Watch out, criminals! Police in Tokyo have created Furiko Man, a superhero that spreads awareness about scammers who pose as family members to trick elderly people into sending them money:

I’m not really sure that this kind of superhero appeals to the target demographic, but he’s still pretty cool.
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Akihabara News – Gadgetry from Japan (Subscribe)
dannychoo.com – [...]

Real life nihonjin Ken Tanaka teams up with Remi February to bring you really easy Japanese. You too can abbreviate your Japanese to sound like a native with the steps outlined in the video.

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Contributor Bio: Claytonian studies the Nihongoes in Saitama and blogs about Japan, Language, and News at The Hopeless Romantic.
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Akihabara News – [...]

Despite the cut little buckets and towels that staff gave to the seals at this aquarium in Hakone, they aren’t actually swimming around in an onsen:

The temperature of the water is actually only – degrees, but since the snow falling yesterday was so cold, it gave the pool the steamy appearance of an onsen.
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Akihabara News [...]

A Canadian Broadcasting Corporation report about how Japanese researchers are creating worker robots that could help overcome the problems created by an aging workforce and low birthrate:
Part 1

Part 2

[via Astroboy World]
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An update on the case of Noriko Calderon:

The Japanese government ruled today that Arlan and Sarah Calderon, Filipinos who illegally entered Japan with forged passports in 1993, must leave Japan by March 9th or be deported　(they have been told there will be no more extensions). Their daughter, Noriko, will be allowed the chance to [...]

Liveware have put out a new cell phone game making fun of the drunken (seeming) peccadilloes of a certain minister who learned that cold medicines don’t go so well with a teeny bit of wine. Just a sip even. Honest. Look I don’t have a problem, I just like a drink every [...]

Reuters reports on a shrine in central Japan that lets visitors attack the “god of poverty”:

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Starting tomorrow, several masterpieces of the Louvre’s collection will be put on display in a special exhibition at the National Museum of Western Art.
The task of transporting and safely setting up the paintings for display in Japan fell to the elite fine art transport division of Nippon Express. Here’s a [...]

Ever since a North Korean government restaurant opened in Bangkok two years ago, the Japanese press have been regularly visiting the place with hidden cameras to catch a glimpse of its dinnertime performances. However, it has now been discovered that the restaurant recently went out of business:

Most of its business had come from [...]

For the third straight year:
The number of crimes committed by foreign visitors in Japan fell in 2008 for the third consecutive year to 31,280, down 12.6 percent from the previous year, the National Police Agency said Thursday.
The number of foreign criminals, excluding permanent residents, also dropped in 2008 for a third straight year to 13,872, [...]

When one thinks of firefighters rescuing cats that get stuck in trees, one usually imagines that they would make use of their extra-tall ladders. That was not the case in Okinawa yesterday, where firefighters were summoned to rescue a cat that had been stranded at the top of a 15-meter tree for four [...]

The Osaka District Court rejected a lawsuit today from a group seeking the removal of their relatives’ names from the list of war dead enshrined at the Yasukuni Shrine.

The AFP’s article about the case contained a headline implying that the court ruled that the names must stay on the list, a [...]