Japanese smart eyewear company Vixion has been working on an innovative pair of eyeglasses that can adjust the focus of the lenses, thus helping wearers overcome both myopia and hyperopia.

Suffering from either shortsightedness or farsightedness is bad enough, but as we age, many of us have to deal with the symptoms of both conditions. That means trouble seeing details up-close and in the distance. Unfortunately, the only way to deal with this is to get two pairs of eyeglasses – one for reading and another for seeing distant things more clearly. Having two pairs of prescription glasses is not only expensive, but also cumbersome. You need to have both with you at all times and switch between as necessary. Luckily, a Japanese company is working on a pair of smart eyeglasses that can help you deal with both myopia and hyperopia.

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A legendary butcher shop in Takasago, Japan allegedly makes Kobe beef croquettes so delicious that people are willing to wait years, even decades just to try them.

Meat & Delicatessen Asahiya, a popular butcher shop in Takasago, Japan’s Hyōgo Prefecture, has been making crispy beef croquettes since it opened, in 1918. You can go right in and order yourself a couple of these fried treats, and you’ll most likely love every bite, but if you’re looking to try the very best croquettes Asahiya has to offer, you’ll have to wait in line. The butcher shop’s famed Kobe beef croquettes are in such high demand that people have to wait years, even decades to receive their order. 

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An unusual capsule machine in Shinjuku, Tokyo has been getting a lot of attention on social media for dispensing ID photos of total strangers for 300 yen ($2.30).

Gachapon capsule toys are really popular in Japan, so popular that you can find them virtually everywhere, dispensing all kinds of collectibles, from small action figures and dolls to souvenirs. The concept has become so popular that it has been incorporated in the majority of mobile phone games, where users have to pay real money for the chance of receiving a missing character or skin. Capsule machines have been around in Japan for decades, but back in March, one particular such machine in Tokyo went viral on social media for dispensing something very unusual – ID photos of total strangers.

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The Opuses restaurant at The Royal Park Hotel in Ginza, Tokyo recently got a lot of attention because of an intriguing dessert shaped like pieces of wall plaster.

On the list of least appetizing things in the world, wall plaster ranks pretty highly, so most people wouldn’t call it the most inspired choice for designing a dessert. Still, that’s exactly what the chefs at Opuses, a high-class restaurant in Tokyo, Japan seem to have done. Photos of this dubious-looking dish were recently posted on Twitter by user @mimimimimitsu32 and ended up getting over 200,000 likes, 26,000 retweets and hundreds of comments. The general sentiment was that the dessert looked remarkably like plaster.

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A Japanese couple who can’t agree on their last name has agreed to divorce and remarry every three years so they can take turns using their respective last names.

Japanese law clearly states that couples must agree on a single last name to use after they get married, but what happens when two lovers just can’t decide which one of their family names to use? That was the conundrum a young couple from Hachioji city, on the outskirts of Tokyo, found themselves in when they decided to tie the knot, after a few months of dating. Only when it came to settling on their last name, she made it clear that she intended to keep her maiden name, something that her husband didn’t agree with at all. They argued about it for a while, but then they decided that they weren’t the first couple to have this problem and that there was a way to solve it.

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Souki Socks, a small sock factory in Japan’s Nara Prefecture, has devised a machine that allows people to knit their own socks by pedaling on a stationary bicycle.

Unless you’re a fan of knitting, making socks doesn’t exactly sound like a fun experience. This was the reality that the brilliant minds Souki Socks were confronted with when they set out to make sock-making exciting for the masses. Luckily, despite having the odds stacked against them, they managed to come up with an ingenious contraption that combined a mechanical sock knitting machine and a bicycle to allow virtually anyone to knit their own socks just by pedaling. Named “Charix,” the machine has been very popular with tourists ever since it was inaugurated in 2017.

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Japanese tech giant Kawasaki caused a lot of raised eyebrows at the world’s largest robot trade show in Tokyo, with Bex, a rideable robot goat.

The 2022 International Robot Exhibition featured a lot of ingenious creations, but few as attention-grabbing as Kawasaki’s latest invention, a robot goat that can carry approximately 220 pounds of cargo. Named after the Ibex, a species of large wild goat native to parts of Eurasia and Africa, the Kawasaki Bex can transport human riders or different materials, but it also has a fully modular top half, so it doesn’t need to be a rideable goat. But let’s be honest, why would you want to ruin a good thing? After all, what’s cooler than a robot goat?

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The Onagadori (‘honorable fowl’ in Japanese) is a rare chicken breed known for its exceptionally long tail, which can reach over 10 meters, putting even peacocks to shame.

Of the seventeen chicken breeds considered Japanese national treasures, the Onagadori is the only one to have “special” status. Ever since it received this status in 1952, exports of Onagadori birds and eggs were forbidden, so there are very few specimens, if any, found outside of Japan today. The breed is famous for the non-molting, and thus incredibly long tails of roosters, which, if kept in the best conditions with high levels of animal husbandry, can grow for the lifetime of the bird.

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Idegami Baku looks like she should be in a popular idol group, only she is actually a 19-year-old boy with perhaps the most striking androgynous appearance in the world.

Men using makeup and photo manipulation technology to pose as women online has become a really popular trend in recent years, but no one does it better than”the most feminine boy in the world,” Idegami Baku. We first featured Idegami back in 2018, when he rose to fame following his participation in Japan’s popular talent contest JUNON Super Boy, where his feminine looks first caught the public’s eye. Even though he didn’t win the contest, people couldn’t get over how pretty he looked, and he amassed a massive online following on social media in record time.

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The Japanese Bobtail is a rare car breed whose distinctive feature is the presence of a short, bunny-like tail, instead of the long, flexible tail of most other felines.

No one knows exactly when this unusual cat breed arrived in Japan, but it has been a part of Japanese culture for at least several hundred years, being frequently featured in traditional art and folklore. In the early 1600s, the breed played a major role in preserving Japan’s silkworm production, by taking on rodents, and by the next century, the bobtail was already the dominant cat breed being kept in Japan. No one knows whether it was because of its distinctive tail, which looked like it had been bent and broken, its friendly personality, or its talkative nature, but the Japanese Bobtail became extremely popular in the Japanese country and remains so today. However, it remains extremely rare outside the borders of Japan.

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A Japanese restaurant has been getting a lot of attention for its unique Miso ramen dish which comes with a soft serve cone melting in the center of the bowl.

If you were to make a list of ingredients that you think best complement Miso ramen, milk and chocolate soft serve probably wouldn’t be at the top. But that just proves you’re not a gourmet visionary, like the people at Franken, a restaurant in Osaka Japan. On January 4th, Franken started selling its unique sweet-and-sour red miso ramen dish with a soft serve cone melting in it. Apparently, they went through many types of desserts, and the soft serve was just unexpectedly compatible with the ramen dish.

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A Japanese engineering university in Kumamoto is famous for holding a unique competition, challenging students to build toothpick towers that can resist a simulated earthquake.

As you probably already know, because of its location in the Circum-Pacific Mobile Belt, where there is constant seismic and volcanic activity, Japan is the world’s most earthquake-prone country. Even though Japan takes up only 0.25% of the land area on our planet, 18.5% of earthquakes in the world occur here. So I guess you can say that building earthquake-resistant architecture is paramount for the Japanese nation. To that end, one engineering school has been challenging students to come up with toothpick tower designs that can resist a simulated earthquake.

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The number of Japanese men who admit to sitting on the toilet seat while peeing has been growing steadily since the late 90s, and today over 60 percent of men reportedly urinate sitting down.

Japan is home to the world’s most advanced toilet systems, with several manufacturers competing to deliver all sorts of outrageous features such as built-in wireless internet, or the capacity to remotely collect and analyze urine samples, and then send the results to a pre-selected hospital. To find out what people want and thus remain competitive, toilet seat manufacturers like Toto or Matsushita Electric Works routinely carry out surveys that reveal some weird, albeit interesting information. For example, the results of one survey recently revealed that most Japanese men urinate seating on the toilet seat.

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People vanish from their established lives all the time, but nowhere is this phenomenon as prevalent as in Japan, a country that has even devised a term for the phenomenon – “johatsu”.

The most common reasons that drive people to disappear without a trace are exactly the ones you’re probably thinking about – inescapable debts, loveless relationships and Japan’s notoriously harsh work culture. But there are certain cultural factors that make these reasons much more serious in Japan than anywhere else. The shame of burdening one’s family with debt, going through a divorce – which have always been very rare in the Asian country – or even quitting a job is considered unbearable by many Japanese people. This only leaves them with very few options – taking their own lives rather than living with the shame, working themselves to death, or becoming “johatsu”, which literally means evaporating from their lives.

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Armed with an Xacto knife and mountains of patience, Japanese artist Gaku turns all kinds of fruits and vegetables into ephemeral works of art.

Inspired by the Japanese traditional food carving art mukimono, Gaku takes fruits or vegetables from the grocery store and carves them into a variety of intriguing patterns, from geometrical designs to traditional motifs and symbols, and even animal models. But apart from the skill and patience required to create these stunning food carvings, the most impressive thing about Gaku is his speed, as many times the artistic process is a race against time to make sure that oxidation doesn’t ruin his artwork. Weh working on apples or other produce that tends to oxidize quickly, he has to finish his designs in just a few minutes and still have time to photograph them.

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