Tokyo Mango

The Japan Times has a fun story today about a duo of young women decorators who refurbish apartments with super-cute colorful furnishings. The properties they work with are pseudo-apartments where residents get their own room but share a kitchen, living...

Some dogs don't like the rain. Most dogs don't like wearing raincoats. The solution could be in this umbrella for dogs — it faces downwards instead of up and has a leash attachment to it so that it automatically opens...

I finally watched Ponyo last night. As most of you know, it's Hayao Miyazaki's latest film, about a magical goldfish who wants to become human. The whole time I was watching, I was thinking, hey, this story is kinda like...

In this hilarious, weird, at times inappropriate Japanese game show video, four guys in super short shorts attempt to climb a set of stairs covered in lotion.

This crazy over-the-top USB board lets you charge up to 80 gadgets at once. It's about $150 from Thanko.

Pink Tentacle has found several fascinating Japan-related articles from Popular Science's 137-year archives, now on Google Books. They include folk medicine from the 1890s, a law that forbade people from owning maroon-colored cars (1930s), and one theory from a famous...

KDDI's R&D lab has come up with a scary new monitoring feature for work-issued cell phones: enhanced motion sensors that "learn" employee movements and then report back to employers if the workers are not going through those motions during work...

A 24-year old pet store manager in Nagasaki named Akira Honda was arrested for stealing a penguin from a zoo to pay off his debts. The bird he snatched was a Humboldt Penguin; they're South American birds that grow to...

Takako Iwasa is a cat-loving Tokyoite who made waves when she created Versailles-themed and other outlandish costumes for her beautiful white kitty: "Costumes for dogs have been popular for 20 years," she said. "But we didn't have costumes for cats...

My friend Ichiru in Japan just sent me a note on Twitter saying: "I heard this site is quite popular in the US." I hadn't seen it previously, but it's a hilarious collection of Godzilla-themed haiku, including one written by...

Over at Boing Boing, we're doing a special yakuza feature series with Tokyo Vice author Jake Adelstein. Today we kicked it off with a Q&A in which we peer into his life a bit and get some interesting anecdotes, like...

Guess what? Mario and Luigi have real restaurants in Manchester, England! Mario's is red and short and Luigi's is tall and green. via Boing Boing

This is all over YouTube already, but worth posting, I thought, because it's not just a fun commercial but plays out like a good short film. A young man moves to a new town, where all the girls are really...

To celebrate its 15th anniversary, National Geographic Japan has produced three short films centered around the theme "knowledge is not the end goal, but the beginning." The second film, called Fight, Haruka!, features a pretty stereotypical OL (office lady) who...

A 26-year old Nara woman named Mami Yoshida is suspected of having starved her own child, allegedly because he looked like his father, whom she is still married to. Apparently, the couple was having marital problems — to vent her...

Embarrassing stat of the day: The Inter-Parliamentary Union came out with its latest survey results on gender breakdown in lawmaking this week, and Japan was ranked 98th. This is actually an improvement from last year, when we came in 104th,...

Did you know that one of the first members of the Black Panther Party was a Japanese-American guy named Richard Aoki? I'm watching a documentary about him right now. Aoki spent 10 years of his childhood in a concentration camp...

On Boing Boing, I just posted this hilarious video of Japanese people singing Weezer on the streets of Tokyo, Kyoto, and Hiroshima. Unlike the more fetishized, fabricated music videos portraying Japan, I thought this one was really genuine and funny.

Often, when I'm trying to explain things to people, I end up trying to translate Japanese words that just don't exist in English. One that came up in conversation today is gyaku gire. It's when you get mad at someone...

On Boing Boing last week, I posted about the many flavors of Kit Kats in Japan and beyond: Sampling different flavored Kit Kats has become a side hobby for some Japanese, and in turn Nestle produces unusual flavors for consumption...

Last night I watched Twilight Samurai (た...

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I posted this on Boing Boing earlier this week: i-ramen.net is an amazingly meticulous web site that chronicles one man's daily consumption of different kinds of instant noodles since 1997. It appears from the way they're numbered that he is...

Starting in March, ANA planes will have toilets designated as women-only on most international flights. Apparently, they've been getting a lot of requests. I'm not sure how I feel about this — maybe subconsciously there's a part of me that...

Wow. Did you see Kim Yu-Na and Mao Asada compete tonight in the Winter Olympics? They're both so good! Asada skated first; her performance was flawless and she was the only woman to do a triple axel, but Kim kicked...