Tag: Japan

These tiny little crumbs look a lot like peppermints you’d use to freshen your breath after lunch, but you don’t want to eat these ones. What you see here are tiny spheres of a sort of latex liquid that are coated in calcium-carbonate nanoparticles.

A man in Japan named Mansun was embarrassed by the idea of using a selfie stick, as well he should be, so he invented a pair of extra-long “selfie arms.” No, these aren’t embarrassing at all.

The latest weird thing to come out of Japan is the Meowgaroo Jumpsuit – an outfit that makes the human inside look like a cat, complete with a fuzzy tail and ears on the hood. The hand mitts even have paw prints on them.

The Japanese are some of the world’s biggest purveyors of weird food. They have some strange snacks, and the latest is a Kit Kat bar with hand placed gold leaf around the chocolaty goodness. Why gold-leafed Kit Kat bars?

Japan has some very weird fascinations and products. A perfect example are these new potato chips. You aren’t really buying these bags of snacks for the chips themselves; you are buying these for the trading cards inside.

I like cake as much as the next guy, and birthday cake is especially good. The thing is while I like dessert, I’d certainly rather have a good steak. This is where Japan got creative and has a new thing dubbed “meat cakes.”

One of the highlights of eating Chinese food is the fortune cookie at the end. The fortunes usually say stupid things and give you some lotto numbers or pronunciation for Chinese words on the back. In Japan, they do fortune cookies differently. 

We all know that Japan is crazy about robots. They have robots to care for the elderly, robots that sell them stuff, robots, robots, robots. All marching along toward the apocalypse where they will be the only beings walking the Earth.

Growing up when I went to the arcade, I gravitated towards the driving games. I played the crap out of Pole Position and any other racing game I could get my mitts on. Only a few years later, driving games sort of fell out of popularity and they left the arcade sticking me with nothing but fighting games.

We celebrate Back to the Future Day today, October 21, 2015, which was the date on the dash of the DeLorean time machine when Marty and Doc arrived in the future. I still don’t have my Hoverboard, and thankfully, cars don’t look as ridiculous as they did in the movie.

It may not be as exciting as Lexus’ hoverboard, but Takara Tomy’s new Linear Liner is still pretty neat. Based on Central Japan Railway’s L0 Series trains, this model train also uses magnetic levitation to zip along its track.

We already have a wealth of options for traveling short distances in urban areas. Bicycles, skateboards and scooters are getting smaller and lighter, with electrically-assisted variants to choose from. But if Cocoa Motors’ WalkCar is for real, we might be seeing this all over cities in a couple of years.

Japan Trend Shop has a variety of facial masks for sale, many of them from geeky franchises. But none are as notable as the ones based on Attack on Titan, particularly because the male mask is based on the skinless Colossus.

Last year we checked out Happinet’s Tsumikore, which are small toys that are made to be stacked and are often based on popular manga or anime characters. This officially licensed Pokémon toy is a lot like Tsumikore, except it turns stacking into an actual challenge.

Every year, the residents of Inakadate Village in Japan’s Aomori Prefecture make large scale pictures on rice paddies using four kinds of rice as their ink. The pictures are typically recreations of classic Japanese paintings, but YouTuber juzji saw that the village also had a modern inspiration for one of their artworks this year.

The rain came, and the bugs followed. If you find yourself spending the bulk of your evenings hunting for the elusive bug that just bit you on the kisser, then you might want to consider donning the Netsmen instead.