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The story behind Flaneur: the curry restaurant that looks like a cigarette stand

Mr. Sato finds friendship, cancer, and the Olympics at the bottom of this confusingly arranged business.

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Japan’s cigarette culture: elderly ramen customer’s gesture of courtesy goes up in smoke

Japanese smoking culture thwarts elderly gent’s gesture of courtesy in this sad tale from a ramen restaurant.

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Mr. Sato smokes some dead leaves he found on the street 【Retro Sato】

With RocketNews24’s fast-paced global news cycle of Polish otaku nylon parties and Taiwanese McDonald’s employees, we can’t always keep up on all the escapades of our star reporter Mr. Sato. So, every once in a while we would like to take a look back to some of his past antics that we might have missed in a segment called “Retro Sato.”

This installment we’re going way back to the year 20 hundred and 14. It was a simpler time when Pharrell’s “Happy” was topping the charts and an Ebola outbreak was threatening to destroy us all. However, on one unusually chilly March morning Mr. Sato was taking a walk to ease his troubled heart. A sales tax hike was set to take place in a few weeks and that meant his monthly cigarette budget would have to go up as well. It was then that some dead leaves gently floated down in front of his eyes.

“That’s it! I’m a freaking genius!” thought Mr. Sato as he gathered a bunch of the fallen foliage in a plastic bag and ran back to the RocketNews24 offices.

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Smoking may be bad, but these tobacco art creations are nothing short of fab!

Smoking is commonly seen as a vice, health hazard, and sometimes a dangerous weapon, and in the eyes of most non-smokers, smoking has virtually zero benefits — be it to the person smoking, the people around them, or, well, pretty much the entire universe.

However, if there was one thing related to smoking that smokers and non-smokers alike could enjoy, it would probably these tobacco art pieces made out of nothing but cigarettes!

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Conbini-talk with Mr. Sato: How to make a convenience store snack 100 times more delicious

Japan’s convenience store- (conbini) littered landscape is a breeding ground for competition, and with that comes increasingly more delicious food and drink in an increasingly wider variety.

This shouldn’t be news to anyone who lives in Japan, but our self-confessed conbini connoisseur Mr. Sato says he has developed a way to make one of their snacks 100 more delicious than its regularly sold.

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Cigarette-selling shiba becomes internet sensation, leverages fame for cucumbers

If you’ve been on the internet this week, you’ve probably seen this smiling face already. This shiba inu, cleverly named Shiba, mans—er, dogs?—the counter at a little cigarette shop in the Musashi-Koganei neighborhood of Tokyo. Last week a video of Shiba at work went viral and now hordes of net surfers around the world are so charmed by the pooch’s customer service, they’re considering taking up smoking.

Since we know our readers love teh cute, we’ve got all the info about this clever spokesdog and photos for your enjoyment.

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Rare and empty pack of smokes now selling on Yahoo! Japan Auction for $300,000

Ever since 2005, the Japanese government has mandated that at least 30 percent of a tobacco product’s warning label contain a written warning about the hazards of smoking. Even prior to that in 1990, there was a mandatory warning written along the side of packs which read, “Warning: too much smoking is a risk to your health.”

In fact we have to go way back to before 1972 until we can find Japanese cigarettes without a warning label. One such pack is currently under the virtual hammer of Yahoo! Japan Auction with bids starting at 30,000,000 yen (US$296,000). Appropriately, the name of this brand of cigarettes is Hope.

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Is ‘The Wind Rises’ up in too much smoke? Yes, shouts the Japan Society for Tobacco Control

In case you hadn’t heard, there’s a new Studio Ghibli movie, The Wind Rises (Kaze Tachinu in Japanese), and it’s stirring up quite a buzz! However, not all the press has been particularly positive–or even about the movie in general. A few weeks ago, we mentioned that there was quite a bit of cigarette-smoking in the movie. While smokers, nostalgic for by-gone eras when they could happily puff the day away, might be pleased with all the tobacco in the film, certain people were not. Specifically the Japan Society for Tobacco Control!

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Plenty of smoke in Ghibli’s ‘The Wind Rises’ – But not the kind you might expect

It looks like Japanese public opinion is still divided on Ghibli’s new anime film, The Wind Rises (Kaze Tachinu), but commercially, the movie definitely seems to be bringing in the dollars (or yen in this case), with more than 2.2 million moviegoers seeing the film and the gross surpassing a whopping 2.8 billion yen (about US$28 million) in the first nine days of its release.

But now, people who have seen the movie are commenting that they’ve been fascinated by a certain unexpected aspect of the movie — something that involves smoke, but not airplane fumes, as you may guess from the fact that the movie is based on the life story of aircraft engineer Jiro Horikoshi. What people are actually talking about is the surprising number of scenes in which characters are seen smoking cigarettes, puffing away like there’s no tomorrow.

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12 disappointing things for Japanese people traveling in the US

Here at RocketNews24, we mostly talk about Japan and other Asian countries, doing our best to offer a sort of “Western perspective” on this fun and fascinating continent. And if you think we love doing it, well, you’re certainly right!

But sometimes it helps to have a little balance—you can’t eat kakigori every day for every meal after all—so today we’re happy to bring you a Japanese perspective on visiting the United States of America! While many Japanese people enjoy visiting the United States, there are some things that can end up being a bit… disappointing.

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Cigarette Carton Airplanes Now Trending on Japanese Nets

Most people have made paper airplanes before but how about cigarette box airplanes?

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Japan is a cigarette smoker’s paradise. More than a quarter of the adult population is said to smoke and, unless specifically stated, smoking in restaurants and public places is widely permitted.

Yet while cigarettes are so popular here that you can even buy packs of them from vending machines on the street, there is virtually no tradition of hand-rolling tobacco, also known as shag.

However, this could start to change as “Japan’s first hand-rolled cigarette bar”, Smoke Friends House, opened in Shibuya earlier this month with the hope of adding a little refinement to Japan’s smoking culture.

We attended a special pre-opening reception event to get a first taste of shag and were quite impressed with the taste and depth of this gentleman’s tobacco.

And if that weren’t luxurious enough, at Smoke Friends House you can have your tobacco rolled and lit by sexy Japanese women!

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Japan Tobacco Unveils 1000 Yen Pack of Smokes

Japan Tobacco Inc. (JT) has announced that it will begin selling a premium brand of cigarettes for smokers who enjoy a rich aroma. The brand, called “The Peace”, will begin a gradual country-wide roll-out on February first.
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