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The Joy of Japanese Photo Booths

On our last full day in Japan, the Tofugu team and the venerable Gakuranman visited Sega Joypolis, an arcade / amusement park in Odaiba, Tokyo. At Joypolis, we tried our hand at purikura, or a Japanese photo booth. As you can see, the results are as colorful as they are disturbing: Purikura (short for “print [...]

A Tale Of Japanese Customer Service

At one point in our recent trip collecting film for TofuguTV, we went up to Yoichi, Hokkaido to visit the Nikka Whiskey Brewery. In our naivety, we bought whiskey thinking we could send it back. We quickly found out that this would be very hard. Various shipping companies as well as the first post office we [...]

Dancing Frenzy Sweeps Feudal Japan

There’s a little-known phenomenon in history called “dancing mania,” and it’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like: huge groups of people start dancing for no real reason until they’re completely exhausted. It’s a rare, incredibly interesting part of human behavior. In Japan, something similar happened a few hundred years ago. It was called ええじゃないか [...]

The Things I Do Not Miss About Japan

While I definitely miss plenty of weird things about Japan, there are things I do not miss as well. While everyone has differing tastes, these are the things that I personally don’t really miss (and wish I could have while in Japan). America, you got these things right. Japan, you should takes some notes. 1. The [...]