On July 12th visitors to Yoyogi Park may have spotted some clothes that had been left in the hedges and foliage like garbage. But far from being discarded items of apparel by profligate Tokyoites, ...
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Just when you thought the Han-ryu boom must surely be over, along comes an even more ambitious development. Though the fad for Korean girl groups seems now to have passed in Japan, the K-pop boys ...
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Though this may sound just like another of those "Wacky Japan" stories, there's something more tender and profound at work here. With its chronically aging population and declining birth rate, ...
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And the award for July's cutest use of augmented reality mobile interaction goes to Dentsu, for this Asoberu T-Shirt ("Playable T-Shirt"). It works with a dedicated phone app to allow you to ...
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Thunderbirds, the classic Sixties puppets TV show created by the late Gerry Anderson, is still quite popular in Japan. We reported last year, for example, on the Thunderbirds-themed restaurant in ...
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Showcased at the recent Baby and Kids Expo at Tokyo Big Sight, Pioneer has developed a micro hologram printer which can produce 3D hologram photos of unborn babies to be used as commemorative ...
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It's not often that I roll out the R-word -- and when I do, it is generally due to the incredible short change that black people or other Asians get in Japanese popular culture. Usually the silliness ...
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Having conquered the female market, Shiseido is next targetting younger consumers. It has created a beauty salon for kids since the children of today are the customers of the ftuture. The salon ...
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The Mount Fuji Eraser is a fun and clever way to bring this icon of Japan into your home or work stationery set. As you use the cuboid eraser, the shape of Fuji gradually comes into view and you find yourself holding Japan's most famous peak.
It's the most famous train line in Tokyo. The JR Yamanote Line defines the geography of the city, encircling the center, running a loop around the notorious "empty void" in the heart -- the Imperial ...
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Showcased at last week's Tokyo Toy Show 2013 was the Camatte57s, a concept car by Znug Design for Toyota. The brainchild of Kenji Tsuji and Kota Nezu, the minimal Camatte57s is not only designed ...
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Starbucks may well have coffee shops in around sixty countries and regions worldwide but other than North America, Japan is the first to reach 1,000 branches. Despite being seen initially as a more ...
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Japan's largest retailer Aeon is offering yukata (cotton summer kimono) this year with peach and soap fragrances. Part of its new "adult kawaii" range of hundreds of summer items, the yukata ...
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We blogged last autumn about the opening of the Art Aquarium in Tokyo in 2012. After the exhibition pulled in a whopping 200,000 visitors, it's not surprisingly coming back to the Nihonbashi ...
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GU (pronounced "gee-you" -- a play on jiyu, meaning "free") is the off-shoot of UNIQLO that is even cheaper and even more casual. GU branches have been popping up around major city centers ...
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Cyber Agent, the people of Ameba, are part of a three-company consortium behind the new Shibuya Clickable Project, a system for Online to Offline (O2O) services using IC tags and NFC-enabled ...
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