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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 527)

Kumamoto Prefecture shows us that less is more with simple yet mouth-watering rice balls

One of our reporters recently drew the enviable assignment of visiting this year’s Nippon no Umai, an annual event sponsored by Kirin that brings the best of Japan’s regional delicacies together under one roof. With so many tasty options on display, those of us not lucky enough to attend the tasting session, held at the super swanky Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, would have to settle for living vicariously through our correspondent’s report after he returned.

We were a little underwhelmed when we asked what he’d eaten, and his answer was “white rice with salt!” but we soon came to understand why he was looking quite so content.

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Living in Japan, it’s easy to take safety and honesty for granted. This is, after all, the country where public trains make ideal spots for a nap.

That said, with over 150 million people in the country, you’re bound to have a few bad apples, such as the lowlifes who’ve decided there’s no better place for a crime spree than the town of Yamamoto, which was hit hard by the massive earthquake and tsunami of 2011.

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For the most part, people in Japan take pride in being well-groomed. Skin care gets particular priority, and individuals especially concerned about looking their best carry around packs of oil-blotting papers called abura torigami. When you don’t want to wait until you get home to wash a day’s worth of grime off your face, they’re handy little things, and we mean that literally.

Abura torigami tend to be pretty small, so much so that you’ll usually see people stretching them out with both hands to get the maximum use out of the precious surface area each one offers. Granted, this looks dainty and adorable when a cute girl does it. Other people, though, such as the RocketNews24 male writing team, are far too ruggedly handsome to ever be considered “cute.” Are there no larger abura torigami for the rest of us?

Indeed there are, thanks to a tie-up with anime smash hit Attack on Titan.

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KFS? Kentucky Fried Chicken Japan offering deep-fried soup

It’s no secret that the RocketNews24 team is pretty enamored of life here in Japan. It’s hard not to have a good time in a country with such deep traditions and cultural events throughout the year.

That said, I always get just a little homesick when autumn rolls around. As great as Japanese festivals are, they simply can’t match American county fairs in terms of fried food offerings.

Thankfully, KFC Japan is ready to take a little of the sting out of fall this year with a new menu item: fried soup.

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Cold beer – less smelly than fermented soybeans, and by one criteria, healthier too

Earlier this week, we talked about the purported beauty benefits of Japanese rice wine. Today, we’ve got good news for health-conscious beer lovers.

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Tokyo restaurant challenges us with a foot of tempura, we gladly accept

Tokyo is a massive, sprawling metropolis. There are so many twisting back alleys that by the time you’ve convinced yourself you’ve seen it all, something new has popped up back at the start of your route

Presented with this limitless variety, you could easily eat at a new restaurant every single day and never go hungry. So why did we go back to Fukugawa Tsuribune just two months after our last meal there? Because like handguns in the US, one of their tempura bowls is so serious there’s a waiting period to get your hands on it.

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Do you remember giant robots? Full-scale Macross Valkyrie lands in Yokohama

The deployment of anime mecha to Yokohama continues. Earlier this month the Ingram from police story Patlabor made an appearance in the bayside city, and now comes a life-size VF-25 Valkyrie from Macross Frontier.

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There’s a saying in Japan that you should have both eyes open before you decide to get married, and one eye shut after you walk down the aisle. It’s sound advice, as you definitely need to know what you’re getting into before you pledge to share your life with someone. At the same time, spending every day together is bound to bring to light the little imperfections that people naturally have (Mrs. Baseel excepted, of course), and it’s important not to get too worked up over them.

Of course, the inevitable result of trying to keep one eye perpetually closed is a wicked eye-cramp, so eventually you’re going to have to open it back up and notice something about your partner that drives you up the wall. Japanese firm Neo Marketing recently surveyed married women on the things their husbands do that they just can’t overlook.

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Gundam-themed Toyota doesn’t come with beam saber, is awesome anyway

Sometimes, despite the director’s best efforts otherwise, the villain of a movie or TV series ends up stealing the show. Luke Skywalker became the archetypical example of a pure-hearted but bland hero, while dark side practitioner Darth Vader went on to become a true cultural icon.

Similarly, you’ll be hard pressed to find any viewers of long-running anime mecha franchise Gundam who name its original hero, Amuro, as their favorite character. His nemesis Char, on the other hand, has legions of fans, even though his last on-screen appearance was way back in the 1988 motion picture Char’s Counterattack. Despite his occasional attempts to drop space colonies onto Planet Earth, fans are drawn to the stylish Char, who has always had cool robots and a cool mask. Now, he’s got a cool car, too.

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Cook rice inside your car with the new Takeru-kun

In the never-ending debate about which country makes the best cars, it’s common to derogatorily refer to a Japanese automobile as a “rice rocket,” “rice burner,” or “rice runner.” Really anything with rice.

But with a new product from Saitama-based company JPN, you can own that insult, and turn it into a positive.

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We combine McDonald’s and MOS Burger for forbidden deliciousness

Whether the blooming of the cherry blossoms in spring or the chirping of cicadas in summer, in Japan there is always a herald to the changing of the seasons. As incorrigible carnivores, for us fall begins when McDonald’s tsukimi burger returns to the menu. Tsukimi literally means “moon viewing,” a popular autumn activity in Japan, but in this case refers to the lunar-looking fried egg the sandwich contains. The tsukimi burger also comes with bacon. It has no linguistic reason to be there, but if you really need an explanation as to why someone would add bacon to a burger, we’ll be happy to explain after you finish your quiche.

Of course, the full moon has been known to do strange things to people’s minds, and we wondered if we couldn’t scavenge components from McDonald’s tsukimi burger to make something even better.

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Dating in Japan is similar to dating elsewhere, in that men are usually clueless about what women really want to do. Strapped for ideas, you might invite your girlfriend to come by your place, you know, just to hang out. Maybe you’ll cook dinner together, which if you’re anything like me, means that after burning your third chicken breast, she’ll forcibly take the frying pan away and suggest you put out the napkins, only to be puzzled later at how you managed to burn those, too.

Over the course of the meal, your girlfriend may mention that next time, she’d really like to go on a dam date instead. Take heart, though. She’s not upset, she’s being helpful.

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So let’s talk about breasts. From a statistical and linguistic standpoint, of course.

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Luxury hotel cooks up adorable melon bread based on JR West’s platypus mascot

As part of our quest to get paid for eating as many desserts as possible, we recently shared our impressions of the Suica Penguin cake, modeled after the popular mascot for JR East’s prepaid IC card train pass system, Suica.

But sometimes loveable mass transit mascots are like hardcore gangster rappers, and it turns out the Suica Penguin has a cross-country rival, in the form of Ico-chan, the spokes-platypus for JR West’s ICOCA train pass system. Not wanting to be shown up by the Suica Penguin’s foray into the world of cake, the only thing for Ico-chan to do was to transform himself into a tasty treat, too.

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Among the many colorful expressions in Japanese you’ll find kuwazu girai, which is used to describe a knee-jerk dislike to something unfamiliar before you’ve given it a fair shot. Kuwazu girai literally translates to “hating it without having eaten it,” and it was exactly the problem restaurateur Himi Okajima was having at his eatery, called Hakata Tonton, in New York’s Manhattan.

Okajima is a native of Fukuoka in southern Japan, and orders weren’t exactly pouring in from American customers for two of his hometown’s favorite dishes that were on the menu: pigs’ feet and cod roe.

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Yes, Hello Kitty really does need a fedora, and the reason why is delicious

Has Hello Kitty finally buckled to hipster fashion trends? Has she been tapped to replace the aging Harrison Ford in an upcoming new Indiana Jones movie, under the logic that if the franchise can include aliens, why not anthropomorphic cats, too? Or has she simply decided to make a living as a hard-boiled private eye?

That third theory actually isn’t so far off the mark, but as with any good mystery, the real culprit behind Kitty-chan’s throwback headgear is someone, or in this case something, you’d never expect: custard pudding.

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Right now at the Pacifico Yokohama Convention Center, Japan’s largest video game developer conference, the CEDEC (Computer Entertainment Developer’s Conference) is in full swing. In order to gain a clear understanding of the type of people who make the industry what it is, the event’s organizers also conducted a survey that covers just about everything from marital status to time spent tied to a desk each day. The results give us a sneaky peek at the demographics and professional lives of the people who bring us the games we love, so we couldn’t help but share.

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Cosplay fans have been putting an insane level of detail into their anime and video game-based creations over the past few years. Looking at pictures from the recent World Cosplay Summit, it’s easy to forget about the simpler side of grown-ups playing dress-up. It isn’t always about putting in hundreds of man-hours to be chosen as the best craftsman in the world.

Sometimes, it’s just about a guy wanting to see his girlfriend in something he thinks looks hot.

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Lotteria craziness continues with the new okonomiyaki burger

In the crowded Japanese fast food burger industry, a chain has to establish an identity to be successful. McDonald’s is the place to go to fill up as cheaply as possible. MOS Burger is for people willing to spend a little more time and money for a sandwich made from higher-quality ingredients. And Lotteria is the place to go for a side of craziness.

While Lotteria occasionally goes completely nuts and has iconic horror movie characters work its registers, the chain’s eccentricity is primarily confined to the menu, with items such as the side-by-side double-patty twin burger and colossal Evangelion cheese burger with roughly a week’s worth of meat. The chain’s newest offering reimagines the savory Japanese crepe okonomiyaki as a burger.

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Like many people who grew up in America, when I hear the word “Asahi,” the first thing I think of is beer. Of course, beer also happens to be the first thing I think of when I hear “breakfast,” but that’s a story for another time.

However, there’s also an Asashi Newspaper in Japan. And while the news outlet has no connection to the identically named brewer, that didn’t stop it from recently handing out the kind of parenting advice you’d normally expect from a dad who’s also a violent problem drinker, suggesting that parents “accidentally” smash their kids’ video game consoles in order to keep them focused on their studies.

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