JAPAN TRENDS
The popular Q-pot Cafe is celebrating the start of 2016 — the year of the monkey in Japan — with some themed special items on their menu.
Available only from January 3rd to January 11th, the New Year menu includes chocolate banana cake, chocolate mousse, and more.
As always, the food...

More

ROCKET NEWS
Can you hear the excited squeals of 90s kids around the world!?
In commemoration of the Pokémon trading card game’s 20th anniversary next year, the Pokémon Company has revealed that they will be reissuing starter sets of the first-generation cards originally sold in Japan in October 1...

More

JAPAN TIMES
 Prime Minister Shinzo Abe expressed his resolve Friday for Japan to play a leading role globally in the “challenging” year of 2016, as the country plans to host a Group of Seven summit in May, a trilateral summit with China and South Korea and return to the U.N. Security Council as a...

More

JAPAN TRENDS
American street artist DAAS has produced an awesome mural in
Takatsuki City, a suburb of Osaka.
Part of the Takatsuki Art Expo 2015, the mural was first featured on Street Art News.
The mural is depicts haniwa, the terracotta clay figures that were installed with burial mounds in the...

More

ROCKET NEWS
What do you like to get from your coffee, relaxation or focus? Apparently, the type of beans can change the affect on your brain, but which does what?
Mmm…there’s nothing like the smell of a fresh cup o’ joe! That smell, however, is more than just a nice fragrance. Depending on the be...

More

JAPAN TRENDS
The Japanese government has faith in soft power, hence all the “cool Japan” campaigns.
This might be J-Pop. It might be anime. It might be cuisine.
But there’s another unusual source of “cool” in Japan — toilets.
While the actual “Japanese” toilets (i.e. squat toilets) as they were o...

More

JAPAN TRENDS
The winner of the design competition to find a replacement for the much-troubled New National Stadium is Proposal A, designed by Kengo Kuma.
The new stadium will be the prime venue for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games but has been one of several albatrosses around the necks of the Games ...

More

JAPAN TRENDS
The Franco-German artist Benoît Maubrey will create a unique loudspeaker torii shrine gate in Kobe this September as part of the Kobe Biennale.
Maubrey’s acoustic shrine gate will be installed in Meriken Park in the waterfront area of the cosmopolitan Kansai city.
Here’s what the org...

More

JAPAN TRENDS
There seems to be a trend in Japan where everything gets turned into a collective activity. Just to name a few, we have shu-katsu (job-hunting or even death-hunting!) and kon-katsu (spouse-hunting) on the top of our list. More minor ones include nin-katsu (aimed at getting pregnant) ...

More

JAPAN TRENDS
Manami Okazaki has released a second edition of her book “Kokeshi, from Tohoku with Love”, featuring interviews with 23 kokeshi artisans as well as 200 photos documenting how the unique wooden dolls are made in northeast Japan.
Okazaki, the author of several books about aspects of Ja...

More