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Japanese company builds giant robot you could be piloting right now

Chiba Prefecture’s Wonder Festival is a bi-annual figure and model expo. The event’s bread and butter is figurine of anime and video game characters, in both frighteningly realistic and sexily unrealistic varieties.

But while the first thing most people associate with the event is toys, if your model is made of metal instead of plastic or urethane, and it’s self-propelled to boot, you’ve crossed the line of three-dimensional art and moved into straight-up engineering. Of course, Wonder Festival’s exhibitors aren’t going to stray too far from their fanciful roots, so what do you get when you combine technology with science fiction? You get this amazing giant robot, which is so easy to pilot that attendees could test drive it.

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Japanese amateur wrestling champion finds fame online for his taste in nerdy hobbies

The man pictured above is Tomoyuki Oka basking in the glow of winning the All-Japan Sambo Championships. Having excelled in the Russian grappling sport, he exhibits all the features of supreme manliness: a square hair-lined jaw, steely and dominant glare, burly muscles that dwarf his first place trophy (the Putin Cup), and a half-hearted effort at those “V” fingers that Japanese people usually pose with in pictures.

But wait a minute… What’s that under his sambovka?

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Do try this at home! 5 foods that you can recreate in taste by combining other foods

Have you ever had an experience when you ate two different foods at once, and the resulting flavor tasted like a completely different food? If yes, then don’t worry, because apparently your taste buds aren’t going crazy. Kyushu University in Japan recently publicized a list of different food combinations that mirror this phenomenon based on actual scientific research. Some of them are so outrageous that you won’t believe it until you actually try making them yourself!

Here’s a little question to get you started: What two food items should you combine in order to produce the flavor of corn soup? The answer and four more recipes after the jump.

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“Are you married yet?” – Chinese ad attempts to guilt-trip young women into trying the knot

Chinese dating company Baihe.com has taken the unusual step of producing an ad that attempts to guilt-trip young women into marriage. In it, an elderly woman who is steadily inching closer to death pesters her granddaughter to find a man and tie the knot, constantly asking, “Are you married yet?”

Eventually – and we swear we’re not making this up – the troubled young woman resolves that she should stop “being picky” and decides to marry right away.

The full WTF? video after the jump.

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Pokémon train brings smiles to Tohoku kids’ faces

The Pokémon with YOU Train is a collaboration between JR East and Pokémon that’s been bringing smiles to the faces of kids affected by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, and this week it made a special appearance in Chiba!

We’re not kids any more, but having seen how awesome it is, we really wish we could take a ride on this thing!!

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Insult or homage? Lady (Taking a) Liberty toys have us scratching our heads

We’ve covered the strange world of gachapon toys on this site before. They are those vending machines that spit out an item in a plastic egg, and any bank of gachapon machines in Japan is sure to have a few bizarre offerings. Twitter user @dradon3 recently spotted this mystifying toy depicting the Statue of Liberty feeling free enough to let it all hang out. Says the ad copy, “Be free from all restraints that bind you.”

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Japan takes customer service very seriously, something that’s easy to see when even convenience store clerks are so dedicated to their job they’ll ask if you want your hot and cold purchases bagged separately, or else build a protective barrier between them. Hospitality standards are no joke, either, as illustrated by the tasks traditional innkeepers are expected to perform, such as carrying the dishes and utensils for full-course meals into and out of guests’ rooms.

It’s no surprise, then, that travelers in Japan have plenty of stories to tell about attentive inns and hotels, such as the 12 below from an online survey by web portal My Navi Woman in Japan.

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You can look at this life-size Super Sonico anime figure, but you can’t touch

Last Sunday, while the Tokyo area was still blanketed in white from the previous day’s snowstorm, we braved the cold and made the trip out to Makuhari Messe in Chiba Prefecture for the winter installment of Wonder Festival. The bi-annual model expo is packed with the latest anime and video game-inspired figurines, including a fully-operational robot suit and hyper-realistic sculpture of one of Attack on Titan’s monsters from the torso up.

But the Attack on Titan figure wasn’t the only giant bust on display, as there was also a life-size statue of voluptuous anime character Super Sonico. In keeping with her exotic dancer-quality figure, though, her display area had some strip club-style rules, such as no groping allowed.

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The Wind Rises U.S. TV spots streamed

The official channel for Hayao Miyazaki‘s final feature film, The Wind Rises began streaming two English television commercials on Monday.

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Man in India viewed as a god for his really long butt hair

They say America is the land of opportunity, but India seems well on its way to taking that crown. Where else can a man acquire a group of followers for having a 37cm (14.5 inch) tail of hair growing just above his butt crack?

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Nippon or Nihon? No consensus on the Japanese pronunciation of “Japan”

As any student of Japanese will tell you, its use of Chinese characters known as kanji can be a nightmare at times. And although they can be really useful at deducing the meaning of complex words, they give little in the way of clues as to how one should pronounce them.

Take the kanji for Japan (日本) for example. Even a first grader can tell you what it means, but ask a group of adults how to pronounce it and you might get a mixture of “Nihon” or “Nippon” and maybe even an occasional “Yamato” if one of those people happens to be a smart-ass.

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McDonald’s brand-new Vietnam restaurant is already a total mob scene

The opening of McDonald’s first restaurant in Vietnam on Saturday drew massive crowds, as well as a live DJ, face painting and various performers.

Hundreds of people began camping out at the new location in Ho Chi Minh City hours before its 8 a.m. opening to get their first taste of a Big Mac and fries made in their own hometown, according to Liberty Voice.

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Want to be an extra in the upcoming Attack on Titan movie? Check out this list of weird criteria

Attention, die-hard Attack on Titan fans! The producers of the upcoming live-action Attack on Titan movie slated for release next year are looking to recruit suitable extras. Since there are unfortunately no titans available for casting in real life, they’ll have to make do with humans and a bit of CGI magic. So why not give it a shot? Just be sure to confirm your eligibility beforehand with the requirements listed on the official recruiting announcement (which is itself quite amusing).

Do you think you’ve got what it takes to transform into a convincing titan?

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Director Collet-Serra hopes live-action Akira will be his next work

In interviews with entertainment news websites Collider and ComingSoon, director Jaume Collet-Serra, who was previously in talks to work on Warner Brothers‘ stalled live-action Akira film project, mentioned that he’s still working on the film, and that he hopes it will be his next one.

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Bon appétit! We try conveyor-belt French food in Paris

Kaiten-zushi, or conveyor-belt sushi, has got to be one of the most fun styles of restaurant anywhere in the world. Who doesn’t love watching delectable, bite-size portions of sushi that are all yours for the taking spin around right in front of their eyes? Many tourists make it a point to stop by a kaiten-zushi place when they visit Japan. The fact that you can fill up on delicious sushi without breaking your wallet makes the experience even better.

While these kinds of restaurants can be found outside of their original home, the quality of Japan’s kaiten-zushi is so good that, whether right or wrong, many foreigners claim that any place outside of Japan is a fake. However, what if you took the concept of the conveyor-belt serving style and applied it to a different national cuisine? Well, that’s just what one restaurant in France decided to do. Now you can enjoy quality conveyor-belt French cuisine at a restaurant in Paris!

We were so intrigued that we recently send one of our Japanese reporters to check it out. 

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The horseshoe crab dance and other odd train station experiences in Japan 【Videos】

With Japan’s reputation as a country serious about train travel, train stations are a ubiquitous sight across Japan where they serve as gateways to the country’s extensive rail network. And these gateways have their own little quirks that give each station its own unique personality. From one station’s catchy “here comes the train” theme tune to an insane rush of comic book geeks running through ticket gates, click below for five quirky looks at train stations across Japan!

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Some hardcore fans of manga comics take their devotion to an almost religious fervor. So strong is their enthusiasm that Osamu Tezuka, the medium’s more prolific and prominent pioneer, is commonly referred to as “The God of Manga.”

Manga, however, is far from a monotheistic religion, and in the 25 years since his passing, other artists have seen their creations go on to achieve the same fame and popularity as Tezuka’s. A recent survey of 24,420 Japanese comic fans recently chose four other artists for the pantheon.

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Chinese woman’s stomach “explodes,” catches fire after binge eating session

As much as we’re reluctant to feed into more negative stereotypes of an entire country, it’s – sadly – time for yet another gross food-related story out of China.

A 58-year-old woman in Jiangsu Province was admitted to the hospital with severe abdominal pains after a marathon binge eating session left her with a ruptured stomach. The rupture was allegedly so bad the woman’s entire stomach had to be surgically removed for an emergency replacement, leading some of the more sensational news outlets and our click-hungry headline to refer to the woman’s stomach as having “exploded.”

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Happy 2,674 birthday, Japan! Now blow out all those candles!

“Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday, dear Jaaapaaaan! Happy birthday to you!!! Yah! Now, blow out your candles! All 2,674 of them!”

Today is a national holiday here in Japan: It’s Kenkoku Kinenbi, or National Foundation Day in English. The day is a celebration of the foundation of Japan, which occurred on February 11 in 660 BCE.

Or was it?!

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“Diet with Your Girlfriend” app lets you do the exact opposite of that

So Japanese dudes dating digital anime girls has been a big thing in the western media lately because “OMG weird Japan!!,” but if there’s one thing the news stories get right it’s that there are a whole lot of “digital girlfriend” apps available for a very specific type of person.

One such app hopes to encourage users to slim down by dieting with their digital girlfriend – the idea being that the more you diet, the more she diets, and the slimmer and more attractive she gets. Never mind that some people don’t actually adhere to those cliched classical standards of beauty and might actually prefer a girlfriend that isn’t horrifically skinny (and may, themselves, not actually want to be horrifically skinny); the developers made a far more glaring error in coding the game to allow players to do the exact opposite of what the game’s title suggests.

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