When you hear the word “piranha,” the image that comes to your mind may be of hordes of vicious fish with razor-sharp teeth stripping you down to your bones in a matter of minutes. But it seems the tables will be turned for a limited time at the Suma Aqualife Park in Kobe, where guests will have the chance to chow down on these predators from the Amazon. And as you can see from the picture, yes, the infamous carnivorous fish look ferocious even when they’ve been turned into a tasty French-style dish!
Japan (Page 1353)
You’ve never seen ice cream like this before…that is unless you’re from Nagasaki. The delicate frozen petals of the rose seen above were skillfully set into place one by one to create what’s known as chirin-chirin ice cream. Let’s take a closer look at this popular dessert with a long history and a silly name.
Earlier this month we posted an announcement about a special limited-time Kiki & Lala Cafe in Tokyo’s trendy Shibuya district. The photos from the preview were just so adorable that we almost had little hearts spilling out of our eyes, and had to send a writer from our Japanese sister site Pouch over to get the inside scoop. After four failed attempts, she finally managed to make her way inside and discover the magical secrets within for herself. The reason it took so long for her to get in? It’s because the place is just too darn popular!
If you’re a fan of Sanrio’s cute characters and are anxious to go for yourself but are a bit hesitant about the long wait, you’ll definitely want to check out our writer’s comments and eight practical tips for planning a visit.
IKEA is a shopper’s paradise. The colors, the designs, and the price all work together and the impeccably presented showrooms make you want to recreate them in your own home. In Japan, there is the extra bonus of that “European style” that really speaks to some shoppers. IKEA is also well-known for its restaurant, where customers can relax and daydream about the new layout of their rooms while stuffing their face full of meatballs. For a limited time in Tokyo, IKEA has made it possible for you to experience living in a space all decked out in IKEA goods and stuff your face with Swedish meatballs at the same time!
Photographer Miki Asai lives in Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan’s four main islands. It’s an area known for its expansive natural beauty, and although Asai does sometimes turn her lens to the broad vistas Hokkaido has to offer, some of her most engaging work focuses on much, much smaller subjects like beads of water, bits of dandelion fluff and even the humble ant.
Says Asai, “Through a macro lens, I am trying to show the beautiful world of the small. I am always surprised when I look through the camera’s viewfinder to see things normally unseen.”
In Japan, the job hunting season is under way. From late December to April or May, students who will graduate in the coming year search for jobs en masse. Companies are busy trying to recruit the best and the brightest to apply to their firms, while stressed students rush here and there attending loads of job fairs, company briefing sessions and employment seminars.
For companies in Fukushima Prefecture, still recovering from the 2011 disaster and subsequent nuclear meltdown, recruiting new applicants is doubly hard. They have to contend with the usual tides of urban migration as well as the negative associations now attached to the area, but one local company, Niraku Corporation, has hit upon an idea to help bring young job seekers in: bus them in for free.
Like most kids, I went through a period where I incessantly bugged my parents to let me have a pet, and like most parents, once they said OK, they ended up doing most of the work taking care of it.
Perhaps they knew things would turn out this way, which is why when it came time to choose an animal companion, they steered me towards a hamster. They’re quiet, relatively easy to care for, and pretty happy to stay in their cages, which meant we wouldn’t have one running around the house and tearing up the carpet.
Another thing that makes hamsters great pets is that they don’t take up much space. But if you still think the cute little rodents are just too gargantuan, there’s a way to make them even more compact, at least while they’re sleeping.
The spring holiday known as Golden Week is upon us in Japan, and if you would like to lay claim to the title of manga super fan, you may want to spend your days off reading these canonical series. Without further ado, here are the 20 most popular manga of all time, based on publication numbers!
So, now that we’re one month in, how’s everyone enjoying the latest sales tax increase to 8 percent? Pretty awesome isn’t it? I’ve been getting a lot more use out of those one yen coins recently.
Not everyone is as lukewarmly amused as myself, however. A consortium of Japan’s online businesses, including ebook sellers and advertisers, met on 10 April to hash out some demands for the government before they get taxed right out of the competition since business such as segments of Apple and Google aren’t necessarily subjected to Japanese sales tax rules.
As we’ve said before, the PlayStation 4’s PlayStation Camera is a woefully underused device. Gamers who enjoy streaming footage of the games they play often use their cameras to capture their own expressions and add real-time commentary, and upcoming virtual reality headset Project Morpheus will make use of the unit to provide additional head tracking, but otherwise it gets relatively little love.
Fortunately, Sony Japan looks to be working on content that will inspire a few more PlayStation 4 owners to plug in their cameras. In two videos released last week, Sony staff show off their experiments with augmented reality, which combines real-world footage with computer-generated images that respond to a number of stimuli. These may only be tech demos, but the sight of a miniature T-rex hiding in the darkness, a man decanting water (complete with rubber duck!) between two virtual boxes, and even a short performance from a tiny Hatsune Miku on the living room rug left us thirsty for more.
Fans of monster movies or big Hollywood blockbusters are no doubt aware that a reboot of the famous Godzilla franchise is due to hit theaters next month. As you might imagine for a movie featuring one of their most beloved pop culture icons, the Japanese are deeply interested in how America is going to bring their national kaiju to the screen.
When clear pictures of the creature hit the net this week, the response was probably not what studio execs were hoping for. Some Japanese fans are apparently calling this incarnation of Godzilla “fat”. Ouch.
Okay, we’ve already shown you in the past how utterly adorable otters can be. Now, Miyajima Public Aquarium in Hiroshima Prefecture is offering the public a chance to learn more about their oriental small-clawed otters by giving us a unique, 33-hour live feed look into the otter exhibit. That’s right, it’s a live internet otter-cam that will let you see how the critters spend their days and nights, and we’re sure it will be a total delight for otter fans!
As dyed-in-the-wool Japanophiles, we’re always happy when something from Japan catches on overseas. Not too long ago, if you lived outside of Japan and liked your fish raw, or your music Japanese, you were part of a pretty small group. Now, though, it seems like every coastal city in the U.S. needs at least one good sushi restaurant in order to claim a respectable dining scene, and J-pop acts go abroad to play in front of adoring, passionate fans.
So when the writers at our Japanese-language sister site told us a new fashion trend with Japanese roots was winning over American fashionistas, including actress and musician Zooey Deschanel, we thought maybe we were about to get the inside line on the summer’s hottest look.
Then, we found out what she was wearing, and we got a chuckle instead.
Do you love Lego? Are you an adult living Tokyo? Don’t you wish that “no admission to adults unaccompanied by children” rule didn’t exist so you could stop “borrowing” kids from the local playground just to hang out at the LEGOLAND in Odaiba?
If so, we have some excellent news for you! Starting in May, the LEGOLAND Discover Center in the Decks Mall will host an adults-only night once a month!
So, apparently numerous ’50s and ’60s B-Movies (and one glorious ’80s cartoon) and a popular, genre-defining video game weren’t enough to deter scientists from playing God with plant-life if the growing number of hybrid vegetables available on Japanese store shelves is any proof.
These days, most hybrid vegetables are created over a roughly 10-year period of crossbreeding certain seeds in what we presume is some kind of laboratory setting, although the practice has been alive for centuries – yielding some hybrids that the general public isn’t even aware are hybrids. The Romanesco, for example, is a cross between broccoli and cauliflower, and was created in the 16th century. Side note: It’s also probably mind blowing to look at while high.
But the things we’re seeing increasingly often in Japan these days are just plain weird.
Given Japan’s unbridled love of things technologically advanced or just plain pretty, it’s no surprise that the country can’t get enough of projection mapping. High-tech artists have put on projection mapping shows at this year’s Sapporo Snow Festival, and just a few weeks ago Kawasaki hosted an event which recreated the monstrous villains from hit anime Attack on Titan in full scale.
But if Sapporo is too cold and the Titans too terrifying, there’s another display coming up that’s sure to be milder in both climate and content though just as visually impressive, as projection mapping is coming to Cinderella’s Castle at Tokyo Disneyland.
To most people around the world, the word ‘Yankee’ is used as a (sometimes derogatory) slang term for Americans in general. To most Americans, ‘Yankee’ refers to a person living in one of the six northeastern states of New England. To die-hard Red Sox fans, just hearing the phrase ‘New York Yankees’ is enough to make their blood boil. But that’s a different story…
Curiously enough, the word ‘yankee’ (ヤンキー) has also established itself within the Japanese lexicon, albeit with extremely different connotations. In Japan, a ‘yankee’ conjures up images of juvenile delinquents and biker gangs (more on that later). While this Japanese subculture may have died down considerably since its heyday in the 1980s, one museum in Hiroshima Prefecture has just opened a special exhibit titled ‘Yankee Anthropology’. This exhibit explores Yankee culture from a serious, academic perspective and includes various related realia. If you’ve always been fascinated by this aspect of Japanese subculture, now’s the perfect excuse to head over to Hiroshima!
Sales of a new survival horror manga from Earth Star Entertainment have been postponed due to an unfortunate case of horrible timing.
The manga, which debuted last November in Monthly Comic Earth Star, features a group of teenaged school girls struggling to survive on a deserted island. The cause for the delay is probably obvious, but click before more information.
As a very young kid, I remember going to the arcade with my brother and pumping quarters into a game called Cliff Hanger. Like the classic Dragon’s Lair, its gameplay consisted of snippets of hand-drawn animation with occasional prompts for the player to move the joystick or hit the action button. Also like Dragon’s Lair, Cliff Hanger was ridiculously difficult, and with each of our numerous deaths, we had to once again start over at the beginning of the scene.
The repetitiveness should have bored us to tears, but instead, we were captivated by the amazing artwork on display, and with good reason. The visuals for Cliff Hanger were culled from the 1979 anime film The Castle of Cagliostro, the very first movie directed by the legendary Hayao Miyazaki.
Really though, the proper way to experience the film isn’t on a scratched arcade monitor as you grip a set of greasy controls. This is a classic that deserves to be seen on the big screen, which is once again possible, as The Castle of Cagliostro is returning to theatres with a painstakingly remastered version.