Posts Tagged ‘strange’

Japanese guy with a big mouth

Japanese comedian Akira Kawashima shows TV viewers that he has a big mouth:

—

• Akihabara News – Gadgetry from Japan (Subscribe)
• dannychoo.com – Your portal to Japan (Subscribe)

Really long gas station

This gas station in Yamaguchi Prefecture is apparently long enough that it deserves to be featured on TV as something odd and strange:

There isn’t really any shocking reason why it was built that way. The owner just says he thought it would be a good idea to have it set up so that customers wouldn’t have to wait.

—

• Akihabara News – Gadgetry from Japan (Subscribe)
• dannychoo.com – Your portal to Japan (Subscribe)

Japanese men sit down to pee

The TV Tokyo program that introduced the foreigner learning traditional Japanese manliness from an ouendan also contained a brief segment on how Japanese men sit down at toilets to urinate instead of peeing from a standing position. In 1999, only 15% of Japanese men claimed they sit down to urinate. By 2007, almost half of the male population were answering that they sit down to pee!

The panelists on the TV show lamented this change as a sign of how manly Japanese men are becoming a rarity. An increased percentage of single men living with their parents and a higher rate of saving income were also cited as examples of increases in unmanliness.

I have posted about this issue in the past, but this video is a bit different. The 2007 FTV program blamed wives for the change, while this TV Tokyo program blamed mothers. Apparently the trauma of being scolded as a child has made many men unable to assume a standing position before toilets.

—

• Akihabara News – Gadgetry from Japan (Subscribe)
• dannychoo.com – Your portal to Japan (Subscribe)
• Kirainet.com – A geek in Japan (Subscribe)

Weird computer animated reenactment of lay judge trial

Japan’s first trial using the new lay judge system is taking place this week and it is a huge news story. In an attempt to create superior coverage of the trial, NTV’s “NEWS ZERO” used computer graphics to reenact the events inside the courtroom:

[hat tip to Ken Y-N, who accurately described them as "some sort of bastard offspring of Miis and South Park 3D."]

—

• Akihabara News – Gadgetry from Japan (Subscribe)
• dannychoo.com – Your portal to Japan (Subscribe)
• Kirainet.com – A geek in Japan (Subscribe)

Google protects the identity of anime characters

Google Street View’s automatic face censorship technology protects the privacy of a statue:

Found from a post about the anime statues that line the road outside of Bandai’s Tokyo HQ. [via JapanSoc]

—

• Akihabara News – Gadgetry from Japan (Subscribe)
• dannychoo.com – Your portal to Japan (Subscribe)
• Kirainet.com – A geek in Japan (Subscribe)

Apprenticeship of Big Toe P

The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P, a bizarre bestselling Japanese novel, will soon be released in English translation. I’ll let the plot summary speak for itself:

The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P tells the story of Kazumi Mano, a naïve twenty-two-year-old who wakes up one afternoon to discover that her big toe has turned into a penis. Her life as an ordinary girl is over, and a rigorous “apprenticeship” has begun. Kazumi flees her homophobic fiancé after he tries to castrate her, and hooks up with a blind pianist with whom she falls in love. Together they join a troupe of sexually deformed and emotionally twisted men and women who tour the country performing what amounts to sexual freak shows. In the course of her bizarre journey, Kazumi is forced to reconsider what she had always passively accepted: her body, her sexuality, and her life.

Amazon’s US site lists its release date as January 2010. Those who can’t wait that long can order it from Amazon Japan (where it has a August 5th 2009 release date).

—

• Akihabara News – Gadgetry from Japan (Subscribe)
• dannychoo.com – Your portal to Japan (Subscribe)
• Kirainet.com – A geek in Japan (Subscribe)