Channel your favourite character on the Central Perk couch with special menu items and Japan-exclusive goods.
TV
Aika Okita surprises everyone with a very different look offscreen.
Kids are spreading the word that a “magic button” on some remotes opens a gateway between the living and the dead.
A lot’s been said about how foreign audiences feel about Japanese TV dramas, but what if we flip the script?
The forgotten tactile pleasure of turning a clicky dial to change the television channel can be had again!
The production house behind Korea’s hit kid’s show Pororo the Little Penguin recently announced a partnership with a developer to release an augmented reality game called Pororo Go.
Caution: Watching this deliciously bizarre ad may cause your entire head to turn inside out and your knees to violently explode.
Panasonic showed off a transparent display seemingly straight out of Tony Stark’s lab at this year’s CES in Las Vegas.
Eighteen years after making its serial debut in the Weekly Shōnen Jump Magazine, Eiichiro Oda’s internationally popular manga/anime franchise One Piece is still going strong, even being turned into a Kabuki performance this year.
Well, with the Holiday Season approaching, it seems One Piece fans will have a huge treat to look forward to just in time for Christmas. Yes, a brand new feature-length One Piece anime will air on TV next month, and details have just recently been released. The anime, titled One Piece — Adventure of Nebulandia, will be broadcast on Japanese national TV on December 19, and fans should be thrilled to see some familiar enemies from the past!
We don’t know what it is about huge companies these days, but they really like to make us feel the feels recently. When did they all have a financial meeting and decide to spend money on making us cry? These commercials are emotional, beautiful and give us hope that even with all the bad in the world, moments of undeniable good can still be found and cherished.
Inspired by true events, this commercial really gives off a “Humans of New York” vibe even though it’s an advertisement for life insurance. Get your tissues ready because, when children show how much they care about their parents, it really warms the cockles of our hearts.
Despite media coverage, Japanese TV tends to lean towards the tame. You’ve got your History Channel-type stuff, your basic daytime dramas, your variety shows that are invariably focused on people eating food and the reactions of people watching said people eat food (spoiler: it’s delicious). You’ve got your movie re-runs and your weather forecasts.
But then, sometimes, you’ve got stuff like this: a man willingly, inexplicably letting a machine paddle him in the family jewels over and over again for what appears to be no reason at all.
Here at RocketNews24 we’re pretty big fans of funny and unpredictable Japanese TV ads, whether they’re for Cup Noodle, Batman dubs, or English schools.
And just by looking at the thumbnail for this Japanese ad for World of Tanks, the multiplayer online game that just announced that it’s coming to PlayStation 4 this year, we knew we were going to be in for a treat.
Wang Sicong, the son of the richest man in China, did an incredibly frank interview with the BBC for its three-part documentary on Chinese youth.
We caught the interview via Shanghaiist.
He said that for people in his generation, escaping China’s strict political system “would be suicide.”
There’s a lot of anime shorthand that, while perhaps a little hard for Westerners and non-nerds to decipher (just kidding, we love anime as much as the next guy), actually works really well to convey a scene’s mood once you understand the visual jargon.
One such shortcut we’ve talked about is the random spewing of blood from a character’s nose, which is used to represent lecherousness and lust, especially in male characters; probably because a comical boooiiing! and a sudden pants-ripping erection crowding out the rest of the screen is both a little too obvious, even for Japan.
Another is ubiquitously used to show a character sleeping and we’ll be damned if this real-life Japanese cat doesn’t nail it.
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