of rush hour in Japan that we’ve ever seen.

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This is what a Tokyo crepe with every dessert topping they’d let us order looks like 【Photos】

Tokyo’s Harajuku neighborhood means different things to different people. The beautiful people living the Japanese high life are drawn by the brand-name jewelers on the tree-lined Omotesando boulevard. Teens, meanwhile, flock to the narrow Takeshitadori shopping street to score up-to-date fashions that leave their parents scratching their heads in bewilderment.

And for those with a sweet tooth, Harajuku is all about the crepes.

Our intrepid Japanese-language correspondent P.K. recently took a break from seeing how many slices of roast pork or boiled eggs he could cram in his stomach and instead decided to see how much dessert he could consume in a single serving, as he decided to max out a Tokyo crepe by ordering one with every available dessert topping.

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Everyone could use a little extra money in their pocket as we head towards the end of the year. Maybe you’ve got a long Christmas shopping list, made fancy New Year’s Eve plans, or just want to take a trip back home to visit family and friends during winter vacation.

As such, you might find yourself looking for a part-time job to help fill your coffers, and while you could go with such traditional choices as picking up a shift working in a restaurant or a shop at the mall, your options now also include a micro-stint as an editor for two of Japan’s most popular manga anthologies.

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Japan’s urban landscape is dotted with giant TV monitors mounted on the sides of skyscrapers. Despite what you might expect, though, from watching science fiction anime or young adult-literature-sourced movies depicting dystopian futures, they aren’t constantly broadcasting information about where citizens should evacuate to during the current alien invasion or directives from the Office of the Supreme Leader.

No, usually they’re just devoted to ad loops. But this weekend, public big screens across Japan will be showing something a little more exciting: The entire first episode of anime hit Evangelion.

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Even if you’re not ordinarily a very artistic person, we bet you get a spark of inspiration when you’ve got a pancake on your plate. Who hasn’t drawn a doodle or sketched a smiley face in maple syrup, or at least initialed their flapjacks with the sticky, tasty condiment?

After all, tasty as they may be, pancakes look pretty dull if you don’t add any decoration…unless you’re dining at this restaurant in Japan where the pancakes come pre-decorated with images of Pikachu, Mario, and dozens of other anime and video game characters.

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Sports car or fighter plane? American tuner’s Nissan GT-R looks like World War II’s Zero

Somewhere along the way, people started calling Nissan’s GT-R, the company’s flagship sports car, “Godzilla.” It’s a fitting nickname, since the GT-R is intimidatingly powerful, and also because with a curb weight of 1,740 kilograms (3,836 pounds), it’s not exactly svelte.

Still, one American turning shop thinks there’s an even more apt comparison to be made that to the King of the Monsters, and has created a customized GT-R with its appearance based on the Imperial Japanese military’s World War II Zero fighter plane.

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Fullmetal Alchemist shoes are here to complete fashionable anime fans’ footwear collections

When making her professional debut, manga creator Hiromi Arakawa decided to work under the masculine-sounding pen name Hiromu Arakawa. The choice was probably made under the logic that a male author would be more easily accepted by the predicted male fanbase of the action-adventure stories Arakawa was crafting.

In the end, though, all of that worrying was probably unnecessary. Male readers have no issue with Arakawa’s gender because she can produce awesome adventure stories, and her series have enjoyed broad crossover appeal with female manga readers as well. As a matter of fact, so many of Arakawa’s fans are women that there are now two pairs of pumps inspired by her most successful series, Fullmetal Alchemist.

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Imagine you’re out and about, strolling around town, when suddenly you come upon one of your fellow citizens sprawled out on the sidewalk. Granted, the fact that it’s not a human, but a cat, would make the situation a little less alarming, but still, you’d be worried right?

That’s how one Japanese Twitter user felt, but it turned out the kitty wasn’t just OK, but adorable too.

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Odds are at some point you’ve been part of an after-school study group with your classmates, either to help each other power through a difficult course or cram for an important exam. Maybe you got together at a friend’s place or took over a corner of your local coffee house, but in Japan, neither of those of those is really a viable choice of location.

Japanese homes are generally too small to host a large group of visitors. Meanwhile, the coffee break-loving country’s cafes tend to be packed when schools let out in the afternoon, so it’s often a serious challenge to find even a single empty seat in a Tokyo Starbucks, let alone adjacent ones for all your study buddies. So in response, clever Japanese students thought outside the box and discovered a trendy new venue for group study sessions: karaoke boxes.

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Paints Without Names: Japanese set of nameless watercolors seeks to free young artistic minds

While visual arts and linguistics are both creative fields, skill with one isn’t necessarily a prerequisite for the other. After all, as long as you can look at three hues and pick the one best suited for the picture you’re painting, it doesn’t really matter if you know whether to call it fuchsia or periwinkle.

As a matter of fact, some would argue that coupling names and colors limits the imaginations of budding young artists, which is why these two Japanese designers have produced a set of paints for children that have no names on their labels, only splotches of their base component colors.

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Four things to hate about looking for an apartment in Japan as a foreigner

Seeing as how the entire English-language RocketNews24 team is composed of people who at some point moved to Japan, we’re pretty big proponents of living here. One unpleasant part of the package, though, it that since you can’t claim the whole country as your residence, living in Japan means finding an apartment in Japan, which is generally agreed upon as one of the least enjoyable parts of the expat experience.

Why? For the following four reasons.

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Japanese gamer beats insanely hard Mario course, goes insane with joy and breaks down in tears

Well, that didn’t take long. It was just a couple of days ago that we took a look at Mario Maker user PangeaPanga’s course titled Pit of Panga: P-Break and shook our heads in awe at its diabolical difficulty. While it’s true that Nintendo doesn’t allow you to upload Mario Maker levels unless you can prove they’re beatable, we wouldn’t have been surprised if no one other than PangeaPanga himself was able to clear his creation.

But in less than a week, the hardest of the hard-core have risen to the challenge, and while this video of a Japanese gamer finishing the level is a display of some impressive platforming skills, what really makes it worthwhile is the surge of adrenalin that sends him shouting his victory to the heavens, and how it leaves his body in pain and his psyche tattered as he breaks down in tears of joy at his gaming accomplishment.

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Third season announced for Sailor Moon Crystal, Sailor Uranus, Neptune, and Saturn on their way

For long-time fans of Sailor Moon, the anime’s recent remake, Sailor Moon Crystal, was an unexpected opportunity to bask in the nostalgia of seeing many of their favorite characters from the series once again. We say “many of their favorites,” though because fan loyalty is divided pretty evenly among the franchise’s numerous celestial-themed heroines, and there just hasn’t been time in the 26 episodes of Sailor Moon Crystal to introduce all of them.

So if you’ve been waiting patiently for Sailors Uranus, Neptune, and Saturn to show up, you’ll be happy to know that production has begun on a third season of Sailor Moon Crystal that will finally bring together the full complement of all 10 Sailor Senshi.

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To –san or not to –san? Should you use the Japanese honorific suffix when speaking English?

For roughly the past two decades, I’ve woken up every morning and asked myself the question “How can I use more Japanese vocabulary today?” That desire was the major reason I decided to study abroad in college, plus move back to Japan after graduation, and I’ve actually reached the point where I’ve got a pretty sizeable stockpile of Japanese words I wish I could import into my native language.

And yet, often when I hear someone use the Japanese honorific “-san” when speaking English, it feels awkward and superfluous to me. But it turns out there’re actually a few compelling reasons behind English-speakers peppering their speech with “-san,” as it solves a couple of linguistic limitations of the English language.

So what are the pros and cons of importing the word into English? Let’s take a look.

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Mobile Suit Toyota – Japanese automaker makes awesome anime ad for new Gundam-themed car

We’re sure everyone’s first choice for mode of transportation would be giant robot, but there are times when you need something more practical to get from Point A to Point B. Being behind the wheel of a four-door hatchback doesn’t mean you have to give up your mecha jock daydreams, though, thanks to the newest collaboration between Toyota and anime franchise Gundam.

The automaker has just released not only a special model inspired by charismatic anime villain Char Aznable, but also an awesome anime commercial for it that has higher production values than the original Mobile Suit Gundam TV series.

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An end to high heel pain? Japanese designer offers revolutionary and stylish footwear redesign

I’ve always been a little confused by high heels. It’s partially because I’m not so tall myself and don’t really have much of a height advantage to spare (even if my date is wearing flats), and partially because if I’m looking at a woman there are probably enough other things that are going to attract my gaze that she’s likely to ask me to stop staring at her long before I get to her shoes, no matter how nice they may look.

High heels seem like an even odder choice in Japan, where the reliance on public transportation means walking around for long stretches of time in shoes where comfort and mobility seem to have been afterthoughts in the design process. Still, many women in Japan step out in high heels as part of their plan to present a femininely fashionable or snappy professional image. Now, one Japanese designer is trying to help those women not only look good, but help their feet feel good as well with a revolutionary ergonomic redesign of high heels.

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Newlyweds on honeymoon in Japan beat up convenience store clerk, get arrested

Although my wife and I have taken several trips together since getting married, we still haven’t gone on an official honeymoon. My old job required me to work weekends and I couldn’t take any time off around the date of our wedding ceremony, so I was back in the office two days after saying “I do.”

As such, my wife and I didn’t get to do the typical newlywed travel activities. You know, things like toasting each other with champagne every night for a week, lounging on the beach and giggling as we call each other Mr. and Mrs. Baseel, or beating the hell out of a convenience store clerk, like the Chinese newlyweds who are not only just married, but were also just arrested in Japan.

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