maps
Megane, hitostuma, and muchi muchi all make the list.
Citizens filled with pride in their country, anger at Mercator projection as distance from Hokkaido to Okinawa is shown to equal Denmark to Spain.
Twitter user makes mind-blowing discovery playing around with puzzle pieces of Japan’s 47 prefectures.
Now you can find out if there are any upskirt photographers, bag-snatchers, swindlers, or burglars in your area.
The Edo Past and Present Wanderings app appeals not only to old map buffs, but to anyone with a sense of adventure.
It looks like some graphic designer was aiming for the gold medal in passive-aggressiveness.
Whether you’re a backpacker looking to clean yourself up or just want to experience this aspect of traditional Japanese culture, hundreds of options are at your fingertips.
These beautiful scaled dioramas let you walk the streets of Tokyo or Hiroshima again and again.
This past year the Tokyo Metro has been brought to life in many different ways, ranging from a spaghetti-alien map to, well, a 3-D spaghetti-alien map. But it’s the latest re-imagining of the Tokyo Metro in the highly versatile SVG format that’s currently causing a lot of commotion online.
Love hotels in Japan provide a service that is very unique in the world. They play a convenient role for those passionate one-night stands, which is exactly the sort of business you’d expect at a place called a “love hotel”. But they are also a place where married couples can go who are being pressured from their parents to give them some grandchildren. That’s kind of hard to do with mom and dad in the room next door. One quick glance in any city shows that these love hotels are a dime a dozen, which is probably why there are so many random and fun hotels with different styles of rooms and designs.
And now, with the convenience of the Internet, choosing a love hotel is easier than ever. Why should we settle with those “flattering” pictures they provide when we can take a tour of it ourselves with the help of Google Street View!
While the average human has not yet come unstuck in time, it doesn’t mean we’re completely at a loss when it comes to time travel. Yes, we may only move in a singular direction, but at least have artifacts from the past to help us look back! Everything from old photos to old pottery help us dig through our murky cultural memory to see how things used to be.
And, thanks to Zenrin, a Japanese mapping company based in Oita Prefecture, now you can travel internationally with their collection of digital maps from the Edo and Meiji periods. Whether you think England is a conspiracy of cartographers or you know the name of every mapmaker since Babylonia, there’s something here for everyone!
The first time I went to Tokyo alone, I got lost within the first five minutes of arriving at Shinjuku Station, unable to comprehend why there were so many transfers to different lines going in different directions. Without mobile data on my phone, I was basically one of the ‘internet-less lost gaijin’ crippled by the lack of Google Maps who ended up befriending the station master at every transfer station because, without them, I would probably have had to spend the night hanging out with the buskers on the streets.
The maps in Japanese subway stations are not only confusing, they also look like multi-colored spaghetti or weird roller coasters, and I can clearly recall thinking how nice it would be to have a better-looking representation of the city’s train lines. Thankfully, it looks like South Korean design company Zero per Zero has fulfilled my wish with their subway map designs, which are becoming a hot topic on Reddit.
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