Lulu Hashimoto is the world’s first “living doll fashion model”, and you can actually become her by putting on a realistic body suit consisting of  doll head mask, a wig and stockings patterned with doll-like joints. As you can see in the photos below, the effect is pretty disturbing.

Becoming a living doll used to be mostly about applying thick layers of makeup, putting on the right clothes and posing in a doll-like position. You’ve probably heard about famous such “living dolls”, like Kina Shen, Kotakoti or Valeryia Lukyanova, but they could never achieve the level of realism displayed by Lulu Hashimoto, a true living doll and Japan’s newest fashion sensation.

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Stacking coins in a simple tower can get pretty challenging after it reaches a certain size, but that’s child’s play compared to what this Japanese artist can create out of thousands of carefully placed coins.

Twitter user @thumb_tani has been delighting his fans with an array of physics-defying coin structures ever since he discovered the hobby, by mistake. He apparently started stacking coins out of boredom, and it just grew on him. He now spends hours at a time working on all sorts of crazy designs that seem ready to topple at any time, and posting the fruits of his work on social media. Some of his photos have gotten tens of thousands of likes, and looking at them, it’s easy to see why.

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When experts predicted that robots will take most of our jobs in the next few decades, priests were probably among the least concerned humans on the planet. After all, machines and spirituality don’t exactly go hand in hand. But one Japanese company is showing everyone that no job is safe, with a line of “Buddhist robots” that can perform funeral services at a fraction of the cost demanded by human priests.

Pepper, a humanoid robot developed by SoftBank Robotics, has taken on several jobs since it hit the market two years ago. Advertised as the first robot capable of reading human emotions, Pepper has been deployed to banks, sushi shops and nursing homes, where it acts as a receptionist, identifying visitors with its facial recognition software, offering information, or just chatting to people. But Pepper’s creators have recently come up with another job for the big-eyed robot – Buddhist priest for clients looking to cut down on funeral costs.

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Japan’s fascination with robotics and all things high-tech is legendary, but did you know thy make robot scarecrows now? Well, Super Robot Wolf is meant to scare a lot more than crows, but still, Japan may be taking their love for technology a bit too far.

When I was growing up, farmers kept birds and other wild animals away from their crops with old fashioned scarecrows. You know, some rags hanging on a cross structure made of sticks with some chimes or small bells for added effect, and that worked ok. But those things couldn’t hold a candle to this Japanese robot scarecrow with the coolest, most over-the-top name imaginable – Super Robot Wolf. They say ii can scare away any wild animal, from deer to bears, and it definitely looks terrifying enough to do it.

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Fidget spinners are everywhere these days, but if you’re looking for ultimate performance, there is nothing like the Saturn Spinner, a marvel of engineering that can spin continuously longer than any other fidget spinner on the market – over 12 minutes.

Dubbed the “Rolls Royce of fidget spinners”, the Saturn Spinner was developed by a subsidiary of NSK, a Japanese precision machining company that specializes in ball bearings for satellites and computer drives. It is designed to resemble a ship’s wheel, with added weights on the outer ring and a light aluminium ball bearing in the center, to increase centrifugal force. It was designed to spin continuously for at least 12 minutes, so each manufactured toy is tested for performance, with those that fail to pass the 12-minute threshold being dismantled, cleaned, reassembled and retested until they can be certified as “compliant”.

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Researchers at the Biotherapy Development Research Center Co. in Kanazawa, Japan, have come with a 100%-natural solution to the age-old problem of melting ice-cream. By using polyphenol found in strawberry, they can keep a popsicle from melting for hours, on a hot summer day.

Believe it or not, the secret ingredient for “unmeltable” ice-cream was discovered by mistake. The Kanazawa research center had asked a local pastry chef to create new confectionery using strawberry polyphenol, in an attempt to find new uses for strawberries not good enough to be sold as fresh fruit. However, the chef later reported that  that “dairy cream solidified instantly when strawberry polyphenol was added”. That made it redundant in confectionery, but researchers at the center realized that polyphenol could be used to make ice-cream melt a lot slower.

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Ginza Ladis 1, a private investigation services company in Japan, seems to think that having someone talk your cheating partner’s lover into ending the relationship is the best way to get your love life back on track.

Welcome to Japan, the country where you can rent a person for virtually anything, from posing as your boyfriend and cuddling, to hanging out and even wiping your tears at work. Whatever your needs, you can probably find someone willing to cater to them, for a fee. Now you can add relationship fixer to that list, thanks to the unique services offered by a private investigation company in Tokyo. Ginza Ladis 1 is renting out actors to befriend your cheating spouse’s partner and convince them to break up with them, so you don’t have to.

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When receiving an order from Amazon, most people throw way the packaging box immediately, but one Japanese man loves Amazon boxes so much that he has spent the last 9 years collecting them.

So what posses a man to start collecting Amazon cardboard boxes? In the case of Kosuke Saito, from Osaka, Japan, it was the discovery of a pattern of numbers. It all started one day, in 2008, when, while unpacking an Amazon product, he noticed the serial number “XM06” on the packaging and remembered seeing “XM08” on another Amazon box. That got him thinking that if there was an XM06 and an XM08, surely there must be an XM07 as well. He wanted to know what that box was like, but it was only the beginning, because he soon discovered that Amazon boxes come in all shapes and sizes, and he was curious about all of them.

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A Japanese Visual Key air band called Golden Bomber recently treated fans to one of the strangest concerts ever, an 8-second performance to promote their latest single, an 8-second song called “8 Second Encounter”

On June 29, fans of Golden Bomber started showing up at Ikebukuro’s Sunshine City mall, in Tokyo, Japan, up to six hours in advance, to make sure they had a stage-side seat, which is pretty ridiculous considering they only got to see their idols for a few moments. The three-minute countdown to their appearance on stage was much longer than the performance itself, which only lasted 8 seconds. As the countdown reached 2 seconds, the four members of Golden Bomber ran up on stage, grabbed their instruments, and performed their new 8-second song before running off the stage to the screams of their delirious fans.

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When a friend and “crow expert” told Katsufumi Sato to hang some “do not enter signs” on the outside of a building to keep pesky crows a way, the Japanese professor thought he was only kidding, but after three years of employing the bizarre strategy, he says it works perfectly.

Sato, a professor of ethology, hanged his first “crows do not enter” signs at a university research center in Otsuchi, Japan’s Iwate Prefecture, in 2015, at the the advice of his friend, Tsutomu Takeda, who he regards as an expert on crows. The birds had been targeting the insulation material covering the building’s pipes, ripping it with their beaks and flying away with bits of it to use for their nests. He was desperate to keep them away, so even though he though the idea of hanging written signs for crows funny, he was willing to give it a try.

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Most people have never even seen, let alone tasted, white strawberries, but they’ve been a staple of the Japanese luxury fruit market for years. The Asian country actually has several varieties of white strawberries, among which the White Jewel, or Shiroi Houseki stands out as the rarest and most expensive.

White Jewel strawberries were created four years ago, by Yasuhito Teshima, and his farm in Japan’s Saga Prefecture remains the only one in the world that produces this unique fruit. Teshima-san claims he spent years cross-breeding different types of strawberries and perfecting his growing technique in order to come up with a large strawberry that was white both on the inside and the outside.

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ekoD Works, a Japanese fashion company that specializes in “humorous art and design”, has recently unveiled an optical illusion t-shirt that can give anyone a busty chest.

The Illusion Grid t-shirt uses distortion and clever shading to manipulate perspective and make anyone looking at it from the front believe that they are staring at two large, perky breasts fighting for space underneath. The design created by ekoD Works is so effective that even loose-fitting t-shirts create the exact same effect. In fact, even when nobody is wearing the garment, the large breasts illusion still works, as long as you’re looking at the grid design from the front.

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When they hear the word “Styrofoam”, most people think about disposable food containers or packaging material, but for one Japanese modular home manufacturer, it is the building material of the future. Its increasingly popular Styrofoam dome houses are highly earthquake-resistant, super cheap and quick to build, and have very high thermal insulating properties. What’s not to like?

Japan Dome House has been selling Styrofoam houses in Japan for the last 15 years, but it was last year that demand for the ultra light housing skyrocketed. In April 2016, Japan’s Kumamoto prefecture was hit by a magnitude 7.0 earthquake that killed 49 people and injured another 3,000. Over 44,000 people were evacuated from their homes, after they had collapsed or caught fire, with thousands of them still living in temporary housing. Structural damage to conventional buildings was reported both in Kumamoto and the neighboring Oita prefecture, but one place that didn’t suffer any damage was Kyushu’s Village Zone, a housing complex made up of 480 closely-packed dome-shaped houses built by Japan Dome House.

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Looking at Toshihiko Hosaka’s incredibly detailed sculptures, it’s hard to believe that they are made from grainy beach sand, and not some sort of clay. But he only uses sand, his talent and 20-years of experience.

43-year-old Hosaka has been making sand sculptures ever since he was in school, and has been honing his skills for over two decades. Today, he is able to create large-scale masterpieces without any molds or adhesives, only simple sand and a handful of metal sculpting tools. He spends hours, sometimes several days sculpting away at mounds of moist sand, but the result is always breathtaking.

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If you’re really short on cash and haven’t eaten anything in about a week, you may want to head over to Gold Curry, a restaurant in Japan’s Ishikawa prefecture, where you can earn up to $900 if you can finish one of their giant dishes in the allotted time.

We’ve featured some outrageous restaurant challenges in the past, like eating a bowl of the world’s hottest curry, feasting on a 4-pound taco, or finishing a giant bowl of Pho soup, but, while definitely extreme, completing them still seemed possible. That’s not the case with the ultimate challenge set by Japanese restaurant Gold Curry. They are offering a grand prize of $900 to any person that can eat over 20 pounds of rice and curry in just one hour, which I for one don’t think is humanly possible without rupturing your stomach.

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