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For many parents, one of the hardest things to accept is that their children are growing up. Every milestone on the path to adulthood seems like it comes too soon, whether it’s finishing school or moving out of the house. Perhaps there’s no greater shock than the day a doctor tells you your child is carrying a fetus. Especially if your child is two. And, especially, if your child is a boy, as was the case for one family in China.

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If you only started playing video games in the last 10 years, you may not know how good you’ve got it. These days, every system includes a hard drive to save your progress, and with most games offering frequent opportunities to do so or doing it on your behalf, even the worst screw-up isn’t going to lose you more than 15 minutes or so of progress. With dozens of online FAQs and YouTube demonstrations for the most popular titles, there’s no need to waste time getting killed by the same boss over and over again.

But back in the day, things were different. Before every home had multiple Internet-capable devices, gamers were completely on their own whenever they entered a new stage, and death usually meant going all the way back to the beginning of the level, if not the entire game. How did old school gamers deal with this kind of frustration?

In the case of one of our Japanese correspondents by biting the controller.

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Tokyo’s selection as the site of the 2020 Olympics seems to have put all of Japan in a good mood. Economic analysts wondered if this optimism would carry over into the investment world, and indeed a modest market-wide rally seems to be building.

One corporation caught up in the surge, however, saw its entire stock price increase wiped out in less than an hour, with some saying the fluctuation was caused by its name.

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We try KFC Japan’s deep-fried soup

Since September 5, Kentucky Fried Chicken Japan has started selling what they call a “corn potage fritter.” It sounds fancy, but when you really get down to it, it’s just deep-fried soup. To our Japanese reporter who hasn’t been versed in the wide variety of bizarre things Americans manage to fry up at county fairs across the United States, the very idea of fried soup was quite surprising. Half-convinced that such a snack even existed, he went down to his nearest KFC and gave it a try.

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For the most part, people in Japan take pride in being well-groomed. Skin care gets particular priority, and individuals especially concerned about looking their best carry around packs of oil-blotting papers called abura torigami. When you don’t want to wait until you get home to wash a day’s worth of grime off your face, they’re handy little things, and we mean that literally.

Abura torigami tend to be pretty small, so much so that you’ll usually see people stretching them out with both hands to get the maximum use out of the precious surface area each one offers. Granted, this looks dainty and adorable when a cute girl does it. Other people, though, such as the RocketNews24 male writing team, are far too ruggedly handsome to ever be considered “cute.” Are there no larger abura torigami for the rest of us?

Indeed there are, thanks to a tie-up with anime smash hit Attack on Titan.

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KFS? Kentucky Fried Chicken Japan offering deep-fried soup

It’s no secret that the RocketNews24 team is pretty enamored of life here in Japan. It’s hard not to have a good time in a country with such deep traditions and cultural events throughout the year.

That said, I always get just a little homesick when autumn rolls around. As great as Japanese festivals are, they simply can’t match American county fairs in terms of fried food offerings.

Thankfully, KFC Japan is ready to take a little of the sting out of fall this year with a new menu item: fried soup.

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Tokyo restaurant challenges us with a foot of tempura, we gladly accept

Tokyo is a massive, sprawling metropolis. There are so many twisting back alleys that by the time you’ve convinced yourself you’ve seen it all, something new has popped up back at the start of your route

Presented with this limitless variety, you could easily eat at a new restaurant every single day and never go hungry. So why did we go back to Fukugawa Tsuribune just two months after our last meal there? Because like handguns in the US, one of their tempura bowls is so serious there’s a waiting period to get your hands on it.

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How many RocketNews24 reporters does it take to eat one family’s worth of udon?

Although it’s often overshadowed by ramen and soba, udon is the final member of the triumvirate of Japanese noodles. With a spongy, absorbent texture, it allows diners to really enjoy the flavor of the broth or dipping sauce it’s served with. This airier structure also means you might need a larger serving to get as full as you would from a meal of ramen or soba, however.

With this in mind, and very little in his stomach, our reporter Mr. Sato headed to a branch of popular udon chain Marugame Seimen, where he fearlessly ordered the largest bowl of udon on the menu, the Family Udon.

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A while back, we paid a visit to Fukugawa Tsuribune, a restaurant in Tokyo’s Kunitachi City famous for its fried foods and tempura. We engaged in a delicious battle with its gigantic tempura sea eel rice bowl, coming away victorious but full to bursting.

But believe it or not, that actually wasn’t the most colossal offering on Fukugawa Tsuribune’s menu, which is home to an even more terrifying titan of a meal.

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Lotteria’s new Twin Burger is not to be confused with a double burger

With so many hamburger chains in Japan, each has to find a way to differentiate itself from the others. For example, MOS Burger prides itself on its high quality ingredients, and Freshness Burger tells diners right up front where its priorities lie.

With Lotteria, there are two things we’ve come to expect; multiple patty sandwiches, like the nine-layer Evangelion Q burger, and unconventional ingredient pairings, as seen in the chain’s ramen burger. But Lotteria’s newest offering combines both of the restaurant’s signature sales points.

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Mention Honda to most people, and they’ll think of a successful car company, if still a few rungs below giants Toyota, GM, and Volkswagen in sheer size. But Honda just happens to be the biggest engine manufacturer in the world, providing power for not just for passenger cars, but also motorcycles, scooters, boats, jet aircraft, and even lawnmowers.

Honda’s most die-hard fans point to the company’s racing pedigree and ease with which its engines can be tuned to make more power, both of which factor into its current project of building the world’s fastest riding mower.

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State media in North Korea, notorious for its far-fetched claims like the late Kim Jong Il’s near-impossible golf scores and how the earth around his birthplace cracked at the moment of his death, is reported to have told its public last week that the lair of a mythical unicorn-like creature had been discovered by archaeologists.

Cue the sound of crayons being dropped the world over and dewy-eyed children turning to their parents and yelling “See!? They are real!”

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Amazon Japan Reviewer Shares Thoughts on Bulletproof Riot Shield: “Ideal for Snowboarding and Domestic Disputes”

We don’t know about you fine people, but when our old bulletproof riot shields start looking a little worse for wear, we usually turn to good old Amazon for a replacement.

Just last week, in fact, I was buffing a few scratches out of my trusty ArmaLite-R50 model when my boss informed me that he’d stumbled upon a bargain on Amazon JP– a brand new bulletproof shield for just 650,000 yen (US$8,300 )…

Rather than the item itself, however, it’s one particular customer review of the shield that’s making headlines online this week… Read More

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