Ha ha — pincers. This reminds me of The Simpsons episode Team Homer where Otto is obsessed with getting that lobster harmonica out of the claw game at the bowling alley. But instead of a bowling alley, this claw game is located in Osaka, Japan’s Namba district, and instead of winning a lobster harmonica, you [...]
The Tokyo Yakult Swallows baseball team played this past weekend in vintage uniforms from their days as the Yakult Atoms. True to their name, the Yakult Atoms uniforms had manga pioneer Osamu Tezuka’s most famous character, Mighty Atom (Tetsuwan Atom/Astro Boy), embroidered on their sleeves. The vintage uniforms were part of the team’s promotional campaign [...]
A single village in China is responsible for cranking out 60% of the world’s paintings. The overwhelming majority of the paintings are slavish reproductions of famous paintings. The artists doing the work are very talented, however, and an organization called Regional asked some of the artists to paint themselves. The results are incredible, as you [...]
The Korean production company Eight Peaks announced on April 10 that it signed a joint production contract with Japan’s Genome Entertainment to make a Captain Harlock film with an initial investment of $10 million. Eight Peaks projects that the total production cost of the film will be in the $100-million range, and that it will [...]
The Totoro no Furusato (The Homeland of Totoro Foundation) has opened an English-language Totoro Fund website in its effort to preserve “the beautiful natural habitat and cultural assets of Sayama Hills and its surrounding areas.” These lush green hills, located to the west of metropolitan Tokyo, helped inspired Hayao Miyazaki to create his 1988 classic, [...]
Death can be cute when it’s commemorated with a Hello Kitty gravestone. The video offers a glimpse of an Easter Island style tiki gravestone, too.
Japan Trend Shop is now selling a black tissue box that comes complete with… wait for it… black tissues! Apparently items like black cotton swabs and black toothpaste are catching on in Japan, since black has a clean and sophisticated feeling to it. All I know is that they look a lot cooler than the [...]
According to thinktank Machine Industry Memorial Foundation, robots could fill the jobs of 3.5 million people in Japan by 2025, helping to avert worker shortages as the country’s population shrinks. The country faces a 16% slide in the size of its workforce by 2030 while the number of elderly will mushroom, the government estimates, raising [...]
Pink Tentacle has a nice gallery of old Japanese drawings of heads that look like faces right-side-up or up-side-down.
From the Article: “Joge-e, or ‘two-way pictures,’ are a type of woodblock print that can be viewed either rightside-up or upside-down. Large numbers of these playful prints were produced for mass consumption in the 19th century, [...]
Yoshiro Irie, a researcher at Tokyo’s National Film Center, has announced that two of the oldest Japanese animated films were discovered in an antique shop in Osaka in central Japan. In 1917, anime pioneer Junichi Kouchi released the two-minute “Nakamura Katana” silent short about a samurai’s foolish purchase of a dull-edged sword. Fellow animator Seitaro [...]
Cabel Maxfield Sasser recently went to Japan and noticed an interesting trend in advertising there: search boxes have replaced URLs.
From the Article: “Within minutes of riding on the first trains in Japan, I notice a significant change in advertising, from train to television. The trend? No more printed URL’s. The replacement? Search boxes! With recommended search [...]
Controversial scientific research happens all the time, but a review conducted by scientists in Japan uncovered a list of ‘bizarre’ trials - including one program designed to crossbreed cows with whales.
Scientists have analyzed 43 research papers produced by Japan over 18 years, finding most were useless or esoteric. The scientific research included injecting minke whale [...]
Bloomberg reports about Japan Steel Works Ltd., a company that still makes samurai swords, and how it may control the fate of the global nuclear-energy renaissance.
From the Article: “There stands the only plant in the world, a survivor of Allied bombing in World War II, capable of producing the central part of a nuclear reactor’s [...]
Japan’s TEC has created a restaurant table with a built-in 3-D LCD screen. The table, called the Tobidasu Menu, lets you browse food choices. The piece de resistance is that you can select each item on the touch-screen table for full-size, 3-D view. The table show what your food will look like sitting in front [...]
The Sankei Sports newspaper has posted images of Ken’ichi Matsuyama (Death Note, NANA, Sexy Voice and Robo) in his Detroit Metal City role of the hapless main lead Sōichi Negishi — and the extravagant metal rocker “Johannes Krauser II” that Sōichi becomes, black-and-white face paint and all. The movie adapts Kiminori Wakasugi’s rock-n-roll comedy manga [...]
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