Bringing you yesterday's news from Japan and Asia, today.
twitter (Page 42)
Dogs with round or square haircuts have, for some reason, been trending this year, but rising to Twitter stardom this week is a Japanese bunny named Puni, who somehow manages to look squarish, round and triangular in different photos, without the help of avant-garde grooming techniques or photoshopping!
Well, it’s Monday again. Sure, waking up on Monday isn’t the worst thing in the world, but it can certainly feel like it when that alarm goes off. Still, it’s not like you can just stay in bed all day, curled up under the sheets like a snail in its shell; eventually we all have to pull ourselves out from under the covers, hop in the shower, and trudge to work. Or do we?
Not if you’re this adorable little hamster! It can spend all day wrapped up in its futon, enjoying its warm embrace and dreaming little hamster dreams! Doesn’t it just make you sick?! So sick you could spend all day staring at its cute little face! Aw, we take it back, little hammie. We could never stay mad at you!
They say that an apple a day keeps the doctor away, but that seems to be more of a guideline than a prescription for any and all maladies, and eventually we all find ourselves in the waiting room of a clinic or a hospital for a check-up or to get our head stapled back together.
Medical staff are well aware that clinics and hospitals aren’t exactly the kinds of places that make patients feel at home, so many medical facilities have tried improving their drab décor and entertainment options to help patrons feel more comfortable about their visit.
One clinic in Japan, however, appears to have gone a little overboard in the interior design department, and is making many of its patients feel like they’ve walked straight into a psychedelic nightmare instead.
“Why did you come to Japan?”
It’s a simple question, and if you spend enough time here, you’re sure to be asked it countless times by Japanese people. In fact, Japan has a whole television show dedicated to asking foreigners this very question, called YOU wa Nani shi ni Nippon e?
For those of us who came for to learn a specific trade or study the language, or who are married to a Japanese spouse and/or have family in Japan, it usually isn’t a hard question to answer honestly. However, for those foreigners that were drawn to Japan’s shores through things like anime or manga, cosplay, robots, or schoolgirls, it can be a question that’s difficult to come up with a socially acceptable answer to.
Still, not all foreigners are ashamed of coming clean about some of the strange hobbies that brought them here, like one Polish Twitter user who is proud to be living out his some of his wildest dreams in good ol’ Nihon. After arriving in Japan, he was presented with the chance to act out one of his many perverted fantasies, leaving otaku on Twitter both amused and green with envy.
Read More
Our love for adorable animals is well-documented at this point – we’ve sighed and squealed over everything from adorable cats to surprisingly cute sea slugs to deer waiting out the rain with humans. Today, we bring you more adorable animals, but this time it looks like they’re being real jerks!
Japanese Twitter users went crazy today after four deer were found ambling along some railroad tracks…and holding up the train behind them!
Oh summer vacation. For little kids (and big kids too!) it’s a time to finally throw off those backpacks, forget about homework, and have fun all day long running around outside or playing video games. If you’re the mom or dad of one of those kids, though, you’re often left to clean up in their wake.
And the same is true in Japan too. For the most part it’s moms who’re left to run after kids giddy with the freedom of no school. They’ve even started a Twitter hashtag for it: #SummerVacationStupidKids.
What kind of things do Japanese kids do to drive their parents crazy? Are they the same as the rest of the world or completely different? Read on to find out!
Whenever someone claims to have found the face of Jesus in their toast or sees the Virgin Mary in the bark of a tree, cynic that I am, my brain immediately jumps back to my old psychology textbook’s section on pareidolia, or the phenomenon of seeing familiar patterns or objects in unlikely places.
But on this occasion I’m willing to put my cynicism on hold for a moment and just believe. For I have just been shown a perfect, miniature Disney princess in an ice-cube.
You know those displays of affection which just make you want to gag? They appear to be the story of one Japanese female Twitter user‘s life, who is less than impressed with her boyfriend’s sugary, lovey-dovey persona in the following two amusing conversations she shared between them.
It seems other net users can either relate to or chuckle from afar at their exchanges, since her original post has since been retweeted 37,600 times as of this writing!
In rural areas of Japan you can often see little vegetable stands set up by the side of the road, where farmers sell their surplus produce for small amounts of money, usually 100 yen per bag. The stands are unmanned and work on an honour system, so you just put your money in the little box and take your pick of produce.
The stands are a pretty common sight in Japan, but we had to do a double-take when we saw this Twitter picture of a kitty named “Aubergine” (or eggplant to our readers in the US) apparently offering himself up for purchase – and at 100 yen (US$0.80), he’s a steal! However, he’s not the only kitty to have attempted this little trick…
An unusual hair-styling trend known as “haato gata” (heart shape) or “haata appu mori” (heart up-set) has become the talk of the interwebs here in Japan recently.
The curious coiffure, which first sprouted in South Korea, is just what it sounds like: girls carefully style their fringe (or bangs to the rest of you) into the shape of a heart, strike a cute pose and then take a picture.
Sadly, to many of us, that’s not what the finished result it looks like…
Imagine you’re taking the train home from work at 7 p.m., finally getting to leave after being there for almost twelve hours. You can’t wait to just eat some dinner, relax, and then get some much-needed sleep.
But then bam! The train stops and the electricity goes off. You’re stuck, and you’re not getting home for a long, long time.
That’s exactly what happened on August 4 to many passengers in the Tokyo/Yokohama area. An accident shut down entire lines, affecting over 350,000 people’s commute home.
What caused it, you ask? The answer may be a single high school student and his friend’s bag.
It’s no secret that for many people in Japan, paler skin is better. In fact, you’ll often seen women strolling down the street on sunny days with parasols open wide and long sleeves pulled over their forearms. But what about all our cosplay-loving friends who often find themselves standing out in the sun for hours at a time?
Many of them are also trying to replicate the look of characters who may be as white as Casper the Friendly Ghost, but that’s difficult to maintain after roasting all afternoon. And that’s where Oneday Brightening, a cream that does exactly what its name says, comes in. The cream has made a splash online recently with cosplayers posting photos of the difference this product makes!
Birds of a feather flock together, so the saying goes. And that concept applies to non-humans as well; it’s not uncommon for pets and their owners to act, and sometimes even look, somehow similar after spending years together. Even in the super popular anime and game series Pokémon, where the aim of the game is to collect as many pokémon as possible, many of the pokémon trainers in the series use pocket monsters that somehow resemble them.
But what the characters of the anime series Free! were pokémon trainers? Which creatures would they have under their well-toned wings? Find out as this Japanese fan puts her imagination to work in a series of awesome Pokémon x Free! crossover illustrations!
As a foreigner in Japan, have you ever experienced a slightly awkward yet somehow humorous interaction with a Japanese person? Perhaps you were curious to know more about some aspect of Japanese culture and asked someone a rather random question, or conversely, a Japanese person was curious to know something about your culture and came to you for all the answers. Or maybe you were just out on the street and happened to witness an amusing exchange between some natives and the local gaijin.
Last year, we brought you 10 such tales of comical intercultural interactions, and today we’d like to introduce seven more fun, quirky, and interesting anecdotes as shared by Japanese Twitter users about their exchanges with foreigners. Have you ever been in a similar situation to one of these yourself?
Thanks to movies like Jaws and the rare instances of human shark attacks, most people don’t conjure up images like the friendly-looking guy above when they think about sharks.
To clear up much of the misconceptions and misinformation surrounding these sea creatures, the Discovery Channel began airing a weeklong marathon of shark-based programing, named Shark Week, in 1988. Celebrating over 15 years of annual shark science documentaries and mockumentaries in the summer, it’s gone on to be the longest running cable television event in history.
But this July, after the Discovery Channel finished up its Shark Week marathon in the U.S., Japan soon took up the baton with the Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan’s Shark World event that began July 17. In order to attract attention the aquarium has been putting up a number of poster advertisements around stations and on trains, leaving those that spotted the ad feeling consumed by surprise.
Japanese culture has spread throughout the world with food, anime, video games, and more. But one region that hasn’t taken in as much of what Japan has to offer as the rest of the world is the Middle East and other Muslim countries.
Until now. Pictures of young Muslim women incorporating Japanese Lolita fashion with their traditional hijab head scarves have been exploding in popularity online. Could this start a new trend toward Muslim idol groups and cosplay conventions?
I’m sure we all harboured a secret crush on a school teacher at least once during our formative years. The operative word here being ‘secret’, mind you.
Spare a thought for this poor Japanese teacher who was faced with open declarations of love, and even a marriage proposal, from one of her students, but who responded to them all with real aplomb.
The internet’s full of weird stuff. Usually, it’s really out-there, kooky, insane, bizarre-o weird stuff, but every now and then something comes along which is weird in a baffling way. Take this video of a cat poking some cotton swabs around as if trying to arrange them in a particular way. It was favourited 1.5 thousand times on Twitter, yet nobody commented on it, possibly because no one knows what to make of it.
What is the purpose of the video? Is the cat some kind of feline savant? Is there some deep, philosophical meaning behind the placement of the cotton buds? See if you can work it out…
Japan has a reputation for being home to some of the safest cities in the world. Having your dropped or lost items returned to you is not uncommon, and the police have enough free time to create life-like ice sculptures outside their offices.
So it comes as a surprise to many Japanese people when they suddenly realize they’ve been the victim of a most heinous crime: umbrella theft. Most buildings in Japan ask you to leave your wet umbrellas in a stand right at the entrance, and people finding their umbrellas missing when they leave is becoming more and more frequent.
How can you protect yourself from these shameless thieves? Read on to find out!
Public programs and government agencies are going out of their way to reach and connect with people as much as possibly, creating mascots and getting on social media like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. The United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) joined Twitter a year ago, and while many may fear the agency, the CIA saw this #Twitterversary as the perfect occasion to reach out and try to find common ground with the people of the Internet. So, they compiled a list of five reasons why you should be following them on Twitter, and it didn’t take long for Japanese users to find the tweets! Can you guess which one caught their attention and got them all aflutter?
Red light district sushi restaurant in Tokyo shows us just how wrong we were about it
Japanese ramen restaurants under pressure from new yen banknotes
Tokyo Tsukiji fish market site to be redeveloped with 50,000-seat stadium, hotel, shopping center
McDonald’s new Happy Meals offer up cute and practical Sanrio lifestyle goods
Mt. Koya planning to instate visitor’s tax to cope with huge tourist numbers
Pokémon Sleep camping suite and guestrooms coming to Tokyo Hyatt along with giant Snorlax burgers
Beautiful Red and Blue Star luxury trains set to be Japan’s new Hokkaido travel stars
French Fries Bread in Tokyo’s Shibuya becomes a hit on social media
New private rooms on Tokaido Shinkansen change the way we travel from Tokyo to Kyoto
Japan’s most beautiful idol singer faces, with AKB48 barely cracking the top 10【Survey】McDonald’s new Happy Meals offer up cute and practical Sanrio lifestyle goods
All-you-can-drink Starbucks and amazing views part of Tokyo’s new 170 meter-high sky lounge
More foreign tourists than ever before in history visited Japan last month
Starbucks reopens at Shibuya Scramble Crossing with new look and design concept
Studio Ghibli releases new action figures featuring Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind charactersFrench Fries Bread in Tokyo’s Shibuya becomes a hit on social media
Studio Ghibli glasses cases let anime characters keep an eye on your spectacles
Is the new Shinkansen Train Desk ticket worth it?New private rooms on Tokaido Shinkansen change the way we travel from Tokyo to Kyoto
Beautiful Ghibli sealing wax kits let you create accessories and elegant letter decorations【Pics】McDonald’s new Happy Meals offer up cute and practical Sanrio lifestyle goods
Studio Ghibli releases Kiki’s Delivery Service chocolate cake pouches in Japan
New definition of “Japanese whiskey” goes into effect to prevent fakes from fooling overseas buyers
Our Japanese reporter visits Costco in the U.S., finds super American and very Japanese things
Studio Ghibli unveils Mother’s Day gift set that captures the love in My Neighbour Totoro
Domino’s Japan now sells…pizza ears?
New Japanese KitKat flavour stars Sanrio characters, including Hello KittyAll-you-can-drink Starbucks and amazing views part of Tokyo’s new 170 meter-high sky loungeMore foreign tourists than ever before in history visited Japan last month
New Pokémon cakes let you eat your way through Pikachu and all the Eevee evolutions
Sales of Japan’s most convenient train ticket/shopping payment cards suspended indefinitelyMcDonald’s new Happy Meals offer up cute and practical Sanrio lifestyle goods
Sold-out Studio Ghibli desktop humidifiers are back so Totoro can help you through the dry season
Japanese government to make first change to romanization spelling rules since the 1950s
Ghibli founders Toshio Suzuki and Hayao Miyazaki contribute to Japanese whisky Totoro label design
Doraemon found buried at sea as scene from 1993 anime becomes real life【Photos】
Tokyo’s most famous Starbucks is closed
One Piece characters’ nationalities revealed, but fans have mixed opinions
We asked a Uniqlo employee what four things we should buy and their suggestions didn’t disappoint
Princesses, fruits, and blacksmiths: Study reveals the 30 most unusual family names in Japan
Pokémon Sleep camping suite and guestrooms coming to Tokyo Hyatt along with giant Snorlax burgers
Beautiful Red and Blue Star luxury trains set to be Japan’s new Hokkaido travel stars
French Fries Bread in Tokyo’s Shibuya becomes a hit on social media
New private rooms on Tokaido Shinkansen change the way we travel from Tokyo to Kyoto
Japan’s most beautiful idol singer faces, with AKB48 barely cracking the top 10【Survey】
New line of modern samurai fashion for fall/winter will make you warm and cool
What does “Konnichiwa” really mean? Understanding Japanese greetings
Sakura tree falls on man at Sannenzaka near Kiyomizu temple in Kyoto 【Breaking News】
Japanese company starts project to restore Nakagin Capsules to capsule hotel
World famous shadow artist shines a light on Tohoku relief【Art】
We tried Korea’s way-too-big King Tonkatsu Burger at Lotteria 【Taste Test】
Why Sensoji temple in Asakusa is better at night
Haku is…Chihiro’s dead brother? Studio Ghibli fans blown away by Spirited Away theory
Japanese driver in traffic jam gets the worst possible vehicle stuck behind him【Video】