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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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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It sounds almost impossible to believe, but the Japanese schoolgirl in the pictures below is actually a middle-aged, married man.

According to Wikipedia, Takuma Tani is a Japanese male vocalist born in 1977. That description doesn’t fit too well with his current image, because virtually every photo of the guy has him looking like a young schoolgirl. Takuma showed an inclination for the art from a very young age, learning piano and vocal music at the age of three. In junior high-school he started writing poems, and at age 28, he became the vocalist of a Japanese rock group. At 34, Takuma decided to adopt the image of a petite schoolgirl, and he’s been doing it successfully ever since. Even though he’s in his early 40s now, Takuma Tani still maintains his incredibly youthful and feminine looks, which have been known to confuse many on the internet.

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When it comes to hyper-realistic drawing, cats and other felines must be among the most difficult things to pull odd due to their fur. Getting every strand just right requires a steady hand and mountains of patience, and that’s what makes Yuki Kudo’s artworks so damn special.

Over the past decade, we’ve posted some pretty impressive hyper-realistic artworks on this website, so it takes some thing special to catch our attention. However, the first time I laid eyes on the color pencil drawings of Japanese artist Yuki Kudo, they took my breath away. I still find myself staring at some of his masterpieces, looking for clues that it’s just a drawing and not some digitally enhanced photo or CGI graphic. Oh, and did I mention he is only 18 years old?

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A young Japanese couple have come up with an ingenious way of making their one-year-old son stop crying whenever he notices that his mother isn’t around – life-size cardboard cutouts of the woman placed strategically in the room he is playing in.

Fuki Sato recently became an overnight sensation after photos of her life-size cutouts went viral all around the world. It’s not that they’re unusually life-like – although they do seem very well done – it’s what they are used that has gotten the family so much attention online. Apparently Sato and er husband had been having trouble calming down their one-year-old boy, who would start to cry whenever he noticed that she wasn’t around. Since staying by his side 24/7 really wasn’t an option, they decided to have her be around the child all the time, while not really being there.

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Our online data is already monetized by several technology giants, but one Japanese IT company thinks real-life data could be monetized as well, and it’s willing to pay people to have their everyday life video-recorded and sold to various businesses.

Last month, Tokyo-based Plasma.inc made national news headlines for inviting people to take part in a controversial social experiment called “Project Exograph”. Participants must agree to have their living rooms, bathrooms, changing areas, kitchens and other parts of their homes wired with cameras that would film them continuously for roughly one month. At the end of the experiment, the footage will be edited in a way that would make it impossible to identify protagonists, and then sent to various companies to see if it can be monetized. Believe it or not, hundreds of people have already signed up for a chance to take part in Project Exograph.

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A 71-year-old pensioner from Saitama, Japan, was recently arrested and charged with obstruction of business after allegedly calling the toll-free number of his telecom provider a whopping 24,000 times over the last two years, to complain about the service and demand apologies.

In the month of October alone, Akitoshi Okamoto, a 71-year-old man from Kasukabe City, allegedly called the toll-free number of Japanese telecom giant KDDI 411 times in a single week to complain about his phone not being able to pick up radio broadcasts. Over the last two years, KDDI registered around 24,000 calls from Okamoto, which works out to an average of 33 phone calls a day, but the corporation had been reluctant to press charges until last week, when the frequency of complaints became too much to bear.

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Can you imagine an inhabited city where the water running through the the drain channels is so pure that beautiful koi fish can swim in it? Well, such a place exists on Japan’s Kyushu island. It’s called Shimabara, and it’s quite a sight to behold.

When the area around Shimabara was affected by the natural disaster known as the “1792 Unzen earthquake and tsunami” which killed 15,000 people, no one imagined that the dozens of fresh water springs that started gushing out would one day put the city on Japan’s travel map and inspire its now famous nickname – the “City of Water”. There are at least 60 known springs throughout Shimabara, making clean water one of the city’s most abundant resources. There is so much of it, in fact, that it flows through the drain channels along some streets. But that’s not even the craziest thing about this place; because the water is so pure, at one point authorities decided to put some koi carp in the channels, and Shimabara became the City of Swimming Carp.

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Getting a hotel room for $1 a night can be considered a bargain pretty much anywhere in the world, and especially so in a country like Japan. But getting the huge discount comes with a catch, and it’s a big one.

Tourists visiting the Japanese city of Fukuoka on a budget can get a stellar deal at Business Ryokan Asahi, a welcoming inn located about a 15-minute walk from the city’s shopping and entertainment area. For just 130 yen (about $1.20) anyone can book a room there for a night, as long as they don’t mind giving up their privacy. That’s because in order to take advantage of this amazing offer, you have to agree to let the hotel live-stream your whole stay on its YouTube channel.

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Onion hardly seems like the best vegetable to base a soft drink on, but Onionade doesn’t contain the kind of onion you’re used to, but a new type that not only doesn’t make you cry when you chop it, but it unusually sweet as well.

Back in 2016 we reported on one of the most interesting inventions to come out of Japan in the past few years – a tear-free onion named “Smile Ball”. Developed over a period of 14 years by scientists at House Foods Group, Smile Ball onions release almost no tear-inducing compounds when chopped or eaten raw, and have a much sweeter taste than regular onions. Available in Japanese grocery stores for the past two years, Smile Balls have been marketed mainly as tear-free alternatives to the common onion, but now its producers want to promote the vegetable’s sweetness and pleasant flavor as well. And what better way to do that than by producing an onion-based drink called Onionade?

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Kumitaiso, a gymnastic formation in which students climb on top of one another to create a pyramid, has at the center of growing controversy in Japan, due to the high number of serious injuries reported by schools.

At its core, kumitaiso is a routine supposed to encourage teamwork and endurance among young students, and as such it has been a mainstay of annual school sport festivals across Japan. However, problems began to occur as the human pyramids organized by schools started getting higher and more difficult to support by the students at the bottom. Seeing dozens of students working together to create these complex structures is undoubtedly impressive to behold, which is why many schools kept pushing the limits over the years, with some devastating results. With hundreds of reported injuries reported every year, many in the Asian country are asking authorities to ban kumitaiso.

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The mud flats of Japan’s Ariake Sea are home to a creature that is reportedly as delicious as it is disgusting-looking. Introducing the “Warasubo”, an eel-like fish that for obvious reasons is known as the “Alien of Ariake Sea”.

If you’re familiar with H.R. Giger’s Xenomorph (the extraterrestrial creature featured in the ‘Alien’ movies), more specifically its iconic “inner mouth”, one look at the warasubo fish is enough to explain its comparison to the fictional alien. It literally looks like the piston-like appendage that Giger’s ferocious predator uses to pierce its victim’s bodies and even metal. The warasubo is a terrifying-looking thing, especially in dried form, which only makes its use as an ingredient for ramen and other Japanese foods that much stranger.

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If you can’t afford a diamond ring, or if you simply want to propose to your beloved in a really special manner, you may want to check out this tutorial for creating an engagement ring out of a year’s worth of nail clippings.

Kiwami, a Japanese DIY master famous for posting detailed how-to videos for making sharp knives out of virtually anything imaginable, recently took on a different kind of challenge – creating an engagement ring with a gem made out of nail clippings he allegedly collected for a year. He kept them all in a jar, and this summer turned them into a black gen that any woman would consider herself lucky to wear on her finger, provided she didn’t know what it was made of, of course.

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Nights out on the town are much better when shared with friends or loved ones, but while most bars and clubs around the world welcome groups, one particular Tokyo establishment only welcomes parties of one.

Hitori, a small bar in Tokyo’s Shinjuku neighborhood, has a very particular admission system – everyone is welcome as long as they come alone, no groups allowed. They make that abundantly clear from the front door, where a sign informs would-be patrons that this is a “bar limited to parties of one”. If you and your work buddies want to get a beer after a long day, or if you’re on a date with a special someone, this is most definitely not the place for you. But that doesn’t mean Hitori is a bar for loners or the socially awkward, quite the contrary…

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Japanese Police arrested a man suspected of assaulting a young pop star he was obsessed with, after allegedly figuring out where she lives by analyzing her social media photos, specifically the reflections in her pupils.

Hibiki Sato, a 26-year-old unemployed man from Saitama, a city north of Tokyo, has been arrested for allegedly attacking Ena Matsuoka, a 21-year-old pop singer with the group Tenshi Tsukinukeni Yomi. It is believed Sato was able to narrow down the area of Tokyo Ms. Matsuoka lived in by going through her social media profiles, enlarging her photos and analyzing the reflections in her pupils. He was thus able to recognize some Tokyo scenery and a bus stop, which he then located using Google Street view. Some sources claim that the alleged stalker had even approximated the storey Matsuoka lived on based on the windows and the angle that sunlight hit her eyes.

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