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99-Year-Old Tea Shop Offers Something New: Green Tea Beer

Being in Japan gives you plenty of opportunities to knock back a beer. The country is filled with pubs, and alcohol consumptions is so accepted that should you tell people, flat-out, “My hobby is drinking,” they’re more likely to ask you to recommend a good bar than to stage an intervention. At the same time, Japan has countless places to sip a relaxing cup of tea, whether it’s the strong, frothy variety used in tea ceremonies called matcha, or hojicha, for which the green tea leaves are roasted before steeping. But with two tempting beverage choices to relax with and only so many hours in the day, how can anyone be expected to choose between tea and beer? As it turns out, you don’t have to. Read More

Today’s Reason to Come to Japan: Free Curry Refills

Big eaters in Japan have a saying: “Curry and rice isn’t something you eat. It’s something you drink.” And as with any beverage, nothing’s better than free refills.

We’ve talked about it before, but it’s worth repeating. The Japanese curry chain CoCo Ichibanya (also known as just CoCo Ichi), provides a free refill of curry sauce to any customer one who asks for it. Read More

Star Wars Takes Over Tokyo Disneyland to Celebrate Reopening of Star Tours

Three days after every other person on the internet was posting “May the fourth be with you,” Tokyo Disneyland was flooded with Star Wars fans celebrating the grand reopening of Star Tours: the Adventures Continues. The ride offers a 3-D Star Wars experience with over 50 possible randomly selected story combinations. There’s no greater thrill than feeling as if you are rocketing through space, interacting with familiar Star Wars characters in the third dimension.

But what impressed our reporter, Tashiro-kun, the most was the fanfare that day. With around 200 Disney cast members dressed in Star Wars costume and more Disney-Star Wars merchandise than you can shake a light saber at, Tokyo Disneyland on May 7 was the place to be for Star Wars fans.

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Desperate to master the power moves we’d seen so many times in our favourite anime (Japanese animated cartoon), we practiced them day and night. Nothing impresses friends and destroys enemies like a well-timed “Turtle Destruction Wave”. Sure of our eventual success and rise to glory, we eagerly followed in the footsteps of heroes, mimicking their warrior cries and poses. Our best efforts were doomed to fail, but we kept on trying. You did too, right? Probably. Hadouken!

MyNavi News asked 286 men and women in Japan which moves they practiced as children. Here are the most common (and surprising) responses.

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Students in Japan Create a Robot That Can Balance on a Ball

Oh Japan, you never disappoint in the robot department. This one in particular may look a little plain compared to the femme bots in Shinjuku or a $1.25 million giant robot, but it’s still really cool. Created by two students at Tohoku Gakuin University in Japan, this little guy is able to perfectly balance on a ball while carrying a load and moving.

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Love Money? Cuddle Your Cash with this Chinese Money Pillow!

Oh, money, you make me smile like it’s Christmas Day and the cat’s just coughed up a shard of rainbow. As a man who spent most of his university years trying to work out ways to make potato chips and sliced bread viable alternatives to meat and vegetables, during the brief moments that I have a bit of cash in my bank account these days I become a noticeably nicer person to be around. I won’t even try to gouge your eyes if you greet me in the street.

This pillow is for people like me. People who want that warm money glow 24/7, so that even when our bank accounts are empty, our hearts are filled by the shallow but immediately believable promise of happiness that only cold, hard cash can bring.

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If you’re a superhero fan living in North America, today very likely means only one thing: the launch of Iron Man 3. Perhaps waiting for a more suitable date to release the title, Marvel and Walt Disney Studios hung on until May 3 to unleash Tony Stark’s newest — and, according to some, best — supersuit-powered adventure, and millions of fans are champing at the bit to see it.

Despite having opened in Japan surprisingly early (Japanese releases are notoriously late, with movie fans forced to wait until this March for both Django Unchained and Wreck it Ralph alone), tongues are wagging all across the country today about Iron Man 3, but for an entirely different reason.

Put together by a clearly passionate and creative team of fans in Thailand, the following video recreates the official Iron Man 3 pre-release trailer shot by shot using little more than hand-crafted props, questionable make-up and models dangling from strings. Even so, it is nothing short of wonderful.

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Beef Up Your iPhone With This Iron Man Mark VII Armor Case

Crank up the Black Sabbath to 11 and bust out your iPhone, this one’s for all you Iron Man fans out there.

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Canned Ice Blasts Let You Literally Stop Cockroaches Cold

Japan is a great place to be in the summer. For the culturally minded, there are festivals at centuries-old shrines, dazzling fireworks displays, and neighborhood folk dances with everyone wearing summer kimonos or yukata. If your thought process is a little baser, the all-you-can-drink beer gardens on the rooftops of department stores, along with much higher socially-accepted hem lines than in many other parts of the world, aren’t half-bad either.

But there’s one thing no one likes about summer here: the hordes of cockroaches.

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How to Make a Hatsune Miku Bento

Hatsune Miku is now coming to a bento near you (that is if you have to time and patience to make her). The folks over at Japanese culture website, Kawaii Kakkoii Sugoi, have just created a step-by-step video explaining how to make an edible version of everyone’s favorite vocaloid.

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The TED (Technology Education and Design) website is easily one of my most favourite places in the entire digital world. With talks from industry experts, innovative thinkers and creative individuals with something valuable to say, I’ve lost hundreds of hours on the site watching presentations and listening to talks, absorbing knowledge and expanding my view of the world, galaxy, universe.

Filmed in February this year at a TED conference in Long Beach, California, the following video sees a young man by the name of Black take to the stage dressed like a cross between a ninja and a rock star. After telling the story of how he first picked up a yo-yo and struggled to perform even the simplest of tricks, he goes on to talk about how mastering this simple toy gave him the confidence he always lacked. As if more proof were needed having already seen him calmly address thousands of spectators in English, Black then launches into a yo-yo routine that left us completely open-mouthed.

The full video after the jump.

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Models, Music and Mindbending Colours Celebrate 10 Years of Tokyo’s Roppongi Hills

Opened almost two decades after it was originally imagined by real estate tycoon Minori Mori, Roppongi Hills — a self-contained mega-complex in the middle of Tokyo complete with office buildings, shopping malls, parks and trendy apartments — has become home to thousands of well-to-do businesspeople and Tokyoites, as well as a metropolitan mecca for those craving designer labels and fine dining.

In honour of Roppongi Hills’ 10-year anniversary, a number of celebrations are being held both online and off. The most creative and eye-catching by far, though, has to be the Tokyo City Symphony, an interactive online synthesizer produced as part of the Love Tokyo project. Combining music, 3-D projection mapping and a 1:1000 scale model of Tokyo with Roppongi Hills’ iconic 54-storey Mori Tower at its centre, visitors to the site are invited to project psychadelic patterns and colours onto the tiny, intricately-detailed model city in order to create original “symphony” music. The effect is nothing short of hypnotic. Read More

South Korean automobile manufacturer Hyundai revealed its new E4U single-person concept car at the recently completed Seoul Motor Show. Egg-like in shape, the mobility device measures 92cm in width while standing 123cm tall. Hyundai believes the vehicle to be suitable for narrow streets in urban centers where speeds are generally slow.
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Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 Gets Explosive New Multiplayer Map Set in Kyushu

Players of the Call of Duty series are no strangers to downloadable content in the form of additional maps on which to shoot, stab and detonate. Ever since downloadable map packs were released for Call of Duty 3 back in 2007, console gamers have been treated to (or blighted by, depending on your stance on DLC) regular releases of additional content to purchase or risk being the one guy in their group of friends who can’t play on the same maps as everyone else.

This time around, developers Treyarch are dropping virtual soldiers and screaming headset-wearing pubescents on Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s four main islands. As well as being situated in the shadow of an erupting volcano, the town featured in the map is absolutely covered with cute cultural references and written Japanese which, we’re happy to say, is not riddled with mistakes.

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Time-Lapse Tokyo: Stunning Video Captures the Captial City’s Hidden Beauty

“Seen this way, Tokyo really is beautiful.”– A comment from the Japanese Niconico Video user who originally posted photographer Samuel Cockedey’s video “Inter States” to the social video site.

The time-lapse video shows splashes of neon interspersed with orange street lamps, streaking red taillights and rushes of black figures, painting detail onto the concrete canvas that is Japan’s capital city. Hives of energy and movement, it sometimes takes an outsider’s perspective to recognise that even a sprawling metropolises like Tokyo can be quite breathtaking when we stop to notice them. The full video after the jump.

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Testament to the strength and versatility of nature, a fish that became caught in the bait box of a small fishing boat swept away by the tsunami that struck the northeast coast of Japan in 2011 has been discovered alive and well on the coast of Washington State.

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Evoland Celebrates the Growth of the Action RPG Genre in Style, Available to Buy Now 【Review】

In January this year, we brought you news of an upcoming video game that quite literally evolves as you play, starting off as a monochrome mass of pixels before slowly introducing virtually every gaming mechanic and action RPG element that we’ve come to know and love, culminating with full-on 3-D visuals, giant demons and a suitably epic plot. That game is Evoland, and after long last it’s available to buy from today.

RocketNews24 was fortunate enough to receive a review copy of the game late last week. Having poured over the original promotional video for so long, it was with high expectations that we sat down with the full game for an extended session of hacking, slashing and critical dissecting. The finished article, we’re happy to say, is absolutely spellbinding.

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Under Its au Brand, Japanese Cellular Service Provider KDDI Unveils World’s Largest and Highest Resolution Smartphone

When he realized he’d primarily been using his smartphone in bed, Nemool Smith, an au product designer and chief hardware architect, wanted a more comfortable and rewarding user experience. Coming up blank in an online search for solutions, Nemool got an idea and decided to approach his bosses at KDDI and get their permission to design a radically new hardware platform he was sure would revolutionize the way people used their phones. The result has set the tech world abuzz, and has the potential to vault KDDI to the top of the global smartphone market.

Introducing the new au zzzPhoneBed by KDDI

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“Geek & Cute” Accessories Made From Electronic Parts Are Actually Really Cool

Electronic resisters, condensers, LEDs, and circuit boards are just some of the parts used to make these really cute, yet totally geeky accessories.

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Sega Fans Rejoice! Limited Edition Mega Drive, Saturn, Dreamcast-Themed Laptops on Sale Now!

If you’re a video game fan and in the line for a new laptop computer, it might be your lucky day! Japan’s Sega Store is currently accepting orders for specially designed notebooks designed to look like Sega’s late, great home consoles.

Short of dropping our current machines down the stairs or accidentally pouring coffee over them, we don’t necessarily need one per-se, but the more we gaze upon these photos, the more that little tech-loving devil inside us shouts the same word over and over and pumps gaming nostalgia into our bloodstream. Waaaant!

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