Legendary competitive eater Takeru Kobayashi made headlines once again this weekend when he emerged victorious at the annual Wing Bowl. In front of a screaming crowd of 20,000 fans, winning $20,000, Kobayashi smashed all records when he devoured 337 chicken wings in 30 minutes. At a little over ten wings a minute, Kobayashi can eat [...]
Last week I talked briefly about 過労死 (かろうし, karoshi) and the effects it has on the Japanese society. Branching off of the article and continuing the Japanese business series of articles, we’ll take a succinct look into the institution that fosters the karoshi problem and also helped fueled Japan towards becoming a global economic identity: the Japanese career system. [...]
You may have read or heard how hard working and dedicated the Japanese people are towards their jobs. Consistently they put in long hours and undying loyalty to their employer, and in return they get a cushy pension, benefits, and life-time employment (although the guarantee of life-time employment is not what it used to be). [...]
A member of TextFugu was kind of enough to share with me this very unique Japanese photoblog, and so now I’m sharing it with you. I introduce to you “Yowayowa Camera,” where yowayowa means “frail” and camera just means… camera. According to Natsumi Hayashi (author of this fine blog), she picked that name because SLRs [...]
If you ask most people, they’ll tell you that North Korea and Japan pretty much hate each other. This is probably true, for the most part. Japan is a festering pit of democracy that the Great / Brilliant Leaders of North Korea can’t tolerate. North Korea, on the other hand, builds nuclear weapons and attempts [...]
Image Source: Flickr Swords have always been a big deal in Japan. Japanese swords, or nihontō (日本刀) are one of the most highly sought after types of swords in the world today. A sword was even involved with the mythological creation of Japan. The Japanese sun goddess of the universe Amaterasu gave her grandson Ninigi [...]
Japan is no stranger to things that are strange, but Keisuke Yamada has taken art to a pretty goofy place. Bananas. Countless Japanese schoolgirls have made a hobby out of creating creatures out of food for their bento-boxes, but never before has someone taken banana art to such a level as this. Regardless of how [...]
