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Jessica Kozuka

Jessica Kozuka is a freelance writer and editor living in the exciting, interesting and sometimes perplexing city of Tokyo. Her work has appeared in Wine Spectator, CNN Travel, and The Japan Times, as well as numerous other print and online media outlets. She writes a column on NPO/NGOs and volunteer work for Metropolis, the largest English-language magazine in Japan, and specializes in EFL educational materials and travel writing. Kozuka is rarely to be found without a book or two within arm’s reach, though there's no telling if they will be serious literature or frivolous guilty pleasures, and she runs a monthly book club for other bibliophiles in the Tokyo area. She's also an enthusiastic if mediocre cook and daily laments the smallness of Japanese kitchens.

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Posted by Jessica (Page 15)

Osaka Temple Offers Visitors Visions of Hell, Tasty Sweets

At the moment there’s a picture book that’s very popular in Japan called “A Picture Book of Hell.” It’s intended to teach kids good manners, and it’s become something of a hot topic, if you’ll excuse the pun. Popular illustrator Akiko Higashimura even mentioned it in her manga series “Mama wa Tenparisto”, loosely translated as “Momma With a Short Fuse”. As you can imagine, there’s been a lot of interest among mothers and educational professionals.

I suppose terrorizing your kids with two-dimensional representations of hell is OK, but did you know there’s a place you can take them to experience it in real life? Read More

Awesome Course Schedule, an app released last year by Japanese content provider Labit, has been rapidly gaining traction with students at Japanese universities, because it allows them to rate and review their courses. Read More

 

Let me describe a scene for you: a crowd of Japanese are gathered around steel drums in a little shanty of a building open to the summer air. Some are drinking beers in plastic cups, others disposable one-cup sakes. Most are eating from unheated cans of food with plastic cutlery, chasing it with sips of their chosen brew. Around them are shelves of unfinished wood, stacked high with a stupendous assortment of cans, probably enough to last several months. Think this is a scene from a disaster shelter in Tohoku? Perhaps an end-of-the-world movie? Think again. It’s Saturday night at one of Osaka’s most unique “restaurants”, the long-standing and popular Kanso, where there’s no menu except the cans on the shelves. Try to contain your excitement, because this monument to apocalypse-chic may be coming to a city near you. Read More

Smokers Find New Haven in Japan, But for a Price

It’s getting tougher to be a smoker in Japan. It was once a paradise for tobacco lovers, who were free to light up in workplaces, restaurants, bars, on the street, and pretty much any darn place they pleased. Add to that the low price of cigarettes and the ever-present vending machines, and you couldn’t swing a tanuki without hitting a smoker. In recent years, though, smoking has been banned on the streets and in offices, the taxes on tobacco have gone up, and more and more public spaces are going smoke free. The government even announced recently that they are launching a 10-year plan to cut the smoking rate nearly in half.

While this trend has tobacco companies shaking in their boots, one company has turned it into a golden business opportunity. For just 50 yen, Ippuku (roughly “a cig” in Japanese) offers smokers a comfortable, indoor place to take a 15-min smoke break. Read More

46 things that surprise foreigners in Japan

Japan is a weird, amazing, amusing and confusing place, and I’m not just talking about the maid cafes and pornographic manga. Even things that your average Japanese would consider completely commonplace and boring can be captivating for foreigners. After exhaustive research (well, some research anyway), Rocket News has compiled this list of 46 things visitors to Japan find surprising.

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Toyota announced this month that it will be a releasing a system for using your Prius plug-in hybrid as a big ol’ battery. The key feature is an inverter which will allow you to plug household electronics directly into the car through a water-proof cable. Read More

Kyoto Bee Research Center Is the Bee’s Knees

Kyoto Sangyo University opened a brand-new research facility this week, the Honeybee Industry Research Center, to study the ecology of the little bumblers and the benefits of their honey. This kind of specialized facility is extremely rare and is generating a lot of buzz among entomologists. Read More

From Starbucks Russia With Love: Cute Nesting Doll Tumblers!

You’d have to be living in a cave not to know Starbucks Coffee has stores all over the world, but did you know that there are limited edition Starbucks tumblers and mugs that are only available in certain countries? Among those much-in-demand merchandising items, the one often said to be the cutest and most desirable comes from Russia.

On a recent trip there, we decided to check them out for ourselves. Entering the shop, we immediately clapped eyes on them! Designed to resemble traditional Russian matryoshka, or nesting dolls, these tumblers were a hot cupful of cute. It would be hard to see one and not want to put your morning latte in it. They come in three sizes, and lined up next to each other, they looked so much like real matryoshka, I couldn’t resist buying the set. Read More

Softbank Releases World’s First Radiation-Detecting Phone

This week, Softbank Mobile presented the newest iteration of its popular Pantone phones, and these are some pretty smart smartphones. So smart, in fact, that they can double as a Geiger counter. Read More

Guy Debuts Open-Fly Prevention Device, Awkward Dance Moves in Web Video

Everyone has the embarrassing experience at least once in their life of forgetting to zip up their pants and going out into the world with their fly down. Well, a creative fellow on the video sharing website Nico Nico Douga has made a handy little device to make sure your privates stay private, and he’s shared his bargain-basement methodology and funky dance moves with the world. Read More

Life-sized Anime Figure Draws Criticism for Price, Creepy Face

A life-sized figure of manga and anime character Fujiko
Mine has been drawing criticism from fans on the Web. Comments have ranged from “Why did they make her like that?” to the more succinct, “Who the hell is that?” Apparently, she’s looking a bit off-color. Read More

If a superflare, which is an explosion up to millions or even a billion times more powerful than a typical solar flare, were to happen on our sun, it would release incredible amounts of electromagnetic energy that would likely fry the world’s all-important electrical grids and send society spiraling into chaos. A large enough one could even burn up our protective ozone layer and turn all life on Earth extra-crispy.

So, what are the chances of that happening? Are we all doomed!? Well, depends on who you ask, apparently. Read More

Tokyo Disneyland (TDL) has recently announced that they will offer weddings for same-sex couples, including the option to hold the ceremony at the iconic Cinderella’s castle. It seems that Disney really does make dreams come true, at least for one gay couple. Read More

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Across all times and cultures, there have been a variety of hygienic practices, some of which we would regard with horror today.  One of those, which has been much discussed recently, is the practice of drinking one’s own urine to promote good health. Yes, you read that correctly, drinking a steaming glass of your own pee as a health supplement. Read More

Is There a Tiny Person Inside That Bird?! Pet Myna Abe-chan Impresses With His Conversational Skills

In the bird world, the undisputed masters of mimicry are the myna. You may even have seen them on TV from time to time copying human voices with eerie precision, but you’ve probably never seen one quite as adorable as Abe-chan, a pet myna cum YouTube star.
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The Japanese version of the popular travel information site Trip Adviser recently published a list of the best factory tours in Japan. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the nation’s most popular exports makes it to number one. Read More

School Lunch Cookbook a Hit With Nostalgic Dieters

If you are feeling a bit nostalgic for the school lunch experience, you don’t have to pass yourself off as a grade schooler and sneak into your local elementary school. You can find healthy, hearty school lunch recipes in a recently published book by nutrition specialist Katsuko Fujiwara called “School Lunches at Home“.

And these recipes aren’t just any old standby. They’re the kind of meals that make everyone happy. Kids want school meals to be delicious, parents want them to be nutritious, and schools just want them to be reasonably priced and easy to prepare. That’s a high bar to clear, but with over 20,000 schools in Japan offering a school lunch program, there were sure to be a few offerings that hit the trifecta, and Fujiwara has compiled some of the best for you.
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Govt Website Gets 45 Million Yen Redesign, Righteous Anger of the Taxpayers

On the second of April, the official website for the Japanese prime minister and his cabinet underwent a major update and redesign. According to Chief Cabinet Minister Osamu Fujimura, the update will allow them to disseminate easily understandable information to the public by gathering together all policy explanations prepared by individual agencies in one place. They have also added a section of the website aimed at children, which includes some specially developed games. The cost of all this? About 45 million yen (about $547,000). And that’s what has Japanese taxpayers’ attention.
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Professor Michitaka Hirose and his team at Tokyo University have invented a pair of glasses which lower your appetite and make you feel fuller simply by making your food look bigger. Now there’s a diet plan that could work for me.
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JAXA Invents Camera That Measures Radiation

On March 29th, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the Japan Atomic Energy Agency announced that they have developed a prototype camera which detects gamma-ray emitting radioactive material such as cesium and shows the exposure distribution over an image. They hope that it can be used to make clean-up of contaminated areas around Fukushima Daiichi more efficient by locating places where radioactive matter has accumulated.
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