Every year, landscaping experts from all over Japan get together to compete in the Key Truck Garden Contest, a unique event that has participants turning the beds of mini trucks into the most impressive miniature gardens they can.l The results are nothing short of awe-inspiring.

The Kei Truck, or “kei-tora”, is a small yet practical utility vehicle invented in Japan, but used throughout Asia, primarily in construction and agriculture. It’s been a part of Japanese culture for decades, and people love it because it provides plenty of space and it’s easy to maneuver on narrow streets. But once a year, Key trucks take center stage as canvases for ingenious landscaping masterpieces, during the Key Truck Garden Contest, a special event sponsored by the Japan Federation of Landscape Contractors. As you can see in the photos below, these mobile miniature gardens are something else!

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I don’t know what it is about Japanese men and bicycle seats, but for some reason some men can never have enough of these seats. Just a few months after writing about a man who stole 159 bike seats in a year, we now have the story of another Japanese man who claims to have stolen over 5,800 seats over the lasts 25 years.

Hiroaki Suda, a 57-year-old truck driver, was arrested on Feb. 13 after surveillance cameras caught him stealing two bicycle seats worth about ¥8,000 ($75) on Nov. 29 and 30, 2019, at a train station and a parking lot for bicycles in Higashiosaka, Japan’s Osaka prefecture. Suda admitted to the charges, and for some reason confessed to police that he had started stealing bicycle seats about a quarter century before, and had since put together quite and impressive collection.

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Japan has always been a rich source of wacky news and ideas, and it doesn’t look like things are going to change anytime soon. Its latest offering – a YouTube channel focused mainly on cooking various foods on a hot computer CPU.

You probably already know that CPUs tend to get very hot, especially under load, but you’ve probably never thought of using a CPU as a hotplate to cook various foods on. Well, one Japanese YouTuber recently has and his videos have been getting quite a lot of attention recently. To be honest, he has been at it for at least six years, but the quality of his videos has drastically improved over time, which may explain why we’re only now seeing his works shared on social media. From boiled and fried eggs, to tiny wagyu steaks and even tiny donuts, there’s nothing this guy won’t try cooking on a hot computer processor.

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Bauhutte, a Japanese retailer who specializes in furniture designed for gamers, recently launched what many are calling the ultimate gaming bed – a crazy contraption that includes a mattress, an elevated headboard, a desk,  snack holder and even a flexible smartphone holder.

If you’ve been asking yourself what the best solution for gaming was, a normal desk or a standing one, the right answer is neither. In fact, after feasting your eyes on Bauhutte’s amazing gaming bed, you won’t even be considering desks anymore. Why sit or stand, when you can lie down, relax, and even enjoy a tasty snack without bothering getting up. That flexible smartphone holder even allows you to text or surf the web while lying down. If you hate ending a gaming marathon because of a pesky back ache, this bed is certainly a solution worth considering, if you can afford it…

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Japanese housewife and amateur designer Pico grew up collecting faux-fur animals and now spends whatever free time she has creating her own. And, as you can see, she’s really good at it!

A self-described cat enthusiast, Pico first attracted media attention five years ago, when photos of one of her incredibly realistic creations went viral on Japanese social media. It didn’t take long for her creations to transcend national borders, and soon photos of her most impressive cat bags started circulating on Instagram, Facebook and the like. But despite the massive interest in her works, Pico was quick to announce that she only sold her works in Japan, and only rarely accepted commission projects. As a mother of two, she preferred to dedicate most of her tim to her children.

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Japanese company Tone Mobile has been getting a lot of attention ever since it launched its Tone e20 model, the world’s first smartphone that prevents users from taking “inappropriate” (nude) photos.

The Tone e20 is not a particularly attractive phone, and its spec sheet isn’t exactly impressive either, but it does one thing that no other phone in the word does – it uses artificial intelligence to prevent users from taking nude photos of themselves or anyone else. Aimed primarily at parents who want to ‘protect children from predators’, the phone can also ‘connect’ with other devices and notify their owner if the connected phone has clicked an inappropriate photo.

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Turtles may be cute, but they are also slow and clumsy, which doesn’t really help them when they are trying to cross train tracks. Luckily, for the turtles in Japan’s Hyōgo Prefecture, railway operators and a local aquarium teamed up to find a solution.

Between 2002 and 2014, disruptions of train operation caused by turtles were reported 13 times, with many more probably going unreported. That is why, in 2015, West Japan Railway Co. and Suma Aqualife Park in Kobe joint forces to prevent tragic turtle deaths on the tracks and unnecessary train delay. After running a series of tests and experiments, they came up with a U-shaped ditch that collects the turtles, preventing them from getting stuck between the metal tracks and getting squashed to death.

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A 70-year-old Japanese man who describes himself as a professional “fundoshi”, or “poop soil master” has been moving bowels outdoors for almost half a centuries, and encouraging others to follow his example.

Masana Izawa, a published mushroom and moss photographer, is famous for avoiding indoor toilets as much as he can. In fact, he prides himself with the fact that he has only pooped indoor 14 times in the last 20 years, and then only because he had no other choice. Whether he is at his home in Japan’s Ibaraki Prefecture, in an urban environment or in the middle of nature, Izawa always does his number two outdoors. He believes that relieving ourselves in the soil rather than in dead plumbing is our responsibility as humans, and he has taken it upon himself to convince people that their poop isn’t worthless at all.

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Looking at the stylish garments made by graduating art student Rie Sakamoto, you’d be tempted to think they are made of brown yarn, but in fact, every piece in her collection is made of knitted rubber bands.

Rie Sakamoto is graduating from Tama Art University, in Tokyo this year and for her thesis she decided to focus on the humble but versatile rubber band. From a staple of office stationery to improvised wrist strap, the rubber band has literally hundreds of uses, but fabric for fashionable clothes most likely wasn’t one of them. But that was before Sakamoto got her hands on a few thousands of brown rubber bands and knitted them into dresses, bolero jackets, and more.

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Japanese model Kato Sari recently finalized her divorce from her husband, after getting separated from him just a week into their marriage, due to her uncontrolled money spending habits.

29-year-old Kato Sari has always been known for her luxurious lifestyle and love of expensive fashion brands, but her husband never imagined that her spending habits would end up putting his businesses at risk. The unnamed real-estate businessman reportedly started dating the model in May of 2019, and in the three and a half months before the pair tied the knot, she had managed to spend about 1 billion yen ($9.1 million) of his money. Still, the man went through with the wedding, but during the first week of their marriage, he allegedly told Sari to slow down her spending, as his businesses weren’t fairing very well. That didn’t sit too well with her, so she asked for a divorce.

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A Hong-Kong-based airline was forced to apologize for making a 25-year-old Japanese woman take a pregnancy test in order to board a flight to Saipan, a  a commonwealth of the United States in the western Pacific Ocean.

The controversial incident reportedly took place in November of 2019, but was only covered in the media last week. Midori Nishida was checking at Hong Kong International Airport, with low-cost carrier Hong Kong Express, in order to fly to the island of Saipan to visit her parents. The Japanese national was not pregnant and said so on a check-in questionnaire, but her body shape apparently made airline staff question her honesty. The 25-year-old woman was asked to give permission to an authorized medical provider to conduct a “fit-to-fly” assessment, which in this case meant a pregnancy test.

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A 61-year-old postal worker from the Japanese city of Yokohama was recently arrested for hoarding around 24,000 pieces of mail that he had failed to deliver since back in 2003.

Officials at Japan Post, the government-owned mail service, noticed there was something peculiar about the unnamed postal worker’s activity last year, and he was let go. However, the cache of hidden mail was discovered later, because it was located in his home, “which is beyond the confines of an internal inspection”. The 61-year-old admitted to failing to deliver the tens of thousands of letters and parcels, claiming that doing his job “was too much bother”. But he didn’t want his younger colleagues to think he was less capable than them, so he just hid the mail at home.

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A convenience store owner in Osaka, japan, sparked a lot of controversy recently when he decided to close his business for a day on New Year’s. Appaerntly that was a pretty big deal in a country where convenience stores a traditionally open 24/7, all year long.

While convenience stores are still pretty popular in the United States, they are nothing compared to the so-called “konbini” stores found on every corner of every street in urban Japan. They are beacons of hope that make life easier for the average person, offering a wide range of services (ATMs, Wi-Fi, printing, delivery services, etc.), as well as groceries, all in one place, day and night. In fact, the thing that makes Japanese convenience stores so convenient is that they are open all 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, making it possible for anyone to pick up some groceries, pay the bills or get a quick bite to eat,whenever they need to. So when one convenience store owner decided to close his business for a day on New Year’s, it made national news.

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If you thought Coca Cola Vanilla was weird soft drink, the flavors developed by Shizuoka Prefecture-based company Kimura Beverage will probably blow your mind.

When it comes to new and completely unexplored soft drink flavors, Kimura Beverage is considered somewhat of a pioneer in Japan. Remember, this is the same country where limited edition flavors for popular soft drinks – like sakura Pepsi or Coca Cola Apple – are pretty much the norm. What sets Kimura apart from any other drinks company is the originality of their flavors, which range from pickled plums to fish eggs and potato chips.

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A Japanese billionaire has announced plans to donate a billion yen (about $9 million) to 1,000 of his Twitter followers in an intriguing social experiment designed to show how money affects people’s lives.

On January 1st, Yusaku Maezawa, founder of Japan’s largest fashion retail website, tweeted that he would be giving away 1 billion Japanese yen ($9.1 million) to 1,000 random people, as part of an effort to find out if money really can buy happiness. All people had to do for the chance to win $9,118 was follow and ‘retweet’ him before January 7. At the time of this writing, Maezawa’s Twitter post announcing the giveaway had been retweeted over 4.5 million times.

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