Remember our earlier post about the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Forces canceling training exercises because of rising fuel costs? Well, now it looks like the Self-Defense Forces won’t even have enough gas to make it through the end of the fiscal year:
Faced with fuel costs that exceed spending plans by 60 percent, the Self Defense [...]

An unforeseen consequence of all the rain the Kanto region has been getting lately:

Tokyo Reporter has an article up about the new Batman movie’s reception in Japan:
Now in its third week of release in Japan, the Christopher Nolan film, which sees the caped crime-fighter battling underworld figures and crooked cops in Gotham City, grossed a mere $1.6 million in its second weekend in Japan to bring its cumulative [...]

Japanese blog Zaeega has discovered something incredibly bizarre: a website that sells videos of pretty girls cutting their hair and shaving their heads:

Example #1
Example #2

Would you shave your head for money?

Yes

No

No, but I want to buy those head-shaving videos!!

View Results

The Japanese media has discovered that Yu Xinmin, the Chinese official that had been in charge of the investigation into contaminated Chinese-made dumplings has been replaced:
The Chinese source said Yu was removed from the post for mishandling of the cases, in which 10 people became sick in Japan from eating pesticide-tainted frozen meat dumplings.
Yu [...]

The quote in this post’s headline comes from an article in today’s Washington Post about Japanese women who choose to delay marriage and a “growing willingness to do without children — or childish husbands.”
Most of the article covers Japan’s demographic problem, discrimination against women in the workforce, and government measures being taken to deal with [...]

Kazuya Ito went to Afghanistan to help teach farming techniques to the locals. He was kidnapped while carrying out his daily inspection of irrigation ditches, and there were initial reports that he had been freed soon afterwords. However, those reports proved to be false, and a day later it was revealed that he [...]

A man has been arrested in Tokyo for illegally keeping 51 poisonous snakes as pets. Here’s a news video showing police removing some of the snakes from his apartment:

His collection consisted of black mambas, green mambas, cobras, rhinoceros vipers, and other very poisonous snakes. There were also a lot of live mice in [...]

A new study released by Japanese scientists suggests that whales are losing their blubber:
Measurements taken from more than 4,500 minke whales slaughtered since the late 1980s reveal the animals have lost significant amounts of blubber, and are getting thinner at a worrying speed. The team says its study offers the first evidence that global warming [...]

Oricon reports that a special Premium Kinnikuman toy will go on sale on August 29th (Kinnikuman Day). The figure will be made out of gold, and will be sold along with a crystal display case. It will be sold online and for a price of around 49,350 yen ($450). They are hoping [...]

The above report from Fuji TV follows a young woman named Mizuki Tanaka who is studying the art of public bath house painting under painter Morio Nakajima. Public bath houses (sento) were once a fixture of everyday life in Japan, but they faded away as Japan became a rich nation, and they’re now [...]

Samuel Wansiru, the Kenyan marathon runner that won a gold medal on the last day of the Beijing Olympics, took some time to speak to the Japanese press in Japanese after completing the race on Sunday:
Wansiru moved to Japan from his native Kenya and studied at Sendai Ikuei High School in Miyagi Prefecture, where [...]