Japan Soc

Kotaku mixes up gratutious photos of pachinko babes with the story about how child allowances may get frittered away at pachinko.

one mans run in with japanese immigration, detained at the airport and ejected from the country.

It takes a while to get started - fast forward to about 1:00 if you're impatient

A storm has uprooted the great ginkgo tree that stood for 1,000 years at the Tsurugaoka Hachimangu shrine.

Evidently the site I soc'd yesterday was using the photographs without permission. So I have asked for that Soc to be deleted, and am now Soc-ing the photographer's original site. Hope everyone will enjoy the nice job that this photographer did with illustrating the emoticons.

The other detective, the unpleasant one said, “Where’s your gaijin card?” "I’m sorry…what did you say?” "Stop acting like you don’t know how to speak Japanese…I’ve dealt with enough of your kind to know the difference…Your ass understands Japanese just fine!”

In some countries, its customary to stand on one side of the escalator and let others who are in a hurry to walk up/down the escalators. While its a common sight in Japan, it seems that the subway stations in Japan are rolling out new policies to ban people from walking on escalators. The rationale is being that they wanted to reduce the number of accidents that occur on escalators. It was mentioned in the news article that escalators accidents have almost doubled over the course of 10 years.

From loneleeplanet, everything you ever wanted to know about theme Love Hotel rooms, with pics. How anyone can pay to do the do in a Supply Closet is beyond me, though...a must see!

A brief introduction to tengu in both Japanese myth and pop-culture. This is my submission for Mazikeen's March edition of the Japanese Blog Matsuri.

Washington Post comes out of nowhere in particular and tags Fujita's ideas as "too bizarre, half-baked and intellectually bogus to merit serious discussion".