Japanese face-scanning vending machines designed to distribute cigarettes only to those of legal age can be fooled by holding a photo of an of-age person in front of the scanner.
In an effort to curtail healthcare spending, the Japanese government is requiring companies to cut the number of overweight workers (and their dependents!) by 25% as of 2015. Companies which fail to do so will have to pay into a fund for elderly care.
Reduced exercise, the adoption of western foods and an aging population have made Japanese men about 10 percent heavier than they were 30 years ago, ministry statistics show. Women are 6.4 percent fatter.
The ministry estimates that half of men over age 40 and 20 percent of women will be diagnosed with metabolic syndrome. For men, a key yardstick is whether they have a waistline wider than 85 centimeters (33.5 inches). Body mass, cholesterol, blood pressure, blood sugar and smoking will also be taken into account.
Here's a video of a car driving on Japan's aforementioned melody roads. (thx, kyle)
The top 60 Japanese buzzwords and buzzphrases of 2007.
The term "monster parents" refers to Japan's growing ranks of annoying parents who make extravagant and unreasonable demands of their children's schools.
(via bb)
Japanese researchers have developed "melody roads" that play tunes when you drive on them. You could use this technique for traffic calming...i.e. the road plays music only when you're driving the speed limit and hope that there's no second-order melody that plays at two times the speed limit to entice highway hackers to speed for forbidden tunes.
Video of a Japanese game show where contestants have to clear hurdles while running on treadmills. There's something Sisyphean about their task. No word on whether any of the contestants were able to take off.
A Japanese temple building company goes out of business after 1428 years. Kongo Gumi was founded in 578 and was the "world's oldest continuously operating family business".
Very much on the travel to-do list: head to Japan to see the cherry blossoms.
There are some goldfish in Japan that live in a functioning deep fat fryer. The frying oil floats above the water where the fish live and as long as they don't try jumping out of their layer, they're fine. A nice side effect of this arrangement is that the fish keep the fryer clean, eating whatever food scraps fall from the fryer above. (via cyn-c)
Japan's top 30 emoticons. (via andre)
Do Japanese pitchers, including Daisuke Matsuzaka, a new member of the Boston Red Sox, have an extra pitch called the gyroball? "The pitch started on the same course as a changeup, but it barely dipped. It looked like a slider, but it did not break. The gyroball, despite its zany name, is supposed to stay perfectly straight." Nice accompanying infographics as well.
With rising domestic silk prices, decreasing sales and retiring masters, Japanese-made kimonos may become a thing of the past. One of the last remaining masters, 102-year-old Yasujiro Yamaguchi, says, "It cannot be helped. All we can do now is keep trying to make kimonos so beautiful that they will no longer be able to resist it. What choice do we have?" (via rc3)
Very simple Japanese game show: fail to correctly repeat a tongue twister and you get hit in the balls. Bonus video: a monkey playing with a dog.
Update: The video in question is not a game show, it's of some sort of comedy team; here's a bunch more of their stuff. (thx, evan and gavin)
Author Haruki Murakami has spoken out against a rise in Japanese nationalism and is planning to address the issue in his next book. "We don't have to be tied by the past, but we have to remember it."
New Japanese device records smells for later playback. Smell is the sense most associated with memory, so this could be quite a compelling personal history recorder.
"At elementary schools, kindergartens, and preschools all across Japan, kids are losing themselves making hikaru dorodango, or balls of mud that shine." I really want to make one of these. (via rodcorp)
Giant jellyfish invade Japan STOP Creatures 2 meters wide and 450 pounds STOP Killing fish, fishing industry, and even humans STOP Run for your lives STOP
Thousands of young Japanese (men mostly) shut themselves in their rooms and don't come out, sometimes for years on end. Hikikomori, as ths phenomenon is referred to, has many potential causes, including that "Japanese parents tell their children to fly while holding firmly to their ankles". Reminds me of some of the themes from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami.
Why are rental cars American cars? Why don't rental car companies use the superior Japanese product?
Story on Muji, the brandless Japanese retailer that has high brand recognition and customer loyalty. (Say wha?) I've got a few Muji things and love them.
I've been reading a fair amount of fiction lately, which is not typical for me. My usual regimen of nonfiction followed by even more nonfiction has been wearing on me and I read so much news and short nonfiction pieces in keeping up with kottke.org that I'm getting a little burned out. My latest foray into fiction has been great, a welcome reprieve from a schedule that has been a little brutal recently.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was especially good; I burned through it like I used to do with books when I was in high school. The lives of the characters in the book start out fairly normal but get more and more strange and unsettling as the action proceeds. But from my point of view as a reader, I was overcome by a growing sense of calm as I read. Maybe it was Murakami's quiet storytelling style, but I was especially struck by the duality of self theme running throughout the book. Many of the characters either had two distinct personalities (not in a schizophrenic sense...usually one personality before a dramatic event in their lives and a different one afterwards), talked of leaving their body & looking back on themselves, or had vague feelings that they should be someone else, that some other personality was inside them and couldn't reveal itself. This all ties into Japanese history & culture, eastern religion & philosophy, and Murakami's own experience[1], but I found it all personally reassuring, a reminder that you could change as a person and still essentially be who you were before or that stepping outside your normal self for a look 'round can be a healthy thing.
[1] I knew next-to-nothing about Murakami before picking up this book, but when I finished, I did a little poking around. Via Andrea Harner, here's an interview with him from 1997 in Salon. In it, you can definitely see how he feels disconnected with Japan, other Japanese writers, and from his past:
Because it's my father's story, I guess. My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories -- not so many, but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then, to my father's generation. It's a kind of inheritance, the memory of it. What I wrote in this book, though, I made up -- it's a fiction, from beginning to end. I just made it up.
Sushi is doing well in many cultures outside Japan and the US, showing up in places like Brazil and Moscow.
A Japanese bank is putting a slot machine in their ATMs; get three 7s and the fee is waived. All they need is the sound effects from Super Mario 2 and I'm so there!
George Weller was the first foreign reporter to visit Nagasaki after the atomic bomb was dropped. For the first time, these are his reports from there, which at the time were censored by the US military.
I am a Japanese School Teacher. Experiences teaching junior high school in Japan.
