“Potager,” in Roppongi Hills Serves Vegetable Sushi That Looks Like Real Sushi

With your eyes, you see raw fish, sea weeds, sea-urchin and rice. But it’s all made of vegetables. Welcome to vegetarians! The French restaurant with the Japanese touch, or Japanese with the French touch serves sushi all made of vegetables, carefully selected. Potager, opened its second restaurant in Roppongi Hills two years ago. Aya Kakisawa, [...]

Tora-san, Japan’s most famous tramp, is a yakuza? テキ屋

Tora-san, Japan’s most popular movie figure, doesn’t have a home. He’s a tramp, and a tekiya (的屋)–a street-merchant yakuza–who earns his living by traveling in remote Japanese towns and selling his wares. In the very first movie, he even visits a local yakuza office to pay his respects. This scene is allegedly no longer included in televised versions.

Goodbye Friendly “Mild Seven” Cigarettes; Hello “Mevius”!

Mild Seven cigarettes are no more to be found in the smoker’s paradise. Japan Tobacco Inc. changed the name of its flagship cigarette brand from “Mild Seven” to “Mevius” in a bid to expand its global market share and stop selling Mild Seven cigarettes this week

Whaling is not a sustainable industry in Japan anymore, says study

Yesterday, February 5th, the International Fund for Animal Welfare released a report: The Economics Of Japanese Whaling: A Collapsing Industry Burdens Taxpayers, and held a press conference at the Foreign Correspondent’s Club of Japan.

Competition In Japanese Digital Comics Gets Bloody; Mamoru Oshii haemophobic?

Blood-Stained Mai Love by Mamoru Oshii is a black comedy about a high school student with a fetish for donating blood and his strange friendship with Mai, a wandering Transylvanian vampire who is too timid to actually bite anyone. When the two form a friendship–well in situation comedy parlance, “whacky, blood chaos ensues.” The protagonist’s attempts to procure more blood for his beloved turn into low comedy far removed from Let The Right One In.When we asked Mr. Oshii why he thought so many Japanese teenagers were drawn to giving their blood, the so-called 献血マニア (Kenketsu-mania) he laughingly quipped, “I can’t stand the sight of blood but I love getting IV transfusions. I get them whenever possible. It makes me feel great.”　

The Cell Phone From Galapagos: Japan’s gara-kei (ガラケー)　

Japan kept making cell-phone that weren’t compatible with the rest of the world and only worked well within the confines of Japan. The development of Japanese cell-phone and mobile technology has been compared to the evolution of life on the very isolated Galapagos Islands. Nowadays, Japan-made flip open old-fashioned cell-phones are referred to as gara-kei (ガラパゴス (Galapagos) + 携帯電話 (cell-phones) keitaidenwa. It’s short-hand for “a cheap, uncool and out of date phone.”

Japanese Tattoo Master: “The carving is one’s personal symbol..”

“People’s clothing are the ‘social symbols’ which allows other people to understand whether he/she is a Buddhist monk, a Christian priest, a salary man, or a medical doctor. Therefore the clothes are the symbols constructed by the community. But at the public bath, once naked, no one knows whether you are a monk, a priest, a lawyer or a musician. The tattoo is the individual’s own symbol. It is a different world. People who wear tattoos feel like they live in two different worlds. Usually, ordinary people live in the same society, whether they take off their clothes or whether they wear them.” He said during a tattoo session in his Yokohama studio.

In Japan, Tattoos Are Not Just For Yakuza Anymore

It is difficult to say whether the wabori Japanese traditional tattoo (入れ墨） hurts more or less than the electric needle tattoo. Pain is like tickle, it is not a feeling that you can measure. You can measure the weight of a person, for example, but you cannot measure pain. Some people say they are afraid of the electric sound of the needle.

The Best Articles About Japan 2012 (on our blog) :D

Hello Kitty, yakuza working in the nuclear industry, coffee and cigarettes, 2012 was a year chock full of news. Here are some of our favorite stories we ran in 2012.

Gambling. Dopamine.Sex. Drugs. Art. X-mas plans in Japan?

My favorite object of art was “Flight, Flee, Freeze.” Those are the three primary reactions we have to fear. There are objects of fear such as a spider and the other pieces show the neurological and physiological processes involved in dealing with a threat. The Japanese catalog misspelled the title as “Flight, Free, Freeze.” Darn those tricky “l”s. But it did make me stop to think that perhaps we do have four choices when facing our fears.