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 ...

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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...

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ROCKET NEWS
 Drunken revellers, rejoice! This festive season you can snooze past your train stop all you like—the rescue bus has got you covered!
As we’ve discussed before, Japan’s trains tend to stop running a little on the early side. And, with so many commuters relying almost entirely on the t...

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JAPAN TRENDS
Before you ever stepped foot on Japanese soil, you probably envisioned a society in complete integration with technology. Yet, when you got here, citizens communicated via flip phones with seemingly no sense of technology shame, workers with manual click counters manned entranceways ...

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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) ...

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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...

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ROCKET NEWS
Pixiv now gives users the option of turning their artwork into fully-illustrated doujinshi (fan-made comics) with just a few mouse clicks.
If you’ve ever thought about trying to self-publish your own manga, pixiv, the social networking site for illustrators, is here to help with its n...

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ROCKET NEWS
Now, we at RocketNews24 aren’t afraid of admitting that we have a huge love of cats–we’ve featured felines and cat-related products on our pages hundreds of times over the last few years. Well, once again, we’ve found another irresistible cat-themed creation that we just had to share ...

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JAPAN TRENDS
Amazon Japan has started offering a monk dispatch service, where a Buddhist holy man is sent to conduct memorial services for you.
The service starts at a flat ¥35,000 (about $285) anywhere in Japan and started December 8th.
The service works by placing an order through the Amazon st...

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JAPAN TRENDS
Japan continues to negotiate its relationship with drones. Just fun toys or dangerous tools?
Until spring this year, drones were perhaps most famous in Japan as a way to get cool aerial shots, such as OK Go’s Japan-inspired “I Won’t Let You Down” music video.
The rest of 2015, though...

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