As many of you may know, the past week was the absolute busiest time to travel in China. With the New Year’s holiday coming up, many people who work in the big cities make the several hour, and in some cases several day, journey back home to be with family. With all those people trying to move around the country at roughly the same time, things are going to get a little cozy. Making matters worse, many passengers seem to have missed the trash receptacles, instead choosing to throw their garbage into the aisle.
A man from Japan’s Gunma Prefecture is facing legal action on the grounds of copyright infringement after uploading Studio Ghibli’s 2013 animated film Kaze Tachinu (The Wind Rises in the West) to a public website in July and November last year, the Yomiuri Online reports. When questioned, the accused individual remarked that he uploaded the film “to be popular”, proving once again that crime, especially the dumb kind, does not pay.
When you’re crammed into a train car during rush hour in Japan and almost everyone has a smartphone in their hands, you sometimes can’t help but look at what someone’s doing on their phone. Moreover, when you have a mix of seated and standing commuters, things get even more interesting, enabling a perfectly positioned passenger to sneak peaks at an unsuspecting person’s private messages. As you’d expect, you come across some really weird stuff when no one thinks you’re looking. Let’s take a look at five anecdotes from passengers who just happened to glance over at their nearby passenger’s phone.
In an unprecedented piece of school lunch policy for Japan, four schools in Mimasaka, Okayama are serving soups containing wild boar and deer as a part of their lunch program. It would seem the scheme is intended to both teach children about local food sources and decrease a “nuisance” to the local environment.
Japan loves its cats. When feline fans here aren’t going online to swap trivia about their favorite members of the animal kingdom, they’re playing with cute kitties between sips of coffee at one of the nation’s many cat cafes.
At times, it even seems like “love” doesn’t properly convey the depths of their emption, and that it would be more appropriate to say some people worship the creatures, which is exactly what you can do at these nine shrines and temples dedicated to cats.
Sometimes, it seems like all of Japan is slowly being drawn into Tokyo. As the county’s economic, educational, political, and even entertainment capital, for many people born elsewhere in Japan, it’s not so much a matter of if they’ll move to the country’s biggest city, but when.
But as in any society, not everyone in Japan is enthralled with urban living. After enough time in the concrete jungles of Japan’s major metropolises, anyone can find themselves thinking about packing up and moving someplace where the horizon is dotted with forests instead of skyscrapers.
Here are three places to consider if you’re ready to make the dream of living in the Japanese countryside into a reality.
Kids’ hopes and dreams for the future can change from one minute to the next and very often depend on the TV shows they watch and whatever their friends are talking about on any given week. But a recent survey conducted by human resource consulting company Adecco has revealed some interesting information about the future aspirations of children from Japan compared to those of kids from other eight other Asian countries.
There’s been a lot of research into the mystery of umami, the mild, pleasing savoury flavour that’s said to exist at the heart of Japanese cuisine. Often referred to as “the fifth taste”, alongside sweet, sour, salty and bitter, umami was first discovered by a Japanese professor and only officially recognised as a proper scientific term in 1985. Now, almost thirty years later, the delicate flavour is finally set to meet its perfect partner in a beer called Wazen (lit. Japanese meal). Due for release on April 8, the beer is being billed as “the beer for Japanese food”.
Remember the good old days, when North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il was just the right combination of diminutive, bumbling and evil to make the country at once problematic yet adorable? Well, Jong-il’s son and recently-ascended heir to the North Korean throne, Kim Jong-un, seems hellbent on making sure North Koreans are the go-to Hollywood antagonists for the next 20 years’ worth of action movies, with unpredictable and combative behavior towards the international community and human rights violations far more brazen and horrific than even his notoriously unpredictable father dared.
Man or woman, sexy or frumpy, unwanted romantic advances and date requests are probably a serious hassle. We wouldn’t know because the last time someone asked us on a date was 1972, but we’re fairly certain if someone we didn’t like asked us out, we’d struggle to come up with a tactful rejection.
So, for those of you who are asked out with any kind of regularity, you can commit the following awesome rejection lines courtesy of Japanese Internet users to memory so you’ve always got a snappy response to let your jilted would-have-been stalker down easy.
In the last 15 months, every major video game console maker has released a new piece of hardware. Each has titles with phenomenal, sometimes photo-realistic visuals, and soundtracks that make it seem like there’s a full orchestra hiding behind the TV providing musical accompaniment.
And yet, none of them stir any stronger emotions than the openings to the original games in the Final Fantasy and Legend of Zelda series, exactly as they appeared in their NES/Famicom forms. There’s something perfect about those 8-bit intros, even if they can’t match the technical heights of current games. If anything, the fact that their designers struggled against those restraints, but still managed to create something moving, helps to convey their emotion all the better.
That direct transmission of effort and personal passion, which can never be completely duplicated with more complex titles and the larger staff such endeavors require, is exactly what’s on display in this three-hour compilation of NES start screens.
Ichirô Nagai, the voice actor of Sazae-san‘s Namihei and Ranma ½‘s Happōsai, was discovered after he had collapsed in a Hiroshima City hotel on Monday morning. He was taken to a hospital, but he passed away. He was 82.
Have you got what it takes to dig your own private well? Well, to be honest, the thought has never really crossed our minds before, but after watching this video we’ve sure been inspired to try (sounds like a good summer project for Mr. Sato). We’ve also learned that well-digging is not for the faint of heart. Here’s the video journal of one man’s long journey to create a well in his backyard over the course of a summer. His adventure was full of ups and downs and many frustrating moments, but the end result was worth all of the trouble, not to mention making surprisingly interesting watching. Join us after the jump for a slideshow of this strenuous undertaking!
Curry is pretty much the ultimate Japanese comfort food loved by children, adults and picky eaters alike. And with data showing that Japanese people eat curry more than once a week, it has definitely become one of the country’s national foods despite its Indian-British origins. And one curry restaurant in particular, Curry House Coco Ichibanya or “Coco Ichi” to its patrons, is reaping the benefits of this curry craze, claiming about 80% of the market share! With more than 1,200 shops in Japan and 116 overseas franchises, it seems like nothing can stop this curry giant.
Its popularity may be dwindling in today’s world of ultra-rich football and baseball teams and their players, but there’s something wonderfully dignified, almost majestic, about sumo. And as one photograph shared last weekend by the Japan Sumo Association shows, there is perhaps even more magic to be seen if only we could all just slow down and open our eyes a little more often.
China’s smog — which routinely engulfs major cities like Beijing and Shanghai — is notorious, and it’s recently reached “danger levels.” But the the smog in New Delhi, The New York Times reports, is actually worse.
The air in New Delhi “is more laden with dangerous small particles of pollution, more often, than Beijing’s,” Gardiner Harris writes, and “a very bad air day in Beijing is about an average one in New Delhi.”
Final Fantasy, perhaps the biggest and best Japanese RPG series ever as far as the Western world is concerned, is no stranger to spin-offs and dubious sub-sequels. There have been a handful of gems amongst them, but there are some that even fans of the main series would prefer to imagine never happened. Rhythm action game Theatrhythm Final Fantasy Curtain Call, however, is one of the few non-core entries in the series that we’re sure gamers would be keen to get their hands on should its makers see fit to release it outside of Japan. And if a patent recently filed in Europe is any indication, they may just get their wish.
If you’ve been keeping up with the amazing 3-D latte art trends going on in Japan’s barista world right now, then you might want to take a look at their savoury counterparts popping up in grated radish form. Instead of swimming in cups of coffee, these adorable home-made creations are taking dips in winter hot pots and stews. Join us as we take a look at some of the cutest critters on offer, from Ghibli characters to sleeping cats, and see just how easy it is to cook up some edible cuteness at home.
Japan is rightfully billed as being an extremely safe country, and for the most part this extends to its natural environment. Lacking the wolves of Europe and North America, the lions and hippopotami of Africa, and the poisonous everything of Australia, there really isn’t a whole lot lurking in the Japanese animal kingdom that frightens us.
Or at least there wasn’t, until we heard the news that Japan is home to a species of super leeches that can even survive being frozen.