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Surprising knock-off goods from Japan

Nowadays, when it comes to knock-offs of popular products, most people think of China. We’re not just saying that to pick on our neighbors to the west, there’s just an awful lot of suspect copies. Korean bootlegs have had their time making the rounds as well, but everyone seems to leave Japan alone. That is until now. A video uploaded by Japanese YouTube user, msdoom99, has surfaced with the goal of giving all those Japanese netizens who have laughed at Chinese and Korean knockoffs a taste of Japan’s little-known copies. Take a look at just a few and ask yourself, “So who’s laughing now?”

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Foreigners love Japanese conbini so much they made a song about them!

Have you ever loved something so much, you just had to shout it out to the whole world? Well these guys certainly know that feeling. A group of foreigners created this video for the one true love in their lives – Japanese convenience stores.

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Fluffy Fighting! The official pillow of the Japan Pillow Fighting Association debuts

It was a normal day at the RocketNews24 office. Writers were writing, editors were editing, and webmasters were…well, no one knows what webmasters do, but they were definitely doing it like crazy. A quiet and peaceful Tuesday, it was…but not for long!

Suddenly, the front door flew open, and a dark figure filled the frame. “PILLOW FIGHT!!!” screamed Mr. Sato as he charged into the room. “Eat my Pillows Officially Recognized by the All Japan Pillow Fighting Association!” he shouted, flinging bedding with as much skill as twenty experienced sleepover tweens combined.

“I wiiiin!” our rampaging Japanese writer cackled before sprinting out of the office for another cup of Starbucks, leaving his co-workers baffled and defeated.

Picking ourselves up, we looked around and could but only wonder: “What the heck is a Pillow Officially Recognized by the All Japan Pillow Fighting Association?”

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Live-action series Street Fighter: Assassin’s Fist could well be all kinds of awesome 【Photos】

Based on Capcom’s hugely popular Street Fighter fighting games, upcoming TV series Street Fighter: Assassin’s Fist began life back in 2010 as a mere seed of an idea. Three years later, fans of the video games went nuts when the project surfaced on Kickstarter asking for funding, only for it to suddenly disappear again when it was snapped up by a private production company.

Since then there has been so little news about Assassin’s Fist that we were starting to wonder if it would ever see the light of day, but recently released photos and one website’s extremely positive first impressions have our hands tingling with hadouken power more than ever.

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Too cute! Donald plays with real-life feathered friends at Tokyo Disney 【Photos】

Millions of visitors take photos with their favourite characters at Disney parks every year. In these adorable pictures, though, Donald is posing with a different kind of visitor for once – his own kind!

When some little critters wandered out of their area at Tokyo Disney and onto the road, Donald and friends were at hand to help keep them out of harm’s way, and took the chance to have a little fun while they were at it.

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Creative bento lunches from the past hint at the origins of “kyaraben”

Kyaraben, short for “character bento”, are insanely popular in Asia and Japan in particular. Young mothers, and some fathers too no doubt, spend hours crafting special lunch boxes, using all manner of foodstuffs to create shapes, faces and designs, and there are even entire books and monthly magazines containing hundreds of ideas. Over the years, we’ve seen lunch boxes based everything from Nivea hand cream to video game smash Metal Gear Solid, but it’s easy to forget that the practice of dressing up a packed lunch has, in fact, been around for quite some time.

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This White Day, tell her how you truly feel… tell her with donuts

With Valentine’s Day over and done with, White Day (14 March) is just around the corner. This is the day in Japan where men are obliged to return the gifts of Valentine’s Day chocolates to the women who gifted them, or else send a clear message that the feeling isn’t mutual by not bothering.

However, many guys have trouble choosing the right gifts for women, so Krispy Kreme Japan is holding a special workshop to teach an exclusive group of guys how to make romantic gifts out of their donuts.

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You wouldn’t know it from the current state of the industry, but the biggest grudge match in video games wasn’t always PS4 versus Xbox One or Skyrim versus Dark Souls. For the bulk of console gaming’s most formative years, the bitterest rivalry was Nintendo versus Sega.

Back before Sega threw in the towel on making its own hardware, the two companies hated each other, and their fans did, too. “Nintendo makes games for little kids.” “Sega’s marketing is obnoxious and juvenile.” “The Super NES processor sucks.” “The Genesis sound chip sounds like a muffled fart.” “Mario is fat.” “Sonic only has one eyeball.”

Soon, you’ll be able to relive the epic struggle for 1990s video game supremacy with the feature film adaptation of the book “Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation.”

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A man and woman pretending to be boyfriend and girlfriend in order to please their traditionally-minded, grandchild-expecting parents is one of the oldest clichés in romantic fiction. It’s right up there with the moody jerk with a heart of gold and the rich, dreamy architect who would love to spend more time with the heroine if only he wasn’t juggling so many projects.

In real life, though, often times once you peel back the layers of jerk a guy has wrapped himself in, all you’ll find he was hiding deep down inside was a smaller, more concentrated jerk. Architecture has one of the highest unemployment rates of any professional field. And talking someone you’re not dating into pretending to be your girlfriend? It’s not nearly as cute as movies and TV make it out to be, as proven by the ugly aftermath of a man in China’s unsuspecting parents giving a sizeable cash gift to his fake girlfriend.

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Soccer fan’s Attack on Titan parody is so awesome it got him a job 【Video】

The other day, faced with another bleakly overcast, freezing cold day, we wife and I decided that the local video store was as far a trip as we were willing to brave the elements for, and came back with a stack of Attack on Titan DVDs. After watching a dozen episodes of the biggest anime hit in recent memory, the only time I’m not bugging her with my rendition of the show’s opening theme is when she’s singing it herself (thankfully, she does a much better job of staying on-key than I do).

There’s just something infectious about the show’s anthem, “Guren no Yumiya.” It’s helped its performers Linked Horizon get famous, thousands of fans get pumped up, and even one soccer fan get a job.

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“Eiffel Tower nose” cosmetic surgery inexplicably trending in China

This sentence is a mouthful: According to Japanese media, Chinese media is reporting that, according to German media, Chinese kids are getting a strange cosmetic surgery known as “Eiffel Tower nose” in record numbers in order to get ahead in their careers.

Despite the fact that we have no idea what “Eiffel Tower nose” is, it is apparently a surgery so extreme that some Chinese college graduates feel it helps set them apart visually from others in the job race.

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BABYMETAL releases full album, metalheads and idol fans headbang in unison

After years of boggling the minds of metalheads and J-pop fans around the world with their idiosyncratic music videos, BABYMETAL have finally released their first full-length album. Of course, we got our hands on a copy as soon as we could, and we are happy to report that it is everything we’d expected it to be!

With the album now available world-wide, you too can turn your day from “average” to “dangerously kawaii” with this soundtrack to the adorable apocalypse. And if you’re on the fence about picking the album up, check out some of these reviews found on the Japanese side of the Internet.

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Limited edition ANA Starbucks bottles are available over Japan, but not in it

Just like it does in other markets, Starbucks offers special limited edition merchandise for specific locations in Japan. But even if you’ve already got special tumblers from Tokyo, Yokohama, Kyoto, and Hiroshima, you collection won’t be entirely complete without this special Starbucks bottle that you can only purchase onboard ANA flights inside or connecting to Japan.

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Health Tip: Drinking live pig’s blood may lead to worms in your brain

I’m sure we can all agree that at the end of a long workday there’s nothing better than enjoying a nice glass of pig’s blood. I don’t mean that bottled crap you buy in the supermarket, chocked full of additives and high fructose corn syrup. I’m talking about the real-deal piping hot blood straight from a live pig.

However, before you go ahead and take a nice drink, take heed. As one young man from Guangxi, China learned, drinking too much live pig’s blood (i.e. any) can actually be bad for your health.

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Lego brick creations that look good enough to eat

With the right amount of creativity, Lego bricks are the keys to other realms and the building blocks of otherworldly creations. But put in the hands of a spatially challenged, uninspired Lego novice, those little bricks continue to resemble the little pieces of plastic they really are. That’s why it’s so impressive when someone masters the art of building with Lego. Artist, Sachiko Akinaga, is one of those Lego masters and she’s managed to create plastic food that will make you want to take a bite.

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Noodles for candy lovers: Gummy Udon arrives just in time for White Day

I have a minor confession to make: I’m really not a fan of udon noodles. When asked to rank the big three – namely ramen, soba and udon – I’ll give my answer from most to least liked in that exact order. Ramen is quite frankly the man and hard to go wrong with, and soba is, although far simpler, nearly always delicious even hot or cold. But udon I just can’t seem to make friends with. Far heavier than its other noodle brethren, I find myself tiring of udon’s flavour even halfway through a meal, and those thick, heavy wheat-flour noodles slip from my chopsticks and splash into my soup. Every. Single. Time.

But these awesome new gelatinous “gummy” udon noodles, I think I could handle.

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The top five manga that should be published in America

Japanese manga fans in the US are probably lamenting the relative stagnancy of the market nowadays compared to its heyday about a decade ago. While American bookstores still stock a large selection of manga and The New York Times publishes a manga section on its bestseller list, it’s about time for a new series to take the US by storm again. The staff of niconico news recently asked one Mr. C, an American veteran of both the Japanese manga industry and DC comics who currently resides in New York City, to share his thoughts about some series that could become big hits if English-language versions were released. Read on to find out his top five manga picks that have the potential to become breakthrough hits in the USA. Who knows, maybe one of these works will usher in a new manga boom in the near future!

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Check out these six hilarious Attack on Titan reaction videos

In an age of smartphones where everyone has a digital camera in their back pocket, the distinctly 21st-century form of entertainment that is the reaction video has become an art unto itself. On YouTube, you can watch a little girl going crazy with excitement as her family tells her they are going to Disneyland; teens reacting to viral videos; even people who are pretending to be other people reacting to things. Gogglebox, a UK television series which consists of footage of people watching TV in their own living rooms, is about to go global, with Chinese and American versions in the pipeline. We are watching people watching, and in our millions.

There is another type of reaction video, too: fans of anime who post videos of themselves watching the latest episode in real time. Reaction videos of English-speaking fans watching Attack on Titan have been making waves on the internet. These YouTubers are almost as animated as the videos they watch, so join us as we enjoy six of the best!

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Korean broadcast asserts Yuna Kim’s gold medalist status at Sochi Olympics with cheeky subtitle

Mention the Winter Olympics or figure skating to any South Korean this week and they’ll likely respond with a scowl or a shake of the head. After an almost completely flawless performance at Sochi, 23-year-old figure skater and darling of South Korea Yuna Kim looked sure to claim the gold, but when the judges presented their scores for her performance, which came to a total of 219.11, the stadium erupted with cheers from Russian spectators who knew that the top medal would instead go to their own Adelina Sotnikova, who scored just five points more.

But the official scores don’t seem to matter much in Yuna Kim’s native South Korea, since one broadcaster pretty much just awarded her a gold medal anyway.

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In general, Japan has very few animals that’ll kill you, as most local wildlife falls outside the three danger areas that trained zoologists refer to technically as poisonous, gigantic, and fangy.

However, you only need to kill a man once to show him you mean business. A check mark in any one of those boxes is cause for concern, which is why authorities in Japan are warning people about deadly poisonous mites that’ve been found in the country.

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