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Fantasy Art: Amano Yoshitaka Art Gallery

Should you happen to be in Tokyo this Golden Week, you have until Tuesday (May 7) to check out a free (!!!) art gallery displaying some beautiful works by Amano Yoshitaka. If the name doesn’t ring any bells, some of the projects he’s worked on surely will: Final Fantasy, Vampire Hunter D, Science Ninja Team Gatchaman, and the incomparable Sandman: the Dream Hunters.

And if you happen to have a few extra yen laying about, you can also pick up some original pieces! The least expensive one we found was only about 40,000 yen (US$402), and the most expensive we spied was about 3.8 million yen (US$38,381). Even if you can’t pick up the original art, you can still get postcards, posters, notebooks, and calendars with Amano’s brilliant art. And! You’ll get a poster just for coming by!

Photo and event information below! (Some of the photos are not safe for work!!!) Read More

Looking for Love? Break the Ice Over Red Meat at this Barbecue Joint Famous for Turning Patrons into Couples

Typically a heaping plate of raw meat isn’t exactly the type of food you’d picture putting people in an amorous mood, but this tiny watering hole-slash-barbecue joint in Kanda (one station over from Tokyo) is famous for bringing patrons together through the magic of a hot grill, cold drinks, and very, very close quarters.

The interior of the restaurant, Rokkakai, is only 6.6 square meters, meaning complete strangers are pretty much forced to crowd around and share a single, rectangular table. We can see where this might result in the odd coupling, but that’s apparently not the only secret behind the location’s uncanny ability to bring people together.

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Say ‘sushi’ and you automatically think ‘Japan’. But a recent taste test by the experts suggests that the perfect sushi may not be 100 percent Japanese. Read More

According to rumors on a 2ch thread and “confirmed” by a current “McDonald’s employee,” the Mega Potato is coming back to Japan and it’s just as awesome as the name implies. Consisting of the equivalent of two large orders of fries, the Mega Potato is said to arrive in a specially made doublewide vessel on May 17.

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Local Group’s Plan for “I Conquered Nation of Japan” Certificates Dashed by Protest

A group of local residents around the Nation of Japan had established a plan to issue “I Conquered Nation of Japan” certificates to people for 500 yen (US$5) a copy.  The plan was a small way to help promote tourism to the area. However, when the news broke, people from all over the country wrote in, protesting the scheme and calling it “inappropriate.”

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Cute Kyoto! We Taste Hidden Delights From a Traditional Sweet House in Pontocho

Pontocho is one of Kyoto’s most beautiful geisha districts. With traditional tea houses, restaurants and bars all crowded together along atmospheric, stone-paved narrow lanes, this area breathes the air of an old, timeless Kyoto. Within its maze of weaving, intersecting alleyways, there are plenty of secrets to discover and hidden areas to explore. Walking through Pontocho, you might notice one of its many mysteries: the area is dotted with Japanese paper lanterns, all bearing the mark of the chidori, the plover bird. They’re incredibly beautiful, but why would a cute chidori design come to be on such traditional products?

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According to news correspondence from Wuhan City in China, a Chinese-Korean woman used the internet to befriend a man from China only to discover that on meeting face to face, he fell short of her expectations. The woman then contacted local authorities claiming that she had been “cheated.”

The woman, Ms. Chan (35), who is of Chinese descent but possesses Korean nationality and resides in the city of Suwon, Korea, first made contact with the Chinese man (37) from Wuhan, China, via the Chinese instant messenger software QQ. The man is believed to be employed part-time. After several chat sessions, the couple are said to have hit it off and as a natural course of events, the woman suggested flying over to China to meet in person. However, for one reason or another, the man would always claim to be busy and say that it was difficult for him to take time off from work.

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Students in Japan Create a Robot That Can Balance on a Ball

Oh Japan, you never disappoint in the robot department. This one in particular may look a little plain compared to the femme bots in Shinjuku or a $1.25 million giant robot, but it’s still really cool. Created by two students at Tohoku Gakuin University in Japan, this little guy is able to perfectly balance on a ball while carrying a load and moving.

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We Try a “One-Piece Chicken McDo With McSpaghetti” at McDonald’s in the Philippines

In our continuing endeavor to visit McDonald’s restaurants around the world we sample the unique regional offerings the international chain creates to appease the locals and delight tourists.

This time RocketNews24 sent a reporter to a McDonald’s in the Philippines to sample one of their localized combos centered by a heap of McSpaghetti. The following is their report.

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Virtual Reality: Taste the Sound Effects From Your Favourite Comic Book Moments

Your drink’s icy cold but the manga ice cubes in your glass are h-h-hot! Now taste the palpitating sound effects from your favourite comic books thanks to these new Manga Kōri, Comic Ice silicone molds from Runa Corporation.

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Love Money? Cuddle Your Cash with this Chinese Money Pillow!

Oh, money, you make me smile like it’s Christmas Day and the cat’s just coughed up a shard of rainbow. As a man who spent most of his university years trying to work out ways to make potato chips and sliced bread viable alternatives to meat and vegetables, during the brief moments that I have a bit of cash in my bank account these days I become a noticeably nicer person to be around. I won’t even try to gouge your eyes if you greet me in the street.

This pillow is for people like me. People who want that warm money glow 24/7, so that even when our bank accounts are empty, our hearts are filled by the shallow but immediately believable promise of happiness that only cold, hard cash can bring.

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The question of what happens after we die has troubled humankind for millennia, with the main problem being that anyone who knows the answer is, well, no longer with us. However,  the “after-death” experiences of people who have technically died and then been brought back to life via resuscitation may hold at least some part of the puzzle. Read More

Checking Out the Myanmar Amusement Park “Happy World”: An All-star Lineup from Mickey Mouse to Doraemon to…BATMAN?!

When traveling overseas, we like to check out the nearby shopping malls and amusement parks, too, whenever we can. But we don’t waste our time with the famous amusement parks that everyone and their mother has been to. For us, it’s the local, never-before-heard-of amusement parks that we love. Why? Because that’s where you can really see the way the local people live… and some of the clever stuff they’ve come up.

So, this time around, we headed to “Happy World” in Yangon, Myanmar (Burma), located right in front of the world-famous Shwedagon Pagoda.

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If you’re a superhero fan living in North America, today very likely means only one thing: the launch of Iron Man 3. Perhaps waiting for a more suitable date to release the title, Marvel and Walt Disney Studios hung on until May 3 to unleash Tony Stark’s newest — and, according to some, best — supersuit-powered adventure, and millions of fans are champing at the bit to see it.

Despite having opened in Japan surprisingly early (Japanese releases are notoriously late, with movie fans forced to wait until this March for both Django Unchained and Wreck it Ralph alone), tongues are wagging all across the country today about Iron Man 3, but for an entirely different reason.

Put together by a clearly passionate and creative team of fans in Thailand, the following video recreates the official Iron Man 3 pre-release trailer shot by shot using little more than hand-crafted props, questionable make-up and models dangling from strings. Even so, it is nothing short of wonderful.

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For Butter Lovers: Easy, Greasy Japanese!

Toast in Japan is taken seriously. If you order the “breakfast set” at a restaurant in Japan, you will probably be confronted with one of the thickest slices of toasted bread you’ve ever seen. If you manage to peer over it, you might spot a boiled egg and a small, sad amount of salad cowering there.

At the supermarket, some popular toast spreads which come in a squeezy tube are chocolate, cinnamon, melon and “french toast” flavour, but for many people, toast means butter, and the more butter, the better. For butter-lovers, the new Easy Butter Butter-Former will transform hard butter straight from the fridge into soft and cotton-like butter threads, ready and easy to be used. Sound too greasy to be true? It probably is.

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Subway Japan to Offer 290 Yen Bran-Tastic Breakfast Sets

Jumping into an increasingly crowded morning menu market, starting May 15, some Subway’s in Japan will start selling bran muffin sandwiches and breakfast sets for the morning crowd.

Three different types of sandwiches using healthier, high-fiber bran muffins will be offered: soft-boiled egg, tuna and mayo, and ham and cheese.

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On April 13, 33 people on Awaji Island, Hyogo Prefecture were injured in a magnitude-6.3 earthquake. Japan is fairly accustomed to earthquakes, but the talking point surrounding this one if the fact that the time and place of the sizable tremor seem to have been predicted in advance. Read More

Since 2007, Hikaru Nakamura’s Saint Young Men manga comic series has followed the daily lives of two young men who just happen to be the revered central figures of Christianity and Buddhism. The divine figures have reincarnated, not so save the souls of humanity, but to spend some time enjoying a low-key lifestyle while sharing an apartment in the comparatively sleepy town of Tachikawa in West Tokyo. The story follows their day-to-day lives, including Buddha’s fascination with the manga based on himself and Jesus’ long locks and wispy beard getting him mistaken for Johnny Depp by schoolgirls at a local convenience store.

To celebrate the upcoming theatrical animated adaptation of Saint Young Men, publisher Kodansha is allowing the free reproduction and use of a portion of the series.

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  • May 2, 2013

What The… Unbelievable (and Sweet) Sushi Creation Found at Chain Restaurant in Southern Japan!

Do you have a favorite sushi topping? Well, raw fish may not be for everyone, but like most people in Japan, I absolutely love sushi, from simple tuna to more lavish creations using unusual ingredients. In fact, some of the best tasting “sushi” I’ve ever had has been of the unorthodox variety, like “grilled foie gras sushi” and “minced tuna and green onion sushi roll tempura” (yes, they actually deep-fried a sushi roll whole)! But now, a story on the Byokan Sunday site has brought to our attention an even more unbelievable sushi dish, and it’s pictured right on the menu above — can you guess what kind of sushi it is? Read More

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