American rapper Kayne West has released a new music video inspired by the anime Akira:

His “song” might just be him singing on top of a far better song he didn’t make, but the video’s still pretty cool.
[via TV in Japan]

A few weeks ago we shared a Japanese TV program with you that traveled to Colombia looking for beautiful women. They found one woman on the street who they thought was pretty, and asked her to introduce them to a friend she thought was prettier than her, repeating the process until they reached the [...]

Vending Machine Red, the bizarre coke machine robot whose videos we featured before, has gone international! It seems that the folks behind the videos have decided to upload English-subtitled versions of Vending Machine Red to YouTube. Unfortunately, the marketing team behind Vending Machine Red didn’t feel like they needed to hire a native [...]

Earlier this week, Billy Blanks, who is in Japan to promote his Billy’s Bootcamp DVD series, appeared on a comedy program hosted by Akashiya Sanma. Billy seemed to hold himself together pretty well in the face of the bizarre and wacky antics of the comedians:
She really loves Billy:

Billy motivates a few comedians into working [...]

Dango is a chewy Japanese sweet made from rice flour. It can be found all around Japan and is usually sold by vendors at temples, shrines, and festivals. There are many kinds of Dango, for example in this photo from front to back, soy sauce and sugar, sesame, and sweet red bean paste. [...]

Today’s Japan-related news links:
NOVA News: Nova Corp President Nozomu Sahashi on Thursday refused to resign from the top post at the largest English-language school operator in Japan over a scandal involving exaggerated advertisements. [Link]

Crook: Shigetake Ogata, a former intelligence agency chief arrested on suspicion of fraud, received at least 30 million yen [...]

Japanese YouTuber okonono has produced the 4th clip in his amazing “the real SUMO fighting” series. You can see it at the end of this video, which combines videos 1 through 4 for maximum effect:

A cool little teaser for the 1966 Japanese Science Fiction/Horror/Monster TV series Ultra Q:

Those of you who are interested in this classic series might want to check out an English-dubbed version of the its third episode, which was made in a failed attempt to convince English-speaking countries to pick up the show. [ Part 1, [...]

An outrageous story of unpunished discrimination from the Asahi Shinbun:
FUKUROI, Shizuoka Prefecture– Fearful that they would be inviting crime to their neighborhood, residents blocked an attempt by a Japanese-Brazilian man to buy land on which to build a house.
[...]
The third-generation Japanese-Brazilian had planned to build a detached house on the plot in the Nagamizo district [...]

Here’s an interesting clip from a Japanese TV show in which a panel of celebrities are shown pictures of people currently in their 70’s and 80’s and try to guess which one of them was the most beautiful in their youth. In this particular one, they take a look at four women:

While it’s cool [...]

An interesting story from Bloomberg News about the zainichi North Korean community in Japan:
Kim is a 66-year-old businessman who owns a shoe factory in Kobe, Japan. In 1997, he resolved to switch his citizenship to South Korea from North Korea after deciding that “I could no longer support a government that allowed children to [...]

Here’s an American news report from 1997 about some trained monkeys in Ushibori, Japan that have been trained to water ski:

[From Yin Yang Report]