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Japan (Page 1147)

The magic is back! Adorable Sailor Moon gashapon transformation toys to be re-released this year

Yes, we love our gashapon toys here in Japan. They’re inexpensive, readily available, and we can’t seem to get enough of them… especially if they’re cute, sparkly miniature Sailor Moon transformation toys!

That’s right — back by popular demand, toy manufacturer (and apparently all-round good guys) Bandai will be re-releasing the “Sailor Moon Transformation Compact Mirror” and the “Sailor Moon Stick and Rod” series of miniature toys, and with the intricate details and bright colors that are sure to capture fans’ hearts, they’re every bit as magically charming as they were before!

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Western-style weddings are overwhelmingly popular in Japan, and especially among young couples, outnumber Japanese-style ceremonies by a wide margin. In many ways, Western ceremonies in Japan are similar to what you’d see in the U.S. The bride wears a dress, the groom a tuxedo, and the pair exchanges vows and seals the deal with a kiss. The reception, likewise, usually involves toasts, a fancy dinner, and a bouquet toss.

But despite Japan’s rather open obsession with women’s undergarments, the garter toss isn’t a wedding tradition here. But the absence of a male equivalent to the bouquet toss has been noticed by some who are soon to be married, and they’ve hit upon the offbeat solution of having the men in attendance try to catch a bunch of broccoli thrown by the groom.

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In Japan, the is no more dominant name in the ready-to-eat pickled ginger game than Iwashita New Ginger. Their stalks of sweet and spicy roots soaked in vinegar and sugar are sure to satisfy those looking for an all-natural snack.

But don’t think for a second that Iwashita is resting on those laurels. They are constantly creating innovative promotional ideas to make people aware of just how satisfying their pickled gingers are. Starting on June 20 they will be opening the Iwashita New Ginger Museum, and to commemorate this opening they’ll be selling the exclusive Iwashita New Ginger penlights pictured above!

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New Japanese biking laws say no more earphones in ears…but what about other orifices?

A few days ago, we brought you a list of 14 things never to do on a bicycle in Japan in light of new cycling traffic laws that went into effect on June 1. Of course, the new, stricter laws are intended to promote bicycle safety and reduce accidents, but they mean a lot of cyclists in Japan are going to have to give up on some of their old bad habits, like riding while listening to music.

There’s a little speculation that riding with headphones in but no music on, and riding with just one earpiece in (although that sounds to us like a recipe for disaster when the other dangling earbud inevitably gets caught in your spokes) are probably not going to get you jail time or anything, but we like to play it safe here at RocketNews24, at least until happy hour rolls around.

So, when one of our Japanese writers – a noted music lover – was pondering other ways to get his music fix while commuting by bike, he stumbled on what seemed like an easy solution: If the law says you can’t ride with earbuds in your ears, well, just shove those suckers right up your schnoz. It’s so simple it just has to work!

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Professional Chinese food chef teaches us how to make the perfect fried rice

If you’re anything like us, you love Chinese food. Ramen, dumplings, spicy ribs, the always delicious chahan (fried rice) – you name it, we’ll keep eating it so long as you keep bringing it! Chahan is, we have to admit, pretty easy to make, but even so we can never get it to taste as good as the stuff they serve in the restaurant.

But no more! A couple of writers from our Japanese sister site recently went to get some pointers on cooking great fried rice from a real Chinese-food chef. Here are his four tips for making killer chahan at home!

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No more earphones while cycling in Japan? Well, how about nipplephones?

As you probably know, bicycles are an incredibly common method of transportation in Japan. They’ve also been a source of many accidents in the country, and police have taken an increasingly strict approach to dealing with law-breaking cyclists. New rules have recently been implemented to keep the country’s streets from turning into a crazy, Mad Max-esque bicycle dystopia, and one that’s really got people’s attention is a prohibition on earphones/headphones while cycling.

The exact rule and punishment seems to vary from location to location, but wearing earphones in both ears is sure to get you at least a warning, and in some places, Tokyo included, even just one ear is now against the law. But, one of our intrepid RocketNews24 Japan writers thought, what about earphones on your nipples?

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Going to an onsen hot spring is one of those quintessentially Japanese experiences that every visitor to the country should have. But is, sadly, an activity many westerners choose to skip for a number of reasons. Coming from a culture where taking a bath with another person is something you really don’t do beyond early childhood, the thought of walking around naked and sitting in a huge bath with a bunch of naked strangers can seem a bit unappealing. I myself was in Japan for two years before I finally decided to take the plunge, but once I did, I was hooked.

Our Japanese writers here at RocketNews24 decided to take a their American pal along for his first onsen experience at the famous Kusatsu Onsen. Find out what he thought of his first ever hot spring soak after the jump.

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Everyone’s got his own unique set of aesthetic sensibilities and ideal vision of beauty. In general, though, guys like looking at half-naked women, and when they aren’t in a position to look at one, they’ll settle for imagining them.

As such, it’s perfectly natural and healthy to fantasize about women wearing sexy lingerie if you’re a young man who’s reached the age of puberty (or if you’re an older man whose mind didn’t really progress that far afterwards). But when you start coming up with systems to determine what kind of lingerie a woman has on, like theorizing that it matches her umbrella, well, you might be thinking about women in their undies just a bit too much.

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While being an anime or manga artist takes a huge amount of artistic talent, they do at least have the advantage of complete control over the mediums in which they work. Making one person taller than another is just a matter of drawing longer lines. Want more people in a crowd scene? Just pencil them in. In a 2-D world, everything, even laws of physics like gravity, exists at, and can be bent to the whims of, the creator.

Cosplayers don’t have it so easy, though, and trying to recreate their favorite characters and scenes under real-world constraints can be a tricky task. These clever costumers have figured out some simple yet ingenious techniques for getting around those obstacles, though, and another behind-the-scenes peek at how they put their shots together reveals that sometimes an awesome final product only comes after some pretty silly-looking cosplay setup.

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Executives arrested from scam dating sites that had 2.7 million users and only one female member

Dating is never easy, is it? Going out and meeting strangers and talking to them can be painful, awkward, and downright terrifying. Fortunately, Internet dating sites have helped us cut through the trial-and-error process to find people we have deep, personal connections with — or, at least, who swiped right.

Unfortunately, online dating is also ripe for abuse, exploitation, and scams. If ever you needed a cautionary tale for being careful about who you give your money to, this group of dating site executives who ran multiple scam sites should suffice. Of the 2.7 millions users on the site, only one was a woman. The rest of the “women” the male members were chatting with online were all paid fakes!

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Dragon Ball “should have ended with the Frieza Saga”, says Akira Toriyama’s former editor

The first editor of the Dragon Ball manga has revealed that he thinks the franchise should have ended with the Frieza Arc. Kazuhiko Torishima, who worked closely with Akira Toriyama on the first half of the Dragon Ball manga, made the surprisingly frank comments in an interview that was recently broadcast on Japanese TV.

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Maryland governor seeks federal funding after riding Japan’s maglev train

Maryland Governor Larry Hogan took a trip to Yamanashi to try out Japan’s record-breaking Maglev (Magnetic Levitation) bullet train. Travelling with him were executives from the Baltimore-Washington Rapid Rail LLC (BWRR), who, after enjoying a 27-mile-long ride, headed back to Baltimore with the intention of bringing the technology stateside.

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Mr. Sato went to Ganguro Cafe and discovered his beautiful inner gyaru 【Pics】

As you probably know, our ace reporter Mr. Sato has his own special way of doing things. Rather than just going to check out a popular speedy steak-cooking restaurant, he instead cooks the steak himself and shoves it in people’s faces. Rather than just buying some butter, he straps a bottle of cream to a helmet and goes around a track in a racecar, getting the g-forces to churn it for him.

So when he heard about the ganguro dress-up and makeup cafe Black Diamond in Shibuya, he couldn’t just write a quick review of the place and be done with it; he had to become one with the cafe and its staff. This is the story of how Mr. Sato became a fashionable gyaru for a day, and we have the glorious pictures to prove it.

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“Japanese steak sandwich” flavour potato chips have us slavering over our keyboards!

Here at RocketNews24, we love trying out all of Japan’s weird and wacky potato chip varieties. Just recently, we wrapped our chops around bags of banana and peach flavoured “breakfast” chips. And of course there was the time that we sampled coffee flavour chips…

But after all that taste bud overloading, our tongues are in need of something a little more subtle. Luckily for us, a new flavour of potato chips is about to hit the market, and they sound absolutely delicious. Japanese steak sandwich flavour? Shut up and take our money!

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Which anime characters do you share a birthday with? This website will tell you

A pretty major difference between anime and western animation is the amount of detail Japanese productions put into character profiles and backstories. For just about any significant anime character, you can be sure the creators have decided on things such as a family name, exact height in centimeters, favorite food, and, in the case of sex-appeal female characters, bust, waist, and hip measurements.

If nothing else, characters almost always have an official birthday, even if there’s never an episode highlighting it or any other part of the story affected by, for instance, Attack on Titan’s Levi being born on December 25. Now, a fan-produced website has compiled a database of anime birthdays, allowing you to plug in your own to see which characters you could conceivably share a cake with.

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We try serving a steak in 8.6 seconds, turned out to be surprisingly erotic

The steakhouse chain Ikinari! Steak! is all the rage in Japan right now thanks to its unique method of cooking your steak immediately after you tell them how you want it. Combined with standing tables, it provides regular steakhouse quality meat at speeds that rival fast food joints.

It got our staff to thinking about how the speedy service of Ikinari! Steak! is so popular. If we, too, could get steak into the mouths of customers within just a few seconds of them ordering, then maybe we could get into the restaurant game and be even more successful.

And so, research into such a steak service was underway, but as often is the case with our research, things somehow devolved into a cheesy porno starring one of our male writers in a bikini.

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One Piece ship to anchor at Japanese theme park

Ahoy, landlubbers! The Thousand Sunny, the preferred vessel of the Straw Hat Pirates in One Piece, is paying a call at the port of Laguna Ten Bosch, a theme park in Gamagori, southeast of Nagoya. Interested fans are invited to board the ship for a few hours to partake in a cruise. They will be treated to a stage show, music and a toast to the Straw Hat crew. Commemorative mugs and certificates will be given as souvenirs.

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These 19th-century Japanese miniature landscapes show that size isn’t everything

The Tōkaidō is perhaps the most important road in Japan’s history. Built in the 17th century, it connected the country’s two powerhouses: it runs from Kyoto, the imperial capital, to Edo (now Tokyo), the seat of the Shogunate. As well as being an important political and trade route, depictions of the Tōkaidō in art in literature were abundant and popular.

The best-known of these is Utagawa Hiroshiges’s series of ukiyo-e woodcut prints, The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō. Ukiyo-e woodblock printing like this continued to flourish in Japan until the 19th century.

Less famous than Hiroshige is the relatively unknown ukiyo-e artist Utagawa Yoshishige, who produced his own prints of the 53 stations along the Tōkaido – by depicting each station in the form of a potted landscape.

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Taiwan’s Ice Monster brings monster shaved ice, monster lines, and monster brain freeze to Tokyo

Popular Taiwanese kakigori (shaved ice) chain Ice Monster opened on Omotesando, the main boulevard of Tokyo’s trendy Harajuku neighborhood, at the end of April to five-hour waits. Even now, waits regularly extend over an hour, but the scuttlebutt was that it was worth it for the mountains of delicious, delicious shaved ice.

We braved the lines and the brain freeze to find out the truth for you, dear readers.

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No plans for the weekend? Free CG animation festival is going on in Tokyo 【Videos】

If you were just looking at the clock and smiling because you’ve reached the end of your workweek, but have since switched to frowning and looking at the Tokyo weather report (clouds or rain all week long), cheer up, because it just so happens there’s a great indoor event going on.

Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia 2015 kicked off earlier this week, and until June 14 will be showcasing the works of talented short film makers from around the globe at venues in Tokyo and Yokohama. Best of all, admission is free, and today we’re taking a peek at some of the festival’s amazing computer animated shorts that are screening this weekend.

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