Every Sunday we gather the week’s weird and interesting Japanese news and present it to you in our Sunday News column. It might not always be hard-hitting news, but we hope that it still informs and entertains you. Enjoy!
Any keen fisher(wo)men among our readers? Nowadays just about every phone is also a camera and a camcorder, so keeping a record of your latest catch is a trivial matter – and of course you’d want to, if only to avoid having to insist “I swear it was this big!” to disbelieving friends and family. [...]
Ikebana (生け花), literally “live flowers,” is the traditional Japanese art of flower arrangement. Its deceptively simple name hides years of history and cultural upheaval that began during the Meiji Restoration. I won’t go into all the details, but suffice to say that ikebana today is quite different from what it used to be! There are [...]
Every once in a while, an invention will come along that changes everything. Unfortunately, rarely does that invention come from Japan. More often than not, Japanese inventions walk the line of being helpful for something extremely specific and being completely useless. But God bless ‘em, those Japanese scientists keep churning out these inventions year after [...]
Easy Rider, eat your heart out. Seriously Japan? Seriously? Every time I think that Japan’s invented the most ridiculous thing, whether it’s a burger made out of poop, sex doll dentistry robot, or a toilet-based video game, Japan just keeps taking it to the next level. All of these inventions are basically past the point [...]
Japan has never failed to bring the world terrifyingly lifelike humanoid robots. Sometimes I feel like Japan is situated right in the middle of the Uncanny Valley. But sometimes these freakish inventions can actually do more than scare people. Sometimes these inventions can actually be very helpful, like one of Japan’s newest inventions, the dental [...]
Just can’t get enough cute oozing out of every single pore of your body? Silly not-from-the-future-run-of-the-mill stationary cat ears not doing it for you? Read on, my friends, read on.
