My friend Albert sent me this picture of another one of those “crazy” Japanese inventions. The concept is quite similar to the legs pillow, but this one is aimed at the women’s market.

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One of the first things in Japan that caught my attention were trains and also the amount of train geeks around here. A general passion for trains exists in Japan. Train geeks collect books about trains, they travel just to have the opportunity to “try a new train” or to visit a particular train station, [...]

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Everything started in 1889 when Fusajiro Yamauchi began producing Japanese playing cards called Hanafuda; apart from Hanafuda cards he also imported some western games, mixed ideas and set up two stores, one in Kyoto and one in Osaka. Playing cards were a novelty for Japanese people and were very succesful at the time. Fusajiro Yamauchi [...]

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In the following video, an actor (who ironically turns out to be Kusanagi) showers/takes a bath in some kind of goemon-buro, the same way as it was supposedly done two hundred years ago. He cleans his teeth with his finger using salt.

Vídeo by Japanprobe

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I was browsing through the flickr account of Tetsuya Blues and I came across this video. It seems that for some weeks now people in Osaka have been able to see a giant rubber duck roaming around the city. The duck is not a Japanese creation but an idea by a Dutch artist called Florentijn [...]

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The electric motorbike prototype in the video is able to reach 150 km/h, while the battery charging time is only 6 hours and has autonomy of 200 km. It will cost around 3.000 euros and will be released to the Japanese market next year.

The motorbike design reminds me of the motorbikes in the movie Akira.

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Japanese people, speciallly Japanese women, love pets. The more kawaii (cute) they are, the better. When you meet a Japanese woman the first thing they often do is to show you a picture of their pet, which they usually have as a wallpaper on their cellphones. Apart from the usual dog books section, the other [...]

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They have been popular online for a while but the other day I came across again one of the Human Tetris videos. It is one of the events in a popular Fuji TV show that began three years ago. The events
in the show are similar to those in the popular Takeshi’s Castle. In fact many [...]

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I came across this interesting stuffed blowfish. Now you can see why it is called “blowfish” or “ballonfish”. Fugu or blowfish usually have this appearance when they are calm, but when they get angry they inflate themselves until they acquire quite a spherical shape. When they inflate themselves they turn into a balloon with spikes, [...]

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There are still many arcade game centers in Japan plenty of video game arcade machines; they are known in Japan simply as “game centers”. One of the companies owning many of the game centers in Japan is Sega. Although Sega stopped producing its own video game consoles a while ago, they have continued until today [...]

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