JAPAN TIMES
 SEOUL – The foreign ministers of Japan and South Korea announced an agreement Monday to resolve the decades-long impasse over Korean females who were forced into brothels run by the Imperial Japanese military before and during World War II.
Later in the day, following the foreign min...

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ROCKET NEWS
Now you can enjoy a vacation in cool anime style with Sailor Moon travel accessories in six character designs.
If you’ve ever dreamed of letting your hair down and dressing as your favourite Sailor Moon character while on your next getaway, but want to avoid curious looks from fellow ...

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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...

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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...

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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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