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Six Things I Learned at Tokyo’s “Food and Bev Expo”

This week, a major food and drink expo was held in Tokyo’s Odaiba area called The World Food and Beverage Great Expo 2013. It’s actually a combination of six different events, including a dessert and wine fair. With hundreds of exhibitors from Japan and abroad showing off their latest and tastiest concoctions, we decided to check it out and see how many free samples we could gobble up. Here’s what we learned. Read More

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Girly Noodles: Is Japan Witnessing the Start of a Female-Oriented Instant Noodle Revolution?

Instant noodles – also known as cup noodles and what this writer lived off during most of his university days – have been a food staple for the busy, cost-conscious and kitchenphobic since their inception back in 1958. Peel back the lid, pour in some hot water, wait a few minutes and you have a hot, filling, if not especially nutritious meal for about the cost of a cup of coffee.

But with the handy meals being something that many associate with students and lonely bachelors, many women shy away from instant noodles, regardless of the fact that they’re just as pressed for time as their male coworkers. And all stigmas and stereotypes aside, few women in their 20s and 30s would be especially happy about replacing their nutritious mid-day meal with a plastic cup of rehydrated noodles swimming in a salty broth.

Enter the girly noodle.

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“Why do I have to study English? I’m never going to use it… there’s no point,” whines at least one Japanese student in any given English class on a daily basis.

Now, thanks to one company’s clever new initiative, instead of the usual spiel about the benefits of English being an “international language,” teachers can tell their students that knuckling down and mastering the language could bag them 1 million yen.

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During an interview at his Kyoto headquarters this week, Nidec Corporation CEO Shigenobu Nagamori was quoted as saying, “Due to Japan’s strict labor laws, we cannot compete with enterprises in Korea and China.” He intends to lobby the government to relax labor regulations to allow for more flexible working conditions.

He additionally said that the government and the Bank of Japan need to weaken and maintain the yen to around a 90-100 yen to the dollar exchange rate in order for Japanese export companies to compete with booming exports from China and Korea. Read More

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Shoes for Shorties: Japan Develops Business Shoes for Men that Add an Extra 7cm

Shorter businesswomen wishing to appear taller can experiment with vertical lines, fashion styles and, of course, pop on a pair of enormous high-heeled shoes in order to gain a few inches, but short of wearing platform shoes and styling their hair into ridiculous quiffs, the shorter male office worker is at something of a loss.

Although the average height of both males and females in Japan is on the rise due to increasingly western-style diets, Japan’s men are still a little on the short side. And that dents their confidence. Thankfully, though, a footwear designer in Japan has recently launched a special line of business shoes that, through a slightly elevated heel and a discreet inner-sole, reportedly add an extra 7 cm to any man’s total height.

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The Top 10 Things Middle-Aged Japanese Men Say While Out Drinking That Make Their Coworkers Hate Them

After a hard day at work, many middle-aged Japanese salarymen love to go out for drinks at the local bar or izakaya. “But it’s no fun to go alone!” thinks the 45-year-old section chief. “Why not invite those young hotshots that entered the company earlier this year? Surely they’d love the chance to loosen neckties and enjoy some laid-back conversation with one of their seniors outside the workplace!”

Meanwhile, the young hotshots are thinking about how they can’t wait to go home and relax after another consecutive day of (unpaid) overtime—but oh wait, section chief wants to go out drinking again and turning his invitation down would show that I’m not a team player.

Such are the troubles of 20 and 30-year-old working men and women who are roped out to drinking with their middle-aged colleagues time and time again.

This generation gap was a popular enough topic for Nikkan Spa to conduct a survey of 200 20 and 30-year-old men and women as to what they found most irritating about drinking with their superiors in their 40s. 

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Looking back at the violence that occurred in the anti-Japan protests in September, I’m still baffled at why those regular people got so crazy over a land dispute between two governments in some remote area.  Maybe I’m the only one who lacks that patriotic spirit that compels one set fire to a factory over zoning issues.

Or perhaps like almost every world event in history, there are more complex – usually economic – factors at play beneath the surface. At least that’s what a group of Japanese writers and journalists claim.  According to them, the stage was set for this explosion of anger years before it happened.

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While most of us use YouTube to upload homemade productions and watch funny cat videos, much of Japan still turns to their domestic video sharing site, Nico Nico Douga.

Yet whereas YouTube sees content from users across the world, Nico Nico Douga has remained primarily an exclusive club for Japanese speakers since it began in 2006. An English language beta website, Niconico.com, was launched in early 2011, but failed to generate interest even among foreign users of the Japanese site, due in part to the separation of Japanese and English videos between two domains.

Perhaps realizing that they’ll never be able to attract a sizable userbase from YouTube, Nico Nico Douga has shifted its strategy away from encouraging original English content to making its Japanese content more accessible to English speakers, replacing the English website with an English interface for the Japanese domain, nicovideo.jp.

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McSwindle? Predictions of McDonald’s Next Cost Cutting Business Move Spark Laughter on Twitter

Regular visitors to RocketNews24 will no doubt be aware that McDonald’s Japan has been making the headlines a lot since the beginning of the month. The removal of menus from its counters, worried rumours of the restaurant putting a stop to free cups of water; the fast food chain has received a lot of negative attention.

After tweets on the theme of “McDonald’s next bizarre business move” hit the thousands, tweet-gathering mega blog Togetter has put up a collection of some of the best thoughts and creative ideas from Japan’s internet users, with some little short of laugh-out-loud funny.

So, what do the people of Japan predict for Ronald and pals’ near future? Let’s find out!

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Danish variety store, Tiger, had recently opened up its first store in Osaka, Japan, in the shopping area known as American Village. Little did they know about the propensities of the Japanese shopper.

Or maybe they just didn’t give them enough credit. In this case, it was the intensity of Japanese shoppers that resulted in the store having to unexpectedly shut down. Despite having the experience of managing stores in 16 different countries, Tiger underestimated the insatiable drive of Japanese people to shop, even if it meant queueing in line for hours and hours.

All this trouble for the European answer to the 100 yen shop... Read More

With the start of the Olympics just around the corner, we bring you a collection of quotes from people of varying degrees of fame and glory, some sure to make you think.

Prayer alone doesn’t give you courage. You need to make the effort and pray.

– Evander Holyfield, boxer who, among other achievements, unwillingly fed Mike Tyson his ear.

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Take the “Public” Out of Public Bathing and Make a Natural Hot Spring in the Comfort of Your Own Home

One of Japan’s greatest features is its many natural hot springs called onsens. Thanks to its highly volcanic location, Japan’s countryside is dotted with resorts welcoming tourists all year round.

For some foreigners visiting or living in Japan, public bathing isn’t a very appealing recreation.  Reasons for this include tattoos which are considered verboten in many onsens, and the fact that foreigners tend to stick out like a sore thumb and might draw uncomfortable stares while bathing.

Now there’s another way to enjoy the relaxing and curative properties of a natural hot spring in the comfort of your own bathroom.  If you want to know how, then give our easy manual “How to Set Up an Onsen in Your Own Home” a quick read.

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Let me describe a scene for you: a crowd of Japanese are gathered around steel drums in a little shanty of a building open to the summer air. Some are drinking beers in plastic cups, others disposable one-cup sakes. Most are eating from unheated cans of food with plastic cutlery, chasing it with sips of their chosen brew. Around them are shelves of unfinished wood, stacked high with a stupendous assortment of cans, probably enough to last several months. Think this is a scene from a disaster shelter in Tohoku? Perhaps an end-of-the-world movie? Think again. It’s Saturday night at one of Osaka’s most unique “restaurants”, the long-standing and popular Kanso, where there’s no menu except the cans on the shelves. Try to contain your excitement, because this monument to apocalypse-chic may be coming to a city near you. Read More

Smokers Find New Haven in Japan, But for a Price

It’s getting tougher to be a smoker in Japan. It was once a paradise for tobacco lovers, who were free to light up in workplaces, restaurants, bars, on the street, and pretty much any darn place they pleased. Add to that the low price of cigarettes and the ever-present vending machines, and you couldn’t swing a tanuki without hitting a smoker. In recent years, though, smoking has been banned on the streets and in offices, the taxes on tobacco have gone up, and more and more public spaces are going smoke free. The government even announced recently that they are launching a 10-year plan to cut the smoking rate nearly in half.

While this trend has tobacco companies shaking in their boots, one company has turned it into a golden business opportunity. For just 50 yen, Ippuku (roughly “a cig” in Japanese) offers smokers a comfortable, indoor place to take a 15-min smoke break. Read More

Toyota announced this month that it will be a releasing a system for using your Prius plug-in hybrid as a big ol’ battery. The key feature is an inverter which will allow you to plug household electronics directly into the car through a water-proof cable. Read More

Custom Made Notebooks Going Like Custom Made Hotcakes

A bookstore called Sanseido, in the Jinbo book selling district of Tokyo, on 1 April announced that they would be selling custom-made notebooks, and it wasn’t a joke.  In fact, they have been flying off the shelves, which is good because these books are ready to take away moments after ordering them.

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Mindreading App (Shut Up and Take More Of My Free Will Away)?

At first glance, this tech news report seems to be telling us of an intriguing augmented reality app that’s scary good. When you point your camera at an object, it can automatically read your mind about what you’ll want to do next on the internet with respect to that object, like get a coupon for it or research about it on Wikipedia. Which would bring to mind various questions, such as, is it like auto-fill/auto-complete, remembering what you or others have done before, taken a few steps further? Is it selectively taking you to a website that’s ultimately aiming to get your money? Is it inviting you to give up your free will and just be satisfied with the website it saw fit to jump you to? How does it know what you want to do? Read More

Softbank Releases World’s First Radiation-Detecting Phone

This week, Softbank Mobile presented the newest iteration of its popular Pantone phones, and these are some pretty smart smartphones. So smart, in fact, that they can double as a Geiger counter. Read More

Tokyo Disneyland (TDL) has recently announced that they will offer weddings for same-sex couples, including the option to hold the ceremony at the iconic Cinderella’s castle. It seems that Disney really does make dreams come true, at least for one gay couple. Read More

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‘Call of Duty’ Secret Bargain. “Long Live the Emperor! Banzai!”

‘Call of Duty’ is a popular video game series, with new releases selling out, even in Japan. But did you know there’s a ‘Call of Duty’ that they won’t ever sell a localized Japanese version of, despite high acclaim everywhere else? We’re talking about ‘Call of Duty: World at War’. Read More

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