Bringing you yesterday's news from Japan and Asia, today.
Master Blaster is the two-man translating team of Canada’s Steven Le Blanc and Japan’s Masami M, a pair who in addition to writing work are in English education and created the StudyNow app for Japanese students of English.
Together they have written somewhere around 1,500 articles for RocketNews24 covering such diverse topics as Chinese men selling sanitary napkins to each other and a Japanese guy dragging an ear of corn around the Tokyo train system. A few of these were actually good, but don’t take our word for it! Here’s what our beloved readers had to say:
“One isn't always in the mood for bold tastes. But when I'm in the mood for bold flavor I turn to you.”
“Stupid article. Who cares what the Japanese think it's cool. You don't call a monkey, "gorilla".”
“You know, this is about the most cogent explanation of how a turbocharger works that I have ever seen in the non-motorsports world.”
“Thanks for the article peter!”
“It's people like you who make exploitation possible.”
“It looks yummy and the story was great. Thank you for the smile.”
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Posted by Master Blaster (Page 114)
It’s been months of events and marketing in the making, and Halloween has finally arrived in Japan. Our own Mr. Sato and P.K. Sanjun decided to hit the streets of Shibuya in costume to report on the festivities at hand.
Well actually, they went a day early, but as we’ll soon see, October 31st ain’t nothing but an ordinal number assigned to anachronistically named month, because in Japan, Halloween comes whenever you want it to.
Although the internet has revolutionized our lives in countless ways, one of the most appreciated is the simple yet outside-the-box recipes that appear on it from time to time. Where else can we discover that a rice cooker can be used to make mind-blowing pancakes or crème caramel on top of instant ramen makes for a delicious flavor boost?
Now, a Twitter user going by the handle of @rea941 has unveiled a new way to enjoy Japan’s favorite instant food, Cup Noodle. With the leftover soup you can make a delicious chawanmushi egg custard. It’s so easy the entire recipe could fit in a single tweet!
With easy, delicious, and cheap being the trifecta of RocketNews24 gourmet bliss, we couldn’t help but make some for ourselves.
I often enjoy watching the educational programming of NHK’s E-Tele in the mornings with my family while we get ready for the day. It’s full of fun and educational shows that teach everything from English to geography, and Pitagora Switch (Japanese pronunciation of “Pythagora Switch”) is a big crowd favorite. It showcases cute little machines similar to Rube Goldberg devices where a ball travels along an array of painstakingly arranged cups, springs, ramps, pulleys and whatever else they can cram in to get to the other end.
My two-year-old daughter always gets a kick out of its blend of physics and fun, and now apparently so does much of the Western world after a segment of the show posted onto YouTube has received rave reviews on Reddit for its unique combination of story-telling and Rube Goldberg machinations.
In any park in China you’re bound to see people exercising, whether it’s by jogging, dancing, tai chi, or downing unmanned aircraft. But just when you think you’ve seen it all, a whole new way of working out gets born. The basic philosophy is “Why walk on only two legs, when you have two perfectly good arms as well?”
And so, recreational crawling was born. At the moment it seems to be practiced mainly by a small band of people in Henan Province, but numbers are growing. It’s also said to have health benefits beyond that of regular bipedal walking.
The fujoshi (“rotten girl”) subculture is well-established in Japan with its sizable population of girls and women who enjoy the past time of homoerotic fan art. Its members are often a contentious presence on the internet for their particular passion of sometimes corrupting young men’s adolescent heroes into love interests. Don’t get me wrong, that’s not to say Goku and Vegeta cuddling and making out itself isn’t right. It’s just not right for them.
Depending on your own parenting aims you may want to steer your young girl away from drawing pictures of unrealistically well-groomed samurai lying naked beneath the sheets together, or you may find it a relatively harmless pastime compared to something like airplane glue sniffing and thus want to encourage fujoshi tendencies in your young one.
Either way, one Twitter user claims to have unlocked the environmental conditions (seven in total) that make a young girl go fujoshi and presented it for peer evaluation on Twitter. But do they hold up to the scrutiny?
The Egyptian pyramids stand strong in the scorching heat of the desert, as they have for over 4,500 years. It is said that the techniques that went into building them were well beyond those of human civilization at the time. They are mysteries wrapped inside of enigmas that continue to fascinate us from afar.
And apparently there is also a pyramid in Tochigi Prefecture, which really cuts down on the travel expenses for those of us in Japan wanting to bask in their wonder. One such spendthrift adventurer was RocketNews24’s own Masanuki Sunakoma, who went to investigate.
Fukuoka Prefecture is a major tourist destination in Japan, drawing people form all over the country all year round. But what’s unusual about the prefecture is that, despite its great many visitors, it doesn’t have any particularly famous sightseeing spots. Most people come for the food alone—a fact which should give you an indication of how good it is.
That’s why our reporter, Takashi Harada went in search of something worth gawking at in the otherwise wonderful land of Fukuoka and came across something that every visitor ought to see: the “World’s Largest Buddha statue” nestled deep in its mountains.
Let’s face it, something needs to be done about track and field. Although it could be considered human athleticism in its purest form, surely the art of running in a straight line is nearing our maximum potential as a species.
It’s time to take events such as sprinting to the next level. Luckily a small group of sumo wrestlers may have stumbled upon a way to bring another dimension to the sport, and another chin or two as well.
It’s turning out to be an interesting post-season in Major League Baseball. In the American league we have the Toronto Blue Jays coming off a stellar late regular season and into their first real World Series attempt since the 90s. Meanwhile, over in the National League the Cubs are inching closer to a possible first World Series win in over a century, made even more eerie by its prediction in Back to the Future II (minus the Miami Gators).
As an added bonus, more games for Toronto means more interviews with infielder Munenori Kawasaki. Charged up by their victory over Texas in the AL Division series, Munerin was in rare form.
As in any country, a Japanese newspaper’s credibility often rests on a very fine political line. If their reporting leans even a little left or right, they run the risk of being called a stack of toilet paper scribbled on by talentless hacks by half the population. It’s a precarious position, and one in which releasing an app wherein you dress up school girls as a reward for current event awareness only seems to provide fuel for your detractors.
And yet on October 14 one of Japan’s leading newspapers, Asahi Shimbun, released just such an app called Kikasete Tensei Jingo. It features several moe girls reading from selected editions of the paper’s long-running Tensei Jingo editorial column. However, as pointless as it may appear on the surface there is some heavy language practice potential buried in there.
Recently Nippon Steel & Sumikin Metal Products unveiled a new type of deer bait that is not only highly effective, but also works exclusively on deer. It’s called a Yukuru and as you can see in the picture above, it’s pretty much just a regular salt lick but it contains one very important ingredient: iron.
That’s right, deer apparently go crazy for the great taste of the metal. It’s a fact that went widely overlooked until now.
It’s that time of year again. The time when the world waits with bated breath to see who was voted as Earth’s greatest contributor to peace and receives what may be the highest honor a human can receive. I’m talking, of course, about the Confucius Peace Prize.
The Confucius Peace Prize is an annual award given to those who work towards peace as seen “from an Eastern perspective”, with past laureates including Vladimir Putin and Fidel Castro. This year, the selection committee announced that the Confucius Peace Prize will go to none other than Zimbabwe President, Chairperson of the African Union, and one of Forbes’ “10 Worst Dictators” in the world: Robert Mugabe.
Two days each year, once in the autumn and again in spring, the setting sun passes behind an NTT antenna tower in the Taruyamachi area of Akashi City, Hyogo. Due to the arrangement of dishes and other receivers, as the sun moves behind them, for the briefest of moments the face of a giant cartoon panda appears, like some benevolent forest god looking down on the town below.
This autumn, on 12 October at 5:28pm, people all over Akashi City gathered to witness the biannual moment of celestial cuteness—an event which has come to be known as the Sunset Panda. However, with cloudy skies and light drizzle it became unclear whether the roly-poly sun bear would come out to play this time…
When you think of “cool Japan,” it’s hard to overlook ninjas, those stealthy spies and assassins with more tricks up their sleeve than a magician in a parka. And yet it seems these timeless icons of Japanese culture have largely been overlooked by the national government’s Cool Japan in favor of AKB48 spin-offs and abacuses.
So instead, a band of 11 Japanese governors and mayors have assembled to create the Japan Ninja Council (JNC) with the sole aim of reminding everyone how cool ninjas are. Having officially launched on 9 October they aim to collect every bit of information on ninjas, including their history and culture, and provide it to anyone who wants to learn more about these elusive figures.
Our Japanese reporter Ahiruneko is an admitted gari (pickled ginger) maniac. Whenever he goes into a sushi restaurant he’s sure to polish off as much of the pink sweet and sour flakes as he does actual sushi. Yes, for Ahiruneko, sushi just wouldn’t be sushi without gari.
But one day he heard some troubling news. Word had it that Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants in Russia were selling a chicken sandwich topped with gari. “What are the Russians thinking?!” thought our reporter as he set out in search of these mythical creations…
I’d like to fancy myself a man of refined tastes. When I eat ice cream it certainly ought to be rose flavored. My colas? Well, they better be of an unexplained taste. And when it comes to crackers, I accept nothing less than those doused in the essence of sea urchins.
And now you can too! All you have to do is pick up a pack of Waza No Koda Wari Noko Uni Shoyu crackers at your local food vendor this winter season.
In these days of modern video games, people seem to be losing sight of what gaming is all about. In all the glitz and glamour of motion control and Hollywood actors lending their voices and likeness to games, it sometimes feels like we’ve forgotten that games are meant to be incredibly difficult, repetitive tasks performed for an arbitrary and intangible reward system of “points.”
This is incredibly valuable experience to prepare young minds for entering the workforce, but thanks to free-roaming environments and checkpoints-a-plenty, we’ve gone from a generation of Mr. Do!‘s to bunch of Mr. Don’t!‘s.
But this nine-year-old kid, whose art class project based on a classic arcade shooter is shown above, gets it. And mark my words, he will become the future leader of this nation.
Among brands who like to get adventurous with the flavors in Japan such as Kit Kat or Häagen- Dazs, Pepsi is certainly one of the most prolific. Past Pepsi flavors have included cucumber, strawberry milk, and salty watermelon.
This time, everyone’s favorite alternative to Coke has unleashed a new flavor called Pepsi Ghost, especially for the Halloween season. They’ve really outdone themselves too, because for this limited-edition outing the special flavor is unknown.
So unknown, in fact, that even after drinking about a litre of the stuff I still can’t quite put my finger on it.
Among the many problems presented by using fossil fuels such as petroleum, one of the more pressing issues is their limited and rapidly decreasing supply. Unfortunately, it would take thousands of years of organic matter decomposing and compressing under layers of the Earth to replenish the supply in the manner in which it was first made, and that’s an unlikely business.
But now it’s been reported that a professor from Kyoto University and his team have found a way to create petroleum efficiently and cheaply. Their method uses no energy-consuming high pressures or temperatures and only requires water, petroleum, and carbon dioxide. As a result, it can be done so cheaply that KTV reported 100 yen (US$0.83) of oil can be synthesized using only 3 yen ($0.02) worth of electricity.
It all seems to good to be true, and in fact it may not be true. With published peer-reviewed studies, mysterious television appearances, and lack of mainstream media coverage. We honestly can’t figure out is this amazing breakthrough or not. And neither can anyone else as science enthusiasts take to Twitter to find answers.
It’s been recently announced that AKB Group, the idol conglomerate responsible for AKB48, NMB48, SKE48, HKT48, NGT48, JKT48, and SNH48, will be adding another serial number to the roster in the form of MNL48, which is planned to operate out of Manila in the Philippines.
This new group will be formed through a project by the publicly funded Cool Japan initiative which, contrary to what Gackt may think, appears to be doing something tangible with all their funding after all. In fact, this is especially tangible as yet another source of revenue for Yasushi Akimoto, the head of AKB Group who also just happens to be the chairman of the Cool Japan Council.
Starbucks releases special matcha Frappuccino made with Japan’s first matcha leaves of the year
Tokyo’s beckoning cat temple asks foreign tourists to stop writing on the beckoning cats they buy
Czech Republic makes multi-eyed mascot friend for Osaka’s multi-eyed Myaku-Myaku mascot
Tokyo DisneySea’s new Fantasy Springs area: Peter Pan’s Never Land has the best ride of all
2nd line of Casio watch rings hits Japanese capsule machines and we got the secret one!
Studio Ghibli releases new mug and tumbler collection featuring Jiji and Totoro
Starbucks Japan’s new Matcha Frappuccino: Brilliant beverage or drink disaster?
Japan now has a convenience store that can be towed by a car【Video】
Japanese public toilet tours become popular with foreign tourists in Tokyo
Japanese man tells friend to wear suit to wedding party, so he comes as Mobile Suit Gundam
Life-size vibrating Legend of Zelda Master Sword for sale from Nintendo【Photos】
Yes, our new smartphone looks like at least two Studio Ghibli anime characters, Sharp says2nd line of Casio watch rings hits Japanese capsule machines and we got the secret one!Japanese man tells friend to wear suit to wedding party, so he comes as Mobile Suit GundamStarbucks releases special matcha Frappuccino made with Japan’s first matcha leaves of the year
Mt. Fuji-blocking screen installed as response to bad tourist manners to be in place by next week
Japanese public toilet becomes a tourist attraction in TokyoStudio Ghibli releases new mug and tumbler collection featuring Jiji and Totoro
New Tokyo restaurant charges higher prices to foreign tourists than Japanese locals
Studio Ghibli releases art crystal puzzles and folding umbrellas for rainy season in Japan
McDonald’s new Happy Meals offer up cute and practical Sanrio lifestyle goods
Foreigner’s request for help in Tokyo makes us sad for the state of societyLife-size vibrating Legend of Zelda Master Sword for sale from Nintendo【Photos】Yes, our new smartphone looks like at least two Studio Ghibli anime characters, Sharp saysNew Tokyo restaurant charges higher prices to foreign tourists than Japanese locals
“Mt. Fuji convenience store” issues apology for bad tourist manners, adds multilingual signs2nd line of Casio watch rings hits Japanese capsule machines and we got the secret one!
Tokyo’s famous Lost in Translation hotel is closed
Japanese ramen restaurants under pressure from new yen banknotes
Bad tourist manners at Mt Fuji Lawson photo spot prompts Japanese town to block view with screensMcDonald’s new Happy Meals offer up cute and practical Sanrio lifestyle goods
Sales of Japan’s most convenient train ticket/shopping payment cards suspended indefinitely
Sold-out Studio Ghibli desktop humidifiers are back so Totoro can help you through the dry season
Japanese government to make first change to romanization spelling rules since the 1950sForeigner’s request for help in Tokyo makes us sad for the state of society
Ghibli founders Toshio Suzuki and Hayao Miyazaki contribute to Japanese whisky Totoro label design
Tokyo’s most famous Starbucks is closed
Doraemon found buried at sea as scene from 1993 anime becomes real life【Photos】
One Piece characters’ nationalities revealed, but fans have mixed opinions
We asked a Uniqlo employee what four things we should buy and their suggestions didn’t disappoint
Studio Ghibli releases new mug and tumbler collection featuring Jiji and Totoro
Starbucks Japan’s new Matcha Frappuccino: Brilliant beverage or drink disaster?
Japan now has a convenience store that can be towed by a car【Video】
Japanese public toilet tours become popular with foreign tourists in Tokyo
Japanese man tells friend to wear suit to wedding party, so he comes as Mobile Suit Gundam
Japan’s video rental giant now rents wigs, so we tried them out【Photos】
New vending machines at Shinjuku Station emit scent, play projection mapping with your purchase
Japanese woman stumbles on the power of the infamous “gaijin seat” phenomenon during flight
Pay for guests’ transport? The many potential pitfalls in the Japanese wedding planning minefield
Candy from Ghibli’s Grave of the Fireflies disappearing as manufacturer goes out of business
The 5 best Japanese bento to buy at Kyoto Station
This gachapon capsule machine dispenses real Akoya pearls, with certificates of authenticity
Japanese people reveal the six western foods they find most disgusting