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US Military’s Newest Robot Gets Upgrade… In Cuteness!

Robotic Firm Boston Dynamic working with the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) made a splash with a demonstration video of a highly functioning quadrupedal robot called LS3 (Legged Squad Support System).

When many internet fiends in Japan laid eyes on it they couldn’t help but think of Homo, a parody of girls into homoerotic art (fujoshi). It was developed on Twitter from ASCII art (┌（┌＾o＾）┐ﾎﾓｫ). Since then it has become something of a subculture phenomenon spawning various merchandise.

A few months later, has the US military improved LS3 enough to quell the giggling of otaku everywhere? Let’s see.

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McDonald’s Guarantees Your Order in 60 Seconds or You Get a Free Burger, Employs Actual Hourglass

From January 4 to January 31, McDonald’s Japan will run a marketing campaign they’re calling “Enjoy! 60 Second Service”, where customers who are made to wait any more than a minute for their order during the hours of 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM will receive a coupon for a free McDonald’s burger of their choice. 

Even if staff are able to prepare the order within a minute, all customers who visit during the 4-hour time frame will receive a coupon for a free small-size ‘Premium Roast Coffee’.

To prove that the campaign isn’t all talk and no substance, staff at each of the 3,300 participating McDonald’s restaurants will be required to flip over an hourglass measuring one minute each time an order is placed.

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Recently the image of a Dragon Quest style floor mat was released on Twitter caused many long-time role playing fans to rise up as one and say “Take my money!”

Unfortunately for me and for thou, this mat, dubbed “Quest Mat”, cannot be bought by conventional means such as gold. In true Dragon Quest fashion it can only be found by searching the urban dungeons known as “video game shops” and then wrested from the clutches of the evil “staff” who are keeping them locked away from us.

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These Comfy “Cat Capes” Are the Purr-fect Last Minute Christmas Gift Idea

With Christmas closing in, many people struggle to check off those last few names on their shopping list.  It’s always those people who seem to have everything.

Luckily, Japanese decorative goods maker kraso has released a great new item we guarantee that difficult-to-buy-for person doesn’t have!

Consider this scenario, familiar to all of us: You’re reading a book of sheet music without any instrument around. You’re sitting on the floor beside a glass of milk while your book of Chopin’s Prelude is propped up on a box atop a chair.

What’s missing from this everyday scene?

That’s right. A cape in the shape of a furry cat hanging off your back.

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Japanese YouTubers Giving Away Cute Sandwich Cutters Worldwide in Creative Collaboration

One of the the things people find most charming about food in Japan is how creative the presentation can be. From adorable panda rice balls to over the top bento lunchboxes, the Japanese have perfected the art of making food something that you can enjoy with both your eyes and your mouth.

If you’ve ever wanted to try your hand at food presentation à la Japan, six Japanese YouTube channels are holding a giveaway for a set of cute sandwich cutters, as well as introducing six creative ways to use them.

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Osaka Pikachu is Adorable! Limited Edition Regional Pokemon Goods On Sale Now!

Want to get your hands on a Hokkaido Meowth eating a melon? Or how about a Fukuoka Oshawott in a bowl of ramen? Our favorite is Osaka Pikachu holding okonomiyaki, Osaka’s signature dish.

Hurry up!  Pokemon Centers across Japan are now offering adorable regional Pokemon goods for a limited time only!

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Unusual Cuisine: Deep-Fried Caterpillars “Make a Wonderful Beer Snack”

Those of you who abhor the very idea of eating food that’s been anywhere near a creepy-crawly may wish to look away now.

Here at RocketNews24 we like to pride ourselves on our willingness to take up unusual food challenges. If we’re not baking Big Mac bread or gorging on bacon, we’re fighting our way through a kilo of curry and rice for your enjoyment. So as soon as word reached Rocket Towers that a nearby restaurant was serving up genuine insect cuisine, our reporter Mr Sato immediately sprang into action and boarded a train to Takadanobaba.

Who’d have thought that deep-fried imomushi (hairless caterpillars or hornworms) could be so delicious that they could bring smiles to our reporter’s face?

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Saying customers were complaining about its cups being too full, Starbucks Japan started reducing the amount of java in each pour of drip coffee this month. According to the company, feedback pointed out their full-to-the-brim cups left no room for adding milk and were too easy to spill. Some customers, however, are voicing displeasure about the unannounced reduction to their caffeine fix.
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Japanese Man Recieved 1-Year Prison Sentence for Stealing 12 Cents

On 13 May, 2012, 66 year-old Osaka resident Masafumi Tsuruhara was visiting Mount Koya in Wakayama Prefecture.  While there, he thought he might help himself to a ten-yen coin (US$0.12), which was left at a statue as a religious offering.

For this, Tsuruhara was apprehended for stealing and brought before the Wakayama court, which sentenced him to one year and eight months in prison.

He later appealed to the Osaka High Court, which agreed that the sentence was too heavy for ten yen. The judge reversed the original sentence and imposed a new one of one year in prison.

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Wooden Playstation 3 Bentō Lunchbox Looks Just Like the Real Thing

You could be fooled into thinking that this is some enormous new add-on for the current Playstation 3 console, but what you’re actually looking at here is a multi-layered wooden bentō lunchbox sculpted and assembled by a master craftsman for Sony Japan.

Presented to staff at Square Enix and Konami in celebration of 25 years of Final Fantasy and Metal Gear games, these stunning lunchboxes are designed to look identical to Sony’s home console, featuring everything from the ridged top to the tiny silver Playstation logo on the front, all the while leaving plenty of room inside for a delicious lunch.

These things are so beautiful that it almost makes us want to trade in our plastic Playstation 3 for a wooden one…

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Some foods are so spicy that consuming them can leave the more intolerant of us with an upset stomach. It was once believed that eating lots of spicy food could even cause gastric ulcers—a break in the tissue lining of the stomach—but this has since been proven false, the credit stolen by a bacterium known as Helicobacter pylori. If you find yourself retching with pain after lunch at an Indian food buffet, you’ve likely aggravated an existing condition and should probably have it checked out.

So as colorful as the expression is, eating spicy food can’t actually “burn a hole in your stomach”. At least, it shouldn’t be able to, which is why doctors at a hospital in Wuhan, China, were scratching their heads when a 26-year-old man with no history of gastrointestinal disorders was brought in after eating soup so spicy that it opened a hole in the wall of his stomach.

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Tired of mowing down pedestrians and scratching up your car while cruising around town? You, my friend, need a supersoft cushion car!

Developed by Hiroshima University, this electric car is completely surrounded by ultra-strong air-filled cushions that protect both those inside and outside the car, meaning that as well as being environmentally friendly it transforms life-destroying collisions into mere belly bounces from the Stay Puft Marshmallow man.

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Panasonic Develops Emergency Flashlight That Works on Any Size of Battery

With only a few more days until the end of the world as we know it, surely everyone has their survival gear all packed and ready to go.  But for those lazy-bones last minute disaster preparers Panasonic feels they have developed the “ultimate disaster survival flashlight”, called Any Battery Light.

As the name suggests, this flashlight can run on any common battery you find lying around, regardless of its size, from AAA to D.

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Peep Into the Enchanted Worlds of Snow White and a Christmas Wonderland With These Books That Open to 360 Degrees of Charm!

Peek through the pages of either of these two wonderful “360° Books” from any angle and you get treated to an intricate view of a fantasy world like you’ve never seen.  All you have to do is keep opening the pages until you’ve created a circle and the scene inside has taken shape. Read More

Food Becomes Art: These Metal Gear and Final Fantasy Bentō Lunchboxes Will Blow Your Mind

“Hideo-kun! What do you want in your lunchbox for school tomorrow? Ham and cheese? Peanut butter and jelly? Or how about Solid Snaaaaaaaake!”

The image you see before you, ladies and gentlemen, is genuine, 100% completely edible food. We’ve seen colourful character bentō lunchboxes before, but this is something else.

As part of its 25 years of Metal Gear and Final Fantasy celebrations, Japanese game developer Konami has had a set of truly amazing lunchboxes made for a photo event. Featuring characters from both of the long-running series, the lunchboxes are so detailed that they almost look like waxworks. No matter how many times we look at these things, we can’t quite get over the fact that it’s actually food.

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Finally, an Udon Museum Where You Can Taste the Difference Between Over 45 Kinds of Udon Noodle Dishes From all Over Japan!

This Udon Museum will open on December 22nd from 11:00 in the Gion area of Kyoto. Udon is a thick noodle made from wheat flour.  With all the variations out there – over 45, including noodle shape, thickness, soup varieties, ways to be eaten, included ingredients and cooking procedures – it makes perfect sense to have a ‘Udon museum’!

One of the best things about Japan is its vast and comprehensive food culture where a wide variety of culinary dishes can be enjoyed. Japanese people take great pride in their ‘washoku‘ (Japanese food), with multiple varieties of the same dish according to geographical location. Different areas have their own version of country cooking, sweet or savory, which becomes that area’s ‘meibutsu‘ or speciality, often times giving that area a name which they become famous for. So it is with Udon. Read More

 

With just seven days to go, children the world over are without a doubt already finding it hard to sleep at night. Will Santa (or Father Christmas as I grew up calling him) arrive? Have I been good enough this year? Does he know about the things I did with Jane Steepleton in her tree house during the summer?

Let’s hope that we’ve all been good boys and girls and that the big man in red will pay us all a visit, unlike one unfortunate individual who found himself giftless on Christmas day one year and took to Japan’s Chiebukuro Yahoo! Answers forums to ask the nation simply: “Where is Santa!?”

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Luffy Vs Goku in 3D! New Shonen Jump Fighting Game to be Released in 2013

Bandai Namco has announced that work is underway on a 3D Team Battle game using the characters of the Weekly Shonen Jump collection of manga series.  The game is set to be released in 2013 to commemorate the 45th anniversary of Weekly Shonen Jump. Color us massively excited!

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When a group of guys get together it’s not uncommon for the topic of conversation to turn to sex. Whether it’s true stories or just some blue jokes, the conversation will naturally float into X-rated territory every now and then.

And though some pretend it’s not the case, women can be equally, if not more explicit when it comes to talking about sex.  I could pull some columns from major women’s magazines that would make you swear you were reading Penthouse Forum. This is all without mentioning that 50 Shades of Pervy series that all you gals are into these days.

While boy and girls are well and fine speaking of naughty things among the same gender for some reason, when we cross paths, the topic of sex becomes a minefield of inappropriateness.  Topics of conversation guys would think nothing of bringing up with each other could easily become actionable in a court of law when in the presence of a woman.

NicoNico News recently went in search of that think blue line between appropriate and not ways to approach mature subject matter in the company of mixed genders.  Let’s see what they found.

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Nothing says winter in Japan like the kotatsu, a low wooden table frame covered by a heavy blanket, upon which a table top sits. Built in underneath is a heat source, either electric or charcoal.

Similar to the image of a Western family sitting in front of the fireplace on Christmas Eve, the scene of a family huddled around the kotatsu, usually placed in front of the living room TV, eating mandarin oranges and watching New Year’s programming is what comes to most people’s minds when mentioning the winter holidays in Japan.

With this in mind, Sanriku Railway Co., which operates two lines along the beautiful Sanriku coast of Iwate Prefecture, Japan, is offering passengers the ultimate Japanese winter relaxation experience with their “Kotatsu Train” (Kotatsu Ressha), a special two-car train equipped with 12 kotatsu so you can enjoy the scenery pass by from the comfort of your own (simulated) living room.

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