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Oona McGee

Half-Japanese Oona McGee hails from Sydney, Australia, where she worked as a journalist and copywriter before making the move to Japan over a decade ago. Now she spends her days exploring the streets of Tokyo with her laptop and camera, always in search of new cafes, restaurants, events and stories to share with our readers. As an experienced food and travel reporter, Oona has travelled extensively through all 47 prefectures of Japan, and is constantly researching new destinations and drawing up itineraries for her next adventure.

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Posted by Oona McGee (Page 228)

Forget FroYo – We Make a Delicious Frozen Dessert With Two Ingredients: Fruit and a Yonanas Machine!

Did you know that you can make a quick and healthy frozen dessert just by throwing fruit into a machine? It sounds incredible but it’s true. With nothing else to add, this kitchen appliance aims to save you money, trim your waistline and please your lactose intolerant friends! We didn’t believe it at first but after testing it out, we can tell you that this thing delivers as promised. It’s called Yonanas, and we have all the details of our fruity sweet encounter with it, including video and even 3D photos, after the break.

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Lotteria Serving Up Ramen Noodle Burgers For the First Time

Fast food chain Lotteria has brought us some unusual burgers in the past. But none will compare to their next creation: the ramen burger. It’s a historical first for the franchise, and they’re going all out with the offering, developing the recipe with famous noodle restaurant chain Menya Musashi, and including special details like disposable chopsticks, soup, and an option for kaedama (a second serving of noodles), just like the ones you get at an authentic noodle joint.

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Neko Font: Let Cats Do the Talking for You!

If it’s taking up residence on beds of sushi, winning hearts with adorable poses or curling up on your face while you sleep, the cats of the world seem to be inching closer to world domination with each passing day. They’ve certainly got a hold of the netisphere, and now they’re writing their names all over it, turning their noses up at the alphabet of boring humans and replacing it with a much cuter one of their own. It’s a free font generator called neko font (cat font), and you can play with it too. It makes even the most boring of words absolutely adorable!

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When Two Amazing Worlds Collide: Welcome to the World of Cat Sushi!

There’s a new breed of sushi in town, and it’s called nekozushi (cat sushi). These unusual creatures live in an alternate reality, travelling between worlds on colourful sushi train plates, stopping to stare at passers-by for just long enough to get them thinking, “Did I really see that?” before zooming off again. Rare sightings have been reported over the years but no-one’s ever been able to really prove the existence of a sushi cat. Until now.

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Gyu-Kaku Philippines Now Open, Serving Up Excellent Seafood

Mariah Carey’s done it. Lindsay Lohan did it too. Megan Fox even does it with her husband. And in Japan, practically everyone’s doing it. It’s yakiniku, barbecuing meat on a charcoal flame, and the hottest place to do it is at the popular Japanese restaurant chain Gyu-Kaku.

Now people in the Philippines are getting a taste of the celebrity-endorsed outlet, with the April 5 opening of their first branch in metropolitan Manila. Already, it’s proving to be very popular with the locals. But when we heard that the star of this Gyu-Kaku (“Bull’s Horn”) wasn’t the meat but the seafood, we had to pay them a visit to see what was going on.

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No Kisses For You! Cute Shiba Inu Refuses Owner’s Persistent Advances【Video】

Meet Mari, the cute Shiba Inu who likes to play hard-to-get. If Mari looks familiar, it may be because she’s a bit of a movie star on the Internet. She’s appeared in dozens of short films with her owner, playing the roles of train passenger, religious sect founder and even tambourine player in her master’s two-piece band. She’s also spent time as a strict homework supervisor.  Now Mari seems to be showing her true colours, refusing her owner’s requests to pucker up for a smooch, with all the scorn and indignation of a displeased cat. This clip is one of their cutest and most hilarious pet-owner collaborations to date! Check out their video after the jump.

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Cute Kyoto! We Taste Hidden Delights From a Traditional Sweet House in Pontocho

Pontocho is one of Kyoto’s most beautiful geisha districts. With traditional tea houses, restaurants and bars all crowded together along atmospheric, stone-paved narrow lanes, this area breathes the air of an old, timeless Kyoto. Within its maze of weaving, intersecting alleyways, there are plenty of secrets to discover and hidden areas to explore. Walking through Pontocho, you might notice one of its many mysteries: the area is dotted with Japanese paper lanterns, all bearing the mark of the chidori, the plover bird. They’re incredibly beautiful, but why would a cute chidori design come to be on such traditional products?

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Virtual Reality: Taste the Sound Effects From Your Favourite Comic Book Moments

Your drink’s icy cold but the manga ice cubes in your glass are h-h-hot! Now taste the palpitating sound effects from your favourite comic books thanks to these new Manga Kōri, Comic Ice silicone molds from Runa Corporation.

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On April 23, the Ryōgoku Kokugikan sumo hall in Tokyo underwent a massive makeover on Google Maps. Now, the street view reveals a line-up of smiling sumo wrestlers. Once you get past them, you’re free to explore the entire building inside, from the seating area, to the food and souvenir stands and even the sacred dohyō, the ring where the bouts are held. We bring you all the best parts to explore, in easy to navigate clips straight from our page, after the jump.

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Schick Brings us Limited Edition Evangelion Goods For Rei-zor Sharp Enjoyment

It’s a good time to be an Eva fan in Japan right now. With Lotteria campaigns and Sega giveaways to coincide with the DVD and Blu-ray release of Evangelion 3.33, we’ve been running around town with some serious Eva fever. And the only cure… is more Eva!

Coming to the rescue is Schick, joining the tie-in celebrations with four different razor holder figurine sets, seven earphone jack accessories, and a chance to win an Eva clock. Plus, an animated interview with Gendo, to get his take on the razor series.

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Tsukiji Fish Market Vendor Releases Tuna For Home Assembly

If you’ve ever been to Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo (the largest seafood market in the world), then you’ve probably dodged speeding forklifts, gotten lost in a maze of stalls, and seen professionals wielding metre-long knives, filleting expensive tuna according to traditional methods that go back centuries.

Well now you can take the Tsukiji experience home with you (minus those pesky forklifts) thanks to a special bluefin tuna designed and manufactured by Yamawa, a third generation fish wholesaler from the markets.

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We Take the McDonald’s Potato Holder For a Test Ride

After our recent report on the April 24 release of the McDonald’s hands-free “potato holder,” we headed out and grabbed one for a test run.  Available for free with all large-size value sets, these plastic holders are only around for a limited time! But, with no car, how could we possibly do justice to the hands-free design, good for eating-on-the-go? That’s when we spotted our pink mama-chari (mama-chariot, a style of bicycle popular with mums in Japan) leaning against the wall of our driveway. With no shame whatsoever, Minoru, our test rider for the day, popped the plastic potato packet into the drink holder on the bicycle, inserted the large serving of fries and set off for a culinary trip around the block. Would they survive? Or would they fall? And how would our rider hold up?

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Is that Soy Sauce you’re Chugging? No, It’s Nanchatte Orange!

Hot on the heels of our incredibly successful cola transformation test, we couldn’t resist another weird and wonderful drink challenge. This time, we decided to try a drink called Nanchatte Orange (literally fake orange). It’s an orange juice sold by “Cheerio Japan” but with one catch: it looks exactly like soy sauce.

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We Try One of the World’s Most Unique Boiled Eggs

Surely, this has to be one of the most unique boiled eggs in the world. In case you can’t make it out properly, we ought to explain that this is a duck egg. With a duck embryo inside. And that strip of black there is indeed baby duck fur. It’s an image so frightful to some that eating it became a featured challenge on TV shows like Survivor and Fear Factor. To others, however, this is simply a delicious Filipino street delicacy.

Keeping an open mind, we plucked up the courage to try one of these babies (pun very much intended) while on a recent trip to the Philippines with one of our Filipino friends. But what did it taste like? And what does a whole baby duck feel like inside your mouth? We give you everything you need to know, complete with mouth-watering photos.

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Eat Pray Love… and Drink Starbucks Coffee in a Breathtakingly Beautiful Balinese Village

Starbucks is well-known for taking up residence in some unusual places. They’ve had a pop-up store in Tokyo and they even have a historical western-style house house in Kobe.  But in the beautiful mountain village of Ubud, Bali, there’s a more subdued Starbucks. Set up in an old storehouse, and blending perfectly with the environment, you wouldn’t instantly think this was part of a global coffee franchise.

We went to check out this unique coffeehouse and found it to be incredibly beautiful and serene. Out of all the Starbucks stores we’ve visited across the world, this is by far the one we recommend the most. With an exceptionally unique atmosphere, we bring you four reasons why this may very well be the best Starbucks in the world.

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Don’t like drinking with the boss? No Promotion For You!

In Japan, husbands often hand over their pay packets to their wives, who are the chief financial controllers for the household. Husbands then receive a fraction of their pay in the form of a monthly allowance, which has to cover costs such as cell phone charges, lunches and all-important networking and relations-building nomikai, or work drinking parties.

According to a survey by Shinsei Bank, the average office worker receives an allowance of 39,600 yen (US$398) a month. But when the average cost for attending a drinking party is 2,860 yen ($28.75), and one lunch is an average of 510 yen ($5.13) a day, many workers are now choosing to skip out on after work drinks. What they don’t realise is that this attempt to save some yen is actually jeopardising their careers.

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Studio Ghibli Denies Live Action Adaptation of Kiki’s Delivery Service, We Dream Up Other Possible Ghibli Adaptations

There were rumours recently about a live action version of Ghibli’s Kiki’s Delivery Service. What’s more, these reports claimed that Takashi Shimizu, the horror film director who brought us nightmare-inducing classics like The Grudge, would be sitting at the helm of the project. A horror take on the story of a cute 13-year-old witch? It  seemed too good to be true! Well, it was a sad day when Studio Ghibli released an official statement quashing the salacious rumours, saying, “We have no involvement in the matter.”

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The Five Most Popular Snacks in Japan

Have you ever opened a pre-packaged snack and then, before realising it, found you devoured the whole thing?

This was the question put to 906 readers of an online news site in Japan. Out of the 906 people in the survey, 618 said they had unwittingly scoffed the lot. But what are Japan’s most irresistible snacks? And what makes them so impossible to resist? Take a look at some of the comments from respondents as we bring you an inside look at the top five…

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Mister Donut and Hello Kitty Now Serving up Cute Doughnuts!

When we heard that Mister Donut was teaming up with Hello Kitty to celebrate the opening of a new Hello Kitty cupcake ride at Universal Studios Japan, we knew there would be a sweet surprise. The result? An insanely cute doughnut range featuring Ms Kitty’s signature bow and a few unique mini cupcake-inspired creations. Plus, a Hello Kitty ribbon headphone jack charm for purchases over 600 yen (US$6)!

But what would a Hello Kitty-approved doughnut taste like? We were seduced by the cute kitten and headed down to our local store to try out her wares. Join us as we take you through the range, bite by delicious bite…

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The Top 5 Ghibli Heroines as Chosen by Men Aged 20-40

It’s not an easy question to answer, but of all the strong and mysterious ladies from Studio Ghibli’s beautiful animated feature films, who is your favourite?

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