Featured

weird (Page 136)

Professional grade mind games: Japanese company dispatches hot dudes to make your man jealous

Poke deep enough into the corners of the Japanese service sector, and you’ll come across the class of businesses known as benri-ya. Literally meaning “convenience providers,” they exist to fill all the little needs that generally aren’t common or lucrative enough to have their own dedicated businesses. For example, female-run Support One offers personal shopping, dog walking, PC setup, and even substitute grave visitors.

Support One is also willing to help customers with white lies that make their daily life easier, such as providing companions who’ll pretend to be your friends or family members at social functions. Now, the company is expanding its catalogue of social trickery with its newest service, dispatching a hot guy to make your boyfriend jealous.

Read More

While I don’t think of myself as the world’s most patient person, I generally don’t get too riled up about air travel. Part of that is thanks to my strategy of getting to the airport early enough to enjoy enough beer that I’m sleepy and relaxed, yet not so much that I’m surly and combative. Mainly, though, it’s because living in Japan and having family in the U.S. means I’ve been on plenty of long flights, and after a while you learn to roll with the punches of a few inconveniences along the way.

So you’d think someone with even more experience flying, like, say, the vice president of Korean Air, who is also the daughter of its owner, would be even more serene when taking a plane from point A to point B. Maybe she ordinarily is, but that certainly wasn’t the case last week, when Cho Hyun-ah went nuts over a bag of nuts.

Read More

These “Engrish” T-shirts are kinda lame, compared to what we’re used to

Call us cynical, but we find that our standards over what constitutes funny Engrish have been changing.  Unless it’s something really hilarious, perhaps involving naughty words or references to embarrassing body parts, we just can’t muster up the same kind of enthusiasm we once had. When it comes to English that’s just a little bit off in certain ways, it’s sometimes just not that funny, especially when you understand the number of reasons why Engrish happens in the first place. However, visitors to Japan will always remember that first taste of Engrish fondly, even if the same example might fail to raise an eyebrow after a few years of acclimatizing. The last piece of Engrish I felt was worthy of documenting can be seen above – it’s a T-shirt from a store in Osaka and several years later it still blows my mind. However, there’s also plenty of pretty mediocre Engrish to be found, as we’ll demonstrate after the jump.

Read More

I can’t help but laugh every time I hear a story about people finding an image of Jesus in some household setting. It’s not so much their spiritual fervor that gives me a chuckle, though, but the incongruent nature of the logic being shown. On one hand, he’s powerful enough to send messages to true believers from across the boundaries of our mortal realm, but on the other, he chooses to make his appearance in a piece of singed toast or an oil stain on someone’s driveway?

Call me cynical, but I’m not convinced the son of God rolls that way. That kid of haphazard choice of manifestation setting seems more like the work of a lower being, like maybe a dog who’s still getting the hang of how to project himself through the astral plane.

Speaking of which…

Read More

You might never eat seafood again after you watch this horrifying lobster molting on land

When we posted a video of an enormous, pulsating, terrifying spider crab slowly escaping the confines of its old shell and setting off in search of new digs and (probably) human souls, we thought that was about the most horrifying the process of molting could really get.

Then we saw this video of a spiny lobster molting on land. We will never be the same.

Read More

Strange English signs in China and Japan really hate vegetables, sometimes threaten to kill you

We’ve talked before about some of the reasons why bizarre English signage pops up in Asia. One of the most common causes is a fundamental difference in the way sentences are structured between English and other languages. Automated translations programs, which aren’t nearly as well sorted out as many monolingual users believe, are also among the usual suspects.

That said, looking at a flawed translation is sort of like performing an autopsy, in that sometimes there’s a limit in what it can tell you. Just like the medical examiner might say, “Well, all the baby spiders hatching inside the subject’s eyeball definitely killed him, but I’ve got no idea how the eggs got in there,” there are times like these when we look at some garbled English, and, just like we can’t stifle our chuckles, we can’t imagine why the translation went flying off the rails, or if it was even on them to begin with.

Read More

Curry and melon bread! Together…at last? Anyway, Yamazaki’s new curry melon bread is here

We’ve talked before about melon bread, one of Japan’s most tempting baked goods that doesn’t really taste anything like the fruit it takes half its name from. But as delicious as the sugar-dusted outer layer is, the inside isn’t anything more than plain old bread, which is why some bakeries add fillings like custard or even ice cream.

One bakery, though, has decided to spice things up literally by filling its melon bread with curry.

Read More

Group of cats in China gathers for séance, summoning, or maybe just some sinister cake 【Video】

Some people say cats possess strong spiritual powers, but I’m not so sure. Yeah, they’ve been popular familiars for literary witches since as far back as anyone can remember, but I’m not really convinced that they can sense spirits where the rest of us can’t just because they have a tendency to be startled by, and throw jabs at, empty patches of air. Really, that’s only about as profound a connection to the supernatural plane as I have after half a bottle of bourbon.

But maybe cats do have access to dark magical powers. It would certainly explain the eerie calm they display in this video showing a group of them huddled around a table as part of what looks like a cultish ritual.

Read More

Funky food-themed swaddling cloths let you wrap your baby up like sushi, egg rolls, or tortillas

It always seems a little strange when someone looks at a really cute baby and squeals, “He’s so cute I could just eat him up!” I agree, most babies are pretty adorable, and if you said, “He’s so cute I could take on the social responsibility of providing food, clothing, and shelter for him,” or maybe “He’s so cute I could put up with his moody teen years,” I’d probably be right with you.

But eating him? Why would your mind go there? Unless, of course, the baby is wrapped in a sushi roll-style swaddling cloth.

Read More

Anime fans vote with their pervy wallets, crowdfund gigantic strap-on penguin boners

Crowdfunding, in its most idealized and theoretical form, should optimize the way financial resources get used. Projects that embody things held to have value should succeed, and things that society feels it can do without shouldn’t.

In practice, though, sometimes frivolous initiatives succeed even as noble causes die on the vine, because real-world economics often have more to do with wants than needs. But even while we understand that principle, what we can’t quite wrap our heads around is how a crowdfunding project for strap-on anime dongs got enough pledges to meet its goal.

Read More

Mikan flavored potato chips sound gross, but may actually be genius marketing

We recently brought you a round-up of some of the weirdest snack foods available in Japan, and now we’re about to add another one to the bag – Mikan (Japanese Tangerine) flavored potato chips! Such a flavor may seem shocking, even deviant to some of us western folks, but there’s a clear marketing strategy behind these new tangy treats that’s bound to result in success in the Japanese market. See if you can guess what it is, then join us after the jump to find out if you were right!

Read More

Japan’s awesome drinkable cookies in a can mean there’s no need to pour yourself a glass of milk

For the most part, cookies in Japan are crunchy little things. One very notable exception, though, is confectioner Fujiya’s Country Ma’am line, which are soft, chewy, and also absolutely delicious.

What makes Country Ma’am cookies so good is how moist they are, and now confectioner Fujiya is taking that one step further by turning them into a drink! We got our hands on a few cans of this miraculous beverage, and while it’s still early in our relationship, we think we may be in love.

Read More

10 girls, 10 wall-pounds – Female kabe-don is here!

One of the biggest buzzwords of the year in Japan has been kabe-don. A staple of girls’ comics in Japan for years, kabe-don, literally “wall-pound,” has traditionally been the domain of guys clumsily expressing their feelings while leaning against the wall and fencing in the object of their amour with their outstretched arm.

We live in an age of increasing gender equality, though. Today, woman govern nations, helm corporations, and are highly capable of wreaking terrible violence upon their targets with their bare hands. As such, it’s only natural to assume that women are gradually shattering the barriers that have made the world of kabe-don practitioners a boys’ club until now, and as proof, we present these 10 videos of women flipping the script and showing off their kabe-don skills.

Read More

No time to cook? Here’s how to make fried shrimp in just three seconds (with the right equipment)

One of Japan’s most popular cooking shows is Three-Minute Cooking. Broadcast by Nippon TV and sponsored by condiment maker Kewpie, the program does exactly what it promises, teaching people to make quick, tasty meals that take just three minutes of cooking.

Three-Minute Cooking started in 1963, though. In the busy 21st century, who can afford the luxury of spending that much time in the kitchen? It’s time for a faster, more modern way to cook dinner, which is where this video comes in with its demonstration of how to cook fried shrimp in just three seconds.

Read More

As handy as online Japanese-to-English dictionaries are for looking up individual vocabulary words, automated translation programs tend to spit out much spottier results. A big part of the problem is how much more Japanese relies on context for meaning, which in turn means speakers can, and often do, abbreviate and omit whole words and phrases which human listeners can easily understand implicitly.

Automated programs, though, lack this ability, which means their translations are often missing vital elements needed for the sentence to make sense in English. It’s a problem software engineers and linguists are trying to address, but adding such soft logic to machines is a difficult endeavor.

In at least one case, though, the Google Translate team seems to have been too effective, as trying to convert a Japanese phrase meaning, “Goodbye, my beloved” into English produces a result that seems to have roughly 38 hours of backstory behind it.

Read More

Since Japan is on the other side of the International Date Line from the U.S., while American families were sitting down for Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday, it was already Friday, November 28 in Japan. Even still, there were celebrations going on simultaneously in the two countries, as November 28 is also known in some circles in Japan as Knee-High Socks Day.

We feel it’s important to spread the word about this unofficial holiday, so just as we did 12 months ago, we’re back again with the Japanese Internet’s best contributions to the day’s festivities. This year, though, Knee-High Socks Day is about more than just appreciating female thighs, as Twitter users are putting their own weird and humorous spin on just who or what can participate.

Read More

In Japan, nothing says “Merry Christmas, Baby” like greasy convenience store chicken

We all know that KFC is a big, big deal in Japan around Christmas-time. Families order huge Christmas platters for the holiday and singles celebrate by inviting friends over and bringing home a bucket of Special Recipe.

While it may strike Westerners as a delightfully quirky example of holidays getting lost in translation this side of the Pacific, to the Japanese, it’s a cherished tradition. And, of course, a multi-million dollar cash cow for KFC; one that convenience store chains are always eager to get a piece of.

Read More

Ouch! Ouch!! Ouch!!! Man in China hit by three cars while “crossing” the street

Context is everything in determining what constitutes a long time. For example, if your boss rewards you for finishing up a long, difficult project by permitting you to take a seven-second vacation, I’m guessing you’d find that amount of time to be less than sufficient. On the other hand, if I asked you to calm a hamster that’s both frenzied and weaponized by pressing it firmly against the warmth of your breast for seven seconds, I have a hunch that’s longer than you’d be willing to hold out for.

Seven seconds is also way too long to be chilling in the middle of the road as you cross the street. That sort of lollygagging is liable to get you hit by a car, or, if you’re this man in China, three of them.

While you won’t see any blood or gore, be aware that this article’s title is not a clever play on words, and it really does contain video of a dude getting hit by multiple automobiles.

Read More

Timpani drummer’s crazy finale is startling, funny, more metal than you’d expect from a symphony

There’s not a whole lot of crossover between the worlds of sports and classical music. Concert pianists generally don’t play the piano with one hand while dribbling a basketball with the other, and I can’t recall the last time I saw a proper squad of cheerleaders accompanying an orchestra.

Likewise, even though “Get your head in the game!” is one of the most commonly shouted phrases in sports, I don’t think you have concert-goers yelling “Get your head in the symphony!” Not that this drummer needed to be told that, though, as shown by the startling flourish he put on the end of his performance.

Read More

We test the mayonnaise hair pack, plus give vegetable and olive oil a shot, and the winner is…

Recently, do-it-yourself mayonnaise hair packs have caught the attention of people who want to look their best, save a little cash, and maybe find a second use for that jumbo-sized jar of the condiment they picked up at Costco. And while we don’t know where she sources her mayo from, our Japanese-language correspondent Shimazu was one of those intrigued by this possible meeting of the beauty and culinary worlds.

So to see if it’s really as good for your hair as its fans say, Shimazu hopped in the shower, lathered up, and slapped on a coat of mayo. She didn’t stop there, though, as she also grabbed a couple of other bottles from her kitchen so she could compare the results versus treating her hair with vegetable and olive oil.

Read More

  2. 1
  3. ...
  4. 133
  5. 134
  6. 135
  7. 136
  8. 137
  9. 138
  10. 139
  11. ...
  12. 165