Featured

The 2014 Sapporo Snow Festival【Photo Gallery】

Last year we brought you a firsthand account of the 2013 Sapporo Snow Festival, with more images of snow and ice sculptures than you can get your tongue stuck to. This year, we’re sad to say we couldn’t make it out to the annual event up in Japan’s northernmost prefecture, so we’ve been living vicariously through Twitter users. Some of the images we’ve seen are too good not to share, so we decided to give you a little taste of the snow festival through the following gallery of images from Twitter.

Read More

Buying your Buddhist goods, drive-thru style

Since their introduction in the 1930’s, drive-thrus have become part of modern life. We’re used to the idea of ordering fast food or a coffee through a little glass window, but there’s also a a range of other shopping and services available from the comfort of your car, from picking up prescriptions or dry cleaning, to getting your groceries. And of course Vegas even offers those infamous drive-thru weddings! But one of the more bizarre drive-thrus is, of course, to be found in Japan.

Read More

You can play Tekken using a piano!!! 【Video】

Tekken is arguably one of the best fighting games out there. The series is coming up on its 20th anniversary and has been hugely successful in Japan and abroad during the past two decades. Tekken has recently been gaining a lot of buzz online, not for the game itself, but for a new way to play it. In a YouTube video titled, “Tekkenpiano Docu,” user Peter Oehler shows us how he invented a way to play Tekken using a piano.

Read More

Glowing man spotted on the last train home in Tokyo

Early this morning, a peculiar fellow was spotted riding the rails in Tokyo. Wrapped in layers of lights and adorned in pink pinwheels, he didn’t even bother sitting in the half-empty carriage. Just what was this glowing man doing on the last train home? The answer may surprise you.

Read More

White Cola is back! And it brought penguins for the Sochi Olympics

For decades Japan has had fleeting affairs with concoctions known as “White Cola” which is meant to be a twist on the age old formula that brings us the brown colas we all know and love. Now, it’s back again to celebrate the Sochi Olympics. From 4 February you can purchase a bottle of Pokka Sapporo White Cola for 147 yen (US$1.45).

Read More

Manga secret agent team has handsome looks, plus backaches, cavities, and sties

As completely fictitious forms of media, we usually don’t see the characters in anime and manga suffering the physical ill effects of their action-packed lifestyles. Shouldn’t Evangelion’s Shinji have severe whiplash from all the times his scrawny frame gets tossed around while piloting his giant robot? How does Kenshiro, hero of post-apocalyptic epic Fist of the North Star, not get a wicked eye infection after spending the whole of his adult life wandering a desert wasteland without so much as bottle of eye drops?

The answer, of course, is that those aren’t what Evangelion and Fist of the North Star are about (they’re about turning humanity into delicious Tang and making dudes’ heads explode, respectively). But by skipping over these real world problems, are creators missing an opportunity to make their characters more nuanced, relatable, and ultimately, attractive?

At least one artist seems to think so, as a new manga series has just begun featuring a cast of handsome men all suffering from physical ailments such as hay fever and stiff shoulders.

Read More

We try Häagen-Dazs Rose and Sakura: It’s like there’s a toilet in my mouth and everyone’s invited

On 3 February, Häagen-Dazs Japan released two new flavors to celebrate their 30th anniversary: Rose and Sakura (cherry blossom). Although they were unusual flavors in the realm of ice cream, in the more than capable hands of Häagen-Dazs they’re sure to be great… right?

Read More

How sweet! Fans send 8,000 boxes of Valentine’s Day chocolate to one anime character

Unlike in the West, in Japan it’s primarily girls who hand out gifts of chocolate on Valentine’s Day. Although the most common pattern is for a woman to give sweets to her boyfriend or secret crush, the holiday’s scope has been expanded to include relatives, coworkers, or any guy whose kindness she feels indebted to, regardless of whether there’s any romantic sentiment involved or not.

In recent years, the recipient doesn’t even have to be a real person, as this giant haul of Valentine’s Day chocolate for a single anime character proves.

Read More

Twitter, Facebook, Line: The people of Japan vote on their favourite social networking services

Like them or loathe them, social networking services, or SNS for short, have become an integral part of our daily lives and society as a whole. While Facebook, Twitter and Naver Corporation’s Line offer very different experiences, most users will agree that without them, they’d feel lost, or at least have a sudden and unexpected amount of free time on their hands.

Recently, a survey was conducted in Japan which asked respondents about the services they used, asking them which they turned to most often, which they were most careful about using and sharing information on, and which they’d hate to be without. Join us for a peek at the results after the jump.

Read More

Seven Japanese drugstore beauty products loved by women abroad

When it comes to product quality and innovation, Japanese makers are the cream of the crop, with exceptional achievements in the automobile and electronics sector. Apart from high-tech machinery, the Japanese also create beauty products of excellent quality and value, something that they’re rarely recognized for outside of Asia.

Beauty and fashion website, The Cut by New York magazine spills that makeup artists backstage at Fashion Week often use beauty tools and cosmetics from Japan. The Cut, together with Japanese makeup artist Maki Ryoke, shares seven Japanese drugstore beauty buys that even women in the West are in love with!

Read More

18 bookstores every book lover must visit at least once

Bookstores can be a destination upon themselves. From Venice to Mexico City, check out some of the most interesting book retailers out there.

Read More

“What’s wrong with her eyes!?” Say hello to the dentist’s doll from the (past, present) future

Yesterday, we ran an article telling the story of a dentist in Japan who was arrested for “massaging” a female patient’s chest while claiming that doing so would help fix her misaligned teeth. In it, we included a photo of what appeared to be a young woman in a dentist’s chair with her mouth wide open.

We received plenty of comments on Facebook and Twitter about the news story itself, but many people also took a profound interest in the model in the photo, some feeling quite uneasy about the way she looked yet not knowing why, asking, “What’s wrong with her eyes!?”

The answer to that question is simple, but also kind of creepy: the woman in the photo is an ultra-lifelike doll used in dentistry.

Read More

New Attack on Titan model is both fear and awe inspiring

While there’s no questioning that Attack on Titan is one of the most successful anime of the past several years, there’s still room for debate about the series’ giant monsters themselves. Sure, the titans stand 60 meters (197 feet) tall and are out to eat all of mankind. At the same time, though, they’re naked, often disheveled, and occasionally of pudgy build. Sometimes they look downright comical, even becoming the inspiration for lighthearted merchandise and cosplay.

So which is it? Are the titans supposed to be terrifying or silly?

After taking a look at this new Attack on Titan model, we’re going to have to put one more mark in the latter column.

Read More

Ladybeard is Japan’s Bizzaro Andrew W.K.

Although Andrew W.K. has sort of fallen out of the spotlight recently, he will always be in the spotlight of our hearts thanks to his manic, just-shy-of-annoyingly positive attitude, party anthems that happened to come out while we were in college and dark flowing locks.

Now Japan apparently has its own version of Andrew W.K., and, because this is Japan, the “party-rocking dude who’s always fun to be around” aesthetic has gotten sort of… twisted on the way.

Read More

Akira Toriyama to draw manga about Goku’s mom

In 2011, Bardock, the father of Dragon Ball lead protagonist Goku, became the star of his own manga, Episode of Bardock, which expanded on his backstory. Now manga creator Akira Toriyama has revealed that he will draw a manga about Goku’s mother as well.

Read More

Robocop called in to exorcise demons at this year’s Setsubun festival in Tokyo

As we learned a few days ago, 3 February is the traditional holiday of Setsubun in Japan. Although its customs vary from region to region, most people who celebrate the occasion enjoy the practice of throwing beans to expel evil from their homes. The Shibamata Taishakuten temple in Katsuhika, Tokyo must have had some industrial strength evil in their area this year because they brought in OCP’s future of oni-fighting, Robocop, to toss some beans.

Read More

Hearing impaired “Japanese Beethoven” admits to hiring composer to write music 【UPDATED】

There’s no doubt that Ludwig van Beethoven was a musical genius, but what makes his compositions even more impressive is the fact that he was deaf, unable to hear the beautiful melodies he created. It’s an amazing feat, one that has no doubt inspired people with disabilities all over the world.

Japanese composer, Mamoru Samuragochi, also claimed to have overcome his own deafness, releasing music that earned him the title of “Japanese Beethoven.” But in a shocking confession on Wednesday, Samuragochi has revealed that he hired someone to compose his most famous works.

Read More

10 weird and funny things Japanese people do

Not so long ago, a friend of mine from the UK came to visit me here in Japan. After showing him around town and making sure to take him to all of the most popular tourist spots, he remarked that quite a few of the subtle behaviours Japanese people exhibit seemed, while in no way offensive, remarkably different to those of our own countrymen. As we worked through a couple of the more unusual customs and behaviours that my friend had noticed, it struck me that at some point during my eight years of living here I had come to accept the everyday quirks of the people around me as entirely normal and not in the slightest bit odd.

Last year, we discussed the 10 things that we love and the 10 things we just can’t stomach about Japan, but today we at RocketNews24 felt it was time to present you with a list of random but genuine observations, from the peculiar to the downright endearing, about the Japanese people themselves. Enjoy!

Read More

Students go nearly a year without textbooks after teacher forgets to hand them out

It would seem a small case of absentmindedness has been breaking out in educational institutes around Japan recently. One such case in Japan’s Kumamoto Prefecture saw a handful of students go nearly an entire year without ever receiving some of their “required reading material.”

However, in this and another similar case, it’s hard to say who’s at fault, the teachers who failed to give the proper references out, or the students who neglected to say anything about it.

Read More

Marketing men’s fashion can be a tricky thing, since, as on average, guys don’t spend that much time worrying about their outfits. One exception, though, is when they’re trying to impress girls. You can sell a man a jacket as long as you first sell him on the image that it’ll make him more attractive to women.

Of course, even if it is the underlying message, most companies are more subtle than to come right out and claim you’ll look so cool in their clothes that women will take their pants off for you.

Japanese online retailer Men’s Fashion Plus is not most companies.

Read More

  2. 1
  3. ...
  4. 1635
  5. 1636
  6. 1637
  7. 1638
  8. 1639
  9. 1640
  10. 1641
  11. ...
  12. 1820