Bringing you yesterday's news from Japan and Asia, today.
Remember all of those umbrellas that were abandoned in train stations in October and November this year during the typhoon season? Well at least one station in Tokyo definitely does, but thankfully they’re putting a few of them to good use: by turning them into surprisingly pretty Christmas trees!
If you or someone you know is expecting or has just given birth to a tiny person, and you’re looking for a gift that’s both cute and a little bit quirky, we may have the perfect item for you right here: Japanese online retailer Akasugu has just announced that it is now stocking baby and maternity items featuring collaborative designs between Japan’s Hello Kitty and classic kids’ picture book, The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
For those living in colder climates using a smartphone creates a major dilemma. We want to check our messages but wearing gloves often renders our touch screens useless. Sure, there are specialized smartphone compatible gloves, but going that way severely limits your choices of style and color.
Driven to the edge with this problem, Yoshiaki Owari of the Daily Portal Z came up with a groundbreaking way to keep your hands warm, stylish, and functional. In addition, you’re left with a tasty dish at the end of the day when you use Sausage Gloves!
If you’re ever looking for the Japanese equivalent to “John Smith,” the go-to name is decidedly “Tarou Yamada.” And yet, if you look at today’s population, neither of those names top the popularity charts! Yamada, though simple to write and stereotypically Japanese, isn’t even in the top five for family names!
Now that we mentioned it, we’re sure you’re all curious to know now, so here’s a list of the five most common family names in Japan, as announcement by the Meiji Life Insurance Company.
MonoMax, a Japanese fashion magazine for men in their thirties, is giving away a free Coach travel clock in their January issue to celebrate the magazine’s six year anniversary. The issue was released on December 10 for 890 yen (US$8.90). Nine bucks for a designer clock?! We had to buy one and check it out!
The biggest star from Japan has got to be Hello Kitty, the adorable cat character that’s easily recognized by nearly everyone. And as the epitome of cute, Hello Kitty has garnered female fans from around the world.
It is this same Hello Kitty that became a contact lens fit to stick in your eye. When production of this bizarre incarnation of everyone’s favorite white cat was announced back in August of this year, the delicate purple contacts were all over the news. Just as strange, My Melody was also made into a contact lens, enabling people across Japan to stick not one, but two beloved Sanrio characters in their eyes.
Thinking how great it would be to hide an adorable character in such an inconspicuous place, ninja style, our Japanese writing staff bought a pair of Hello Kitty and My Melody contact lenses. Here are the results…
Legos make everything better. And when those little plastic bricks are used to make some of our favorite Pokemon, the coolness goes well over 9,000. Let’s take a closer look at this awesome engineering, including a peek inside the boardable mecha-type lego Pokemon!
With the end of this year fast approaching, we now enter the season of reflection for 2013 via ranking lists. In these last fleeting days let’s take a moment to see which albums, apps, shoes, books, and cockroach traps Japanese shoppers flocked to buy online in the largest numbers. Perhaps then we can form a clearer picture of what life in Japan was like for this two-thousand thirteenth year of our lord.
Gamers in Japan who have yet to place an order but are hoping to pick up Sony’s newest console when it finally launches next February may well be disappointed come launch day. Amazon Japan is already reporting that it has sold out completely, and although it is hoping to guarantee more units soon might not be able to meet demand.
As with most new must-have items, numerous retailers offering the console at considerably inflated prices are already starting to appear online. Whether or not for its own gain, Amazon Japan has urged its customers via Twitter to be aware that those paying more than 40,000 yen (US$385) for a PlayStation 4 are being ripped off.
Airline meals once had a pretty bad rap, but in-flight food has improved quite a bit since Seinfeld was wondering what its deal was. And really, isn’t it kind of amazing that you can get a hot meal at all when you are barreling through the sky at 600 miles per hour in a small metal tube?
For everyone that has ever wondered how that perfectly portioned food turns up on your tray, we’ve gone behind that scenes at the in-flight meal production center for Japan Airlines (JAL) to get the scoop.
Christmas is just around the corner, and ’tis the season to be giving! While some of us have yet to even start on our Christmas shopping, an anonymous Santa has already presented three schools in Hokkaido, Japan, with a whopping gift of over 3,000 books in total!
Japan is famous for being an onsen (hot spring) nation, so much so that a friend of mine preaches that “if you’ve never been to an onsen, then you’ve never been to Japan”. Quite the extremist, but you get the idea. Japanese hot springs come pretty close to “heaven on earth”.
But Japan’s neighboring country, Taiwan, also has some fabulous hot springs to boot! The fact that there are onsen-loving Japanese people who travel to Taiwan for a soak is sufficient to vouch for the quality of these bubbling hot baths. Here’s a list of five onsen hot spots you wouldn’t want to miss on your trip to Taiwan!
Now here’s something you don’t see every day – a bunch of enormous men in their underpants sitting in fiberglass pods that look like something NASA might fire out of a space shuttle.
Shared on Twitter earlier today by the Japan Sumo Association, these photos show some of the sumo community’s most famous faces attending a health check session prior to a series of upcoming bouts. They’re also kind of hilarious.
As part of our solemn duty of keeping our readers abreast of the latest panty-related developments, we recently brought word of the Sailor Moon lingerie developed by Japanese intimate apparel manufacturer Peach John. Unfortunately, several of the anime-inspired offerings sold out almost immediately and are currently unavailable.
On the bright side, Peach John has several other themed lingerie sets, which we, being the dedicated journalists we are, present to you today.
I recently went to a cake shop, but when the time came to order, I said, “I’ll have the soy sauce ramen with a side of fried dumplings.” Don’t worry, I haven’t lost my mind. I was just at a hot new sweets shop in Shinjuku called, Maplise, where the specialty of the house is a decadent dessert that looks like a hot bowl of noodles.
With the winter cold now upon us in Japan, we suppose it’s natural that some of us should feel more partial than usual to warm, fuzzy-looking objects — like wool felt dolls, for instance. And in that spirit, one of our reporters from our sister site Pouch decided to try her hand at making her own felt doll herself. Sounds like a nice little project that should result in a cute hand-made creation, right?
This same reporter has previously written a story about a felt-craft project gone horribly wrong that had been shared on Twitter, in which what was supposed to turn into a cute cat ended up as, well … a bizarre-looking creature that’s hard to describe accurately. Could it really be that difficult to make a decent-looking felt doll? Our reporter’s account follows.
While Japan’s most iconic alcoholic beverage is the indigenous brew known abroad as sake (and as nihonshu at home), there are Japanese winemakers as well. Many are located in Yamanashi Prefecture, where local wineries hold an annual festival which we visited this past fall.
However, the last bottle of vino we enjoyed didn’t age in the mountains of Yamanashi, or the highlands of any other Japanese prefecture for that matter. Instead, our most recently purchased wine spent seven months aging at the bottom of the sea.
In Japan, every year is marked with a single kanji character as chosen by a national vote. The kanji is meant to represent situations and global or domestic events that took place during a given year and is announced on December 12 by the head monk at Kyoto’s famous Kiyomizu Temple.
Two years ago, 絆 (bonds) was chosen to represent 2011 due to the fraternal and familial bonds that were strengthened in the wake of natural disasters around the world, including the Great East Japan Earthquake and large-scale flooding in Thailand. Last year it was 金 (gold) for the numerous first place finishes Japan achieved in 2012, including winning the gold medal in women’s soccer and possessing the world’s tallest tower upon the completion of Tokyo Skytree.
The kanji for 2013 has just been chosen, but what what does it mean?
There are some extreme flavours of ice cream out there: all the flavours of the meat rainbow. Ice cream chock-full of pork, beef, or even chicken. We’re not talking about ice cream that adds a little meat extract to approximate the taste. We’re talking about a carnivore’s wet dream, the meat ice cream that practically walks on all fours; a dessert confection that blasts chunks of meat into your mouth with every spoonful. That’s the kind of pork ice cream our Japanese RocketNews24 reporter Kuzo found in Taiwan, sampled, and wrote this article about.
Perhaps we were wrong about cats being secret geniuses plotting to overthrow the world. This video, which is receiving a lot of attention in Japan today, suggests that there is at least one member of the feline federation that is perhaps a few strands short of a cat’s cradle.
When two-year-old Chai here spots a plastic bag on the floor of her owner’s apartment, she is naturally keen to investigate. Little does she know, though, that once she climbs inside it, the bag will simply refuse to let go…
New Japanese Food Sample Making Cafe opens in Asakusa, Tokyo
Tokyo government’s official AI-powered dating app, Tokyo Enmusubi, has officially launched
Some of the best Japanese fried chicken in Japan comes from this shack in the middle of nowhere
Respect for the Aged Day celebrations very unpopular with Japanese women in survey
The perks of drinking root beer at A&W in Japan
Ghibli Art Frame calendar gets expanded availability, will keep fans organized, happy in 2025 and beyond
Experience the “Color of Water” from a 250-year-old Japanese confection maker!
The last of the Mohican-hairstyle-wearing people still lining up for iPhones
Japan’s cat testicle calendar is here for nyantama fans to go nuts with
You want the whole crab? Japan’s Dom Dom will give it to you, and curry too, in Marugoto Kani Burger
Starbucks teams up with the oldest of Japan’s Six Ancient Kilns to create a Bizen ware coffee mug
New Hello Kitty McDonald’s Japan Happy Meal toys are here, and Kitty’s sister is part of the set
One of Tokyo’s most beautiful gardens gets its own moon for moon-viewing season
Super budget-friendly retro Tokyo hotel feels like having your own 1960s Asakusa apartmentSome of the best Japanese fried chicken in Japan comes from this shack in the middle of nowhere
Abuse Cafe Japan: We get abused by waitresses in maids’ uniforms at Tokyo’s viral pop-up diner
Tokyo Skytree to be lit up in Jujutsu Kaisen colors on Halloween in months-long art collaboration
Japanese cat island reveals all its cats will soon be gone
Night sky Studio Ghibli greeting cards are a beautiful reason to put pen to paper【Photos】
Studio Ghibli releases free-download board game — Here’s how to play it without reading Japanese
Foreign tourists on Shinkansen bullet train break suitcase etiquette, angering local passengersStudio Ghibli releases free-download board game — Here’s how to play it without reading Japanese
Studio Ghibli lets you cosplay as Howl from Howl’s Moving Castle with cosy anime fashion rangeNew Hello Kitty McDonald’s Japan Happy Meal toys are here, and Kitty’s sister is part of the setStarbucks teams up with the oldest of Japan’s Six Ancient Kilns to create a Bizen ware coffee mug
Japanese government suspends plan to pay Tokyo women 600,000 to move away to get married
Japanese government wants to remove tax-exemption limit for foreign tourists on consumables
Starbucks Japan unveils new limited-edition Frappuccino for autumnOne of Tokyo’s most beautiful gardens gets its own moon for moon-viewing season
The heartwarming story of Japan’s “Weakling Gundam” and the fans who supported it in its hour of need
McDonald’s new Happy Meals offer up cute and practical Sanrio lifestyle goodsForeign tourists on Shinkansen bullet train break suitcase etiquette, angering local passengers
[Deleted] Article written for April Fool’s Day 2018
Sold-out Studio Ghibli desktop humidifiers are back so Totoro can help you through the dry season
Japanese government to make first change to romanization spelling rules since the 1950s
Foreigner’s request for help in Tokyo makes us sad for the state of society
Ghibli founders Toshio Suzuki and Hayao Miyazaki contribute to Japanese whisky Totoro label design
Doraemon found buried at sea as scene from 1993 anime becomes real life【Photos】
Tokyo’s most famous Starbucks is closed
Princesses, fruits, and blacksmiths: Study reveals the 30 most unusual family names in Japan
Ghibli Art Frame calendar gets expanded availability, will keep fans organized, happy in 2025 and beyond
Experience the “Color of Water” from a 250-year-old Japanese confection maker!
The last of the Mohican-hairstyle-wearing people still lining up for iPhones
Japan’s cat testicle calendar is here for nyantama fans to go nuts with
You want the whole crab? Japan’s Dom Dom will give it to you, and curry too, in Marugoto Kani Burger
New Hello Kitty McDonald’s Japan Happy Meal toys are here, and Kitty’s sister is part of the set
One of Tokyo’s most beautiful gardens gets its own moon for moon-viewing season
Japanese cat island reveals all its cats will soon be gone
Edamame fans unite! Zunda-flavored Meiji Super Cup ice cream is here
What do you eat when you catch a cold? We asked 11 of our Japanese reporters
This Nara workshop has been making deer crackers for more than 100 years and offers tours【Photos】
1,200 Japanese workers convert above-ground train to subway line in a matter of hours
Studio Ghibli anime artist to sell artwork to support Ukraine
Comparing Japanese sweet potato ice creams that unite both summer and fall in one cup【Taste test】