Fights have broken out all over the world in the last couple of days in front of Apple Stores as people queued for the new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.
Apple iPhone releases have been known to make people do crazy things. Whether it’s dressing as a blue slime and sleeping on the street for days or using your nipple to unlock your phone, there’s a sense of excitement and ceremony surrounding each new model that makes us want to push the boundaries and just have fun.
The latest release on the weekend was no different, and in our excitement to test out the much-anticipated ‘Digital Image Stabilization’ (DIS) on the iPhone 6, it seemed entirely sensible to line up two different models side-by-side and give them both a good shake. And how better to do that than by strapping them onto a vibrator?
Nowadays, it seems everyone is surrounded by multiple electronic gadgets that need constant managing and charging. And we all know it can be a drag remembering to keep all those devices juiced up. Well, you might as well do the charging in style, right? In that case, these adorable USB power adapters may be just what you need to get the job done. Yes, our favorite friends from Disney have turned themselves into power adapters for your precious gadgets, but in this case, they’re keeping their faces hidden — and displaying their cute bottoms instead!
Meet μ [the Greek letter mu], a four-year-old Scottish Fold female cat who enjoys all the typical feline hobbies of catnapping, meowing for treats, coughing up hairballs, and sitting down on your laptop while you’re trying to work. But μ has another hobby which is a bit more, shall we say, atypical in nature. Like many human children (and adults!), μ likes nothing better than to cuddle up with her favorite pink stuffed animal when she falls asleep!
Earlier in our thankfully extremely sporadic series, “Oh Boy, That’s Pretty Racist,” we covered a Japanese “comedian” (I use this term loosely) who posted Vine videos as a poorly acclimated Indian guy living in Japan, complete with racist accent and affinity for curry, of course.
For our second installment, we have a Japanese woman living in Taiwan explaining the reasons people should choose Japanese women over Taiwanese women using broad cultural stereotypes that at best unfairly pigeonhole Taiwanese ladies, and at worst are outright false. Let’s take a look:
This “disappearing picture” is a neat optical illusion we’ve never seen before. If you stare at it long enough, it disappears! Now to me, that sounds suspiciously like the time during my first year of middle school when the teacher sent gullible little me to ask the teacher next door for a “long stand”. (Incidentally, did you know the l’s are silent? The correct pronunciation is goo-ible.)
But I digress. This disappearing picture trick is pretty cool, and it really does work! All you need is your eyes and a little patience.
If you’ve ever visited Japan, chances are pretty high that you’ve been through Narita International Airport (and perhaps even been lucky enough to sample the perfect beer served there), no doubt thinking that you were flying to directly into Tokyo only to discover that you were still an hour train ride away from the city. The smaller Tokyo International Airport, commonly called Haneda, is, however, actually located within the city, but has until recently been considered Tokyo’s main domestic airport.
But all that’s about to change. As well as increasing the number of destinations it serves, Haneda has been improving its facilities and significantly upping its game in an effort to become more of an international hub. In fact, it was recently awarded the coveted 5-Star award from the ratings company Skytrax, making it the first airport in Japan and only the fourth in the world with that title.
On the evening of 19 September, JR Osaka Station became the scene of unseasonable weirdness as dozens of photographs of an unknown teenage boy seen sitting on the train fell from the sky like giant snowflakes of randomness.
Upon investigating the incident, Osaka Prefectural Police found this to have been an act of revenge by what is fast becoming Japan’s most oddball sub-culture: train otaku.
If you’re an Apple fanboy living in Japan, you may have noticed – while waiting in a ridiculously long line for your latest gadget – that there was a huge number of Chinese nationals waiting in line along with you.
That’s because, for the last couple of years, heading out to other countries to buy up the latest Apple products and sell them for a profit back in China has become a popular pastime for China’s more enterprising scalpers.
But this year, when Apple stores unexpectedly sold out of the new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 + before lines could dissipate, things got a little out of hand with the remaining Chinese customers, who reportedly stormed at least one Tokyo-based Apple store and wrecked the place – in addition to leaving piles of garbage out on the streets. Which would not have gone down well had it not been for the actions of one man.
Apple’s iTunes service released a trailer for the English dub of Studio Ghibli and Isao Takahata‘s The Tale of the Princess Kaguya on Monday.
On the application for a lot of jobs in the service sector, they’ll ask if you’re willing to work nights and weekends. Oftentimes, it’s hard to see this as anything other than a trick question. On the one hand, candidates obviously want to put their best, most eager face forward, and if you say you’d rather not take shifts then, you’re opening yourself up to the very real possibility of losing the job to someone who’s, at least on paper, more industrious.
Honestly though, no one really wants to be working at those times, since nights and weekends are some of the best times to enjoy spending the money you earn as part of raising your overall quality of life. Thankfully, one udon chain seems to understand this, and as part of their recruiting advertising, points out that working at its restaurants won’t get in the way of the more important things in life, life spending your weekends at an anime convention.
For most of this summer, Kyoto Prefectural Police have been carrying out an aggressive campaign of going to people’s homes and asking them to voluntarily give up their shoes with built-in hidden cameras. These house calls have resulted in hundreds of pairs of these “tosatsu shoes” (voyeur shoes) winding up in police custody.
This plan to deter the use of tosatsu shoes to illegally film in private areas such as up women’s skirts had proved so successful that police in Kyoto are spreading the word to other departments and will continue the same tactics in the future.
PelleK is a Norwegian rock and metal singer who doesn’t just limit himself to screaming about death and darkness, and uses his amazing vocal talents to cover anime songs and more, uploading them to YouTube for everyone to enjoy. Check out his awesome voice and performances in the videos below.
This month Kantai Con, ‘the anime convention on an aircraft carrier’, was held aboard the USS Yorktown in South Carolina, and attracted some fabulous cosplayers dressed up as the hottest warships in town.
While the English edition of RocketNews24 is primarily focused on Asia in general and Japan in particular, our Japanese-language sister site, Pouch, covers stories from around the world. Sometimes, the source information they work with is in English, so Pouch’s team members are always on the lookout for ways to brush up their language skills.
So we weren’t shocked to hear that one of Pouch’s writers, Marie, had recently gotten really into a new English-learning smartphone app. What did surprise us, though, was when we took a look at the phrases she was learning, including such nuggets as, “I just took a dump.”
The Tokyo Game Show for 2014 closed its doors this past weekend, and a record number of game companies showed up to display four times as many titles as last year. As always, the ever popular cosplay was a big hit and thousands of people came to buy the unique goods sold there. But what about the show itself? Was it the best attended TGS in years? Did it smash attendance records all around the world?
Cat cafes have established a pretty solid foothold in the Japanese dining scene. That said, some of them deliver more on the “cat” than the “café” part, with pretty unimpressive interiors and menus.
That’s not a problem at Monta, though, a cat café which recently opened up in Tokyo’s Asakusa neighborhood. With stylish and colorful furnishings and delicious food, we’d be tempted to stop by even if it didn’t have a half-dozen cats running around inside.
Those cute kitties, though, sure helped seal the deal and get us through the door, though.
When you stop and think about it, designing squirt guns is actually a pretty hard job. In an era where people have smartphones, video games, and the wonders of the Internet to keep them entertained, how do you get people to seriously consider shooting tiny sprays of tepid water at one another a viable entertainment option?
One idea is to go for a unique design, like the company that decided to model its guns after bears and leopards. That’s playful, unexpected, and eye-catching right? Unfortunately, guns and four-legged animals ordinarily have very different shapes, and in this case, trying to mash the two together meant the trigger ended up in a place you really shouldn’t touch a grizzly unless you’re looking to get mauled.
Burger King recently launched two new hamburgers in Japan that feature black buns and cheese with matching squid ink black sauce. Ads, like the one above, made the burgers look pretty unappetizing. But the burgers, known as the Kuro Diamond and Kuro Pearl, look even worse in reality.
Here are some examples:
The traditional Japanese kanzashi hairpin is usually an elaborate affair meant to be worn in the hair when donning a kimono or yukata. Intricately detailed and beautiful, they’re like Japan’s answer to the corsage. But these particular kanzashi may just be too beautiful to ever wear at all on account of directing all the attention away from your kimono.
Sakae, a kanzashi specialty manufacturer, makes each kanzashi by hand from colored glass that’s been melted down and coated in resin to prevent breakage – and lord knows you wouldn’t want one of these shattering into a thousand pieces in your hair.
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