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Fran W

Fran grew up on a farm in Northumberland, England’s most northern and least populated county. She relocated to Nagoya in 2011 to teach English and find better edamame beans. On arriving in Japan, she enthusiastically abandoned a lifetime of vegetarianism and now spends her weekends on the trail of the perfect miso katsu. When not attempting to sing k-pop at karaoke, Fran can often be found loitering in old camera shops, or on a hike wishing the manual camera in her backpack wasn’t so heavy.

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Posted by Fran W (Page 8)

Toyota’s dance craze contest invites you to Wakudoki your way to Tokyo【Video】

Toyota’s dance craze contest invites you to Wakudoki your way to Tokyo【Video】

Japan is famous for its quirky and original commercials, and Toyota is a strong player in the constant provision of video-based weird Japanese ad-tertainment. This summer’s offering is the wakudoki, a song and dance routine performed by techno-pop outfit World Order. With some tribespeople. Oh yes, and a dancing gorilla.

It’s weird, wonderful, and we can’t stop watching!

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It opens next year?! We go to the Shanghai Disneyland site, find a lonely river in a field

It opens next year?! We go to the Shanghai Disneyland site, find a lonely river in a field

“Um…is this Disneyland?” our reporter asks a construction worker. “Sure is!” he replies.

She looks around. The first Disney park in mainland China, Shanghai Disneyland is scheduled to open next year. But all our reporter, a writer from our Japanese sister site, can see is a dirty river and barren land. No rides, no hotel, no lake, no scaffolding for Cinderella’s castle … Can this really be Shanghai Disneyland?

Join us after the jump as we go on a photographic journey to Shanghai’s version of The Happiest Place on Earth (If They Ever Finish It).

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Hiroshima, 1958: Everyday life captured on camera 【Photos】

The French actress Emmanuelle Riva is best known for her role in Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima, Mon Amour, an innovative 1959 drama that explores memory and loss against a background of the after-effects of the Hiroshima bombing. While filming on location in Hiroshima, Riva also took these striking photographs of the city and its people, which provide a fascinating peek into everyday life in Japan back then.

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Young artist makes stunning Hyrule Warriors art using just coloured pencils

They may look like digital creations, but these stunning illustrations are in fact entirely hand-drawn in coloured pencil. 17-year-old artist Polaara is a young British student who made these painstakingly detailed drawings in between studying for exams.

Join us after the jump for beautifully rendered fan art of Link, Zelda, and other video game and anime characters – plus some videos from Polaara herself showing how it’s done.

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Japanese viewers spot “real ghost” in TV broadcast, get all freaked out

As well as barbecues, rooftop beer gardens, and delicious ice-cream, summer in Japan is time for horror. No, not the fear of opening your August electricity bill after all those nights sleeping with the air-con on, but scary stories. Whether you get your scare fix by going to the movies, visiting a pop-up haunted house, or do it old-school by telling ghost stories around a campfire, in Japan, summer is the season to cool off by giving yourself the chills.

I’ve never quite seen the appeal of actual horror films, personally, and tend to find them mildly distressing, although not in an exciting way like other people do. “Well, that’s kind of gross”, is about the strongest reaction I can muster. I do love Japanese TV though, and there’s no shortage of scary programming here in summer. Honto ni atta kowai hanashi (“scary stories that totally actually happened”) – or Honkowa for short – celebrated 15 years onscreen this year with a summer special that went out on the night of August 16th. During the broadcast, something unexpected happened – and viewers took to Twitter to ask the eternal question into the internet ether: “Did anyone else see that, or was it just me!?”

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“Office lady in heels walking on tatami”: The mysterious world of Japanese fetishism

When I left England for Japan in 2011, I received a card from four schoolfriends of mine. “Keep in touch!” the girls had written. “Have a great time!” The one guy in the group had a slightly different message for me: “Enjoy the tentacle rape porn!”

While for many, Japan evokes imagery of ancient temples, plates of sushi, and Shinkansen, it is also known as the land of crazy weird sex stuff.  (Tentacle erotica, by the way, is much older and, I might add, much rarer than you might think). So when we stumbled across (I know, right! I can’t remember what we were looking for in the first place, either!) a Japanese blog post about surprising sexual fetishes, we knew it was worth sharing.

“What’s your fetish? An introduction to the fetishes you won’t believe exist” runs the title of the list, compiled by 26-year-old Japanese NEET Nura Hikaru. We bring you our top three, plus a few bonus ideas for good measure.

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What if the 1945 Hiroshima bomb had been dropped on Tokyo instead?

On Wednesday of last week, the city of Hiroshima marked the 69th anniversary of the atomic bombing. When the bomb detonated in the air above Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, it destroyed the city and killed up to 140,000 people. Almost everything in a one-mile radius of the target site was immediately razed to the ground. On August 9, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing a further estimated 70,000.

Hiroshima was chosen as the primary target for a number of reasons. The US wanted a target city with an urban area of at least three miles diameter. It also had to have been untouched by other air raids, so that the weapon’s impact could be accurately observed. Hiroshima was also thought to be the only potential target city that did not have any Allied prisoner-of-war camps.

But what if the A-bomb had been detonated over Tokyo instead? Or Osaka? Using statistics collated by Dr. Mark A. Carlson at the University of Nebraska, the Japanese Huffington Post has produced this interactive Google map answering just that question.

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Turns out women STILL don’t want to see men’s nipples through their shirt

Eighty-four percent, apparently, is the magic number. And there I was thinking it was three all this time.

When we brought you the news last year that 84 percent of Japanese women said that not wearing an undershirt to work was “totally gross and, like, we can see your nipples, ewwwwww…”, little did we expect that some eighteen months later, a completely separate survey – this time with seven times as many participants – would not only confirm a general freaking-out about male summer nipple protrusion, but also come up with – get this – exactly the same number of non-nipple-showage fans: 84 percent.

This time, though, there’s a but. We should’ve known! There’s always a but.

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“Jibanyan, I choose you!” Does Yo-kai Watch have the power to topple Pokémon?

Pokémon is a long-running global megalith: a multi-platform media franchise like no other. Millions of kids grew up watching the anime, wearing the T-shirt, and of course playing the games. Here in Japan, Pokémon characters are everywhere – and none more so than Pikachu. Go to the mall and there’s a giant fluffy Pikachu to meet and cuddle. At school lunch, chances are a bunch of kids’ mums have made their onigiri into Pikachu’s face for them. And a whole city was recently invaded by scores of our favourite yellow friend for an entire Pikachu festival.

There’s a new kid on the “collect-all-the-monsters” block, though, and it looks to be pushing Pokémon by the wayside. Yo-kai Watch hasn’t been released internationally yet, but in Japan the 3DS game, anime and its characters have quickly gained a ubiquitous popularity that looks like it could even overtake Pokémon. Have Pikachu and friends really had their day? Or is Yo-kai Watch merely a flash in the pan?

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Crafts for grown-ups! Make your own portable smartphone speakers with toilet paper tubes

It’s a well-known fact that the average person has 27 plastic bags under their kitchen sink, and a minimum of three old toilet paper tubes in their bathroom. Also, did you know that 63 percent of statistics are made up?

Anyway, if you’re looking for a nifty use for old toilet roll tubes, and don’t have a small child to palm them off on in the name of encouraging their crafting creativity, Japanese Twitter user @ChigasakiR134 has a summer life hack for you! All you’ll need is one toilet paper tube and two paper cups.

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Something for the weekend? Love doll exhibition opens in Ginza – and yep, it sure looks creepy

“Bored of Tokyo”, you say?! It’s impossible to run out of things to do in Tokyo! Ever-evolving fashion, more Michelin stars than any other city in the world, and hundreds and hundreds of art museums and galleries…

“Oh yeah! Art! Like that erotic gallery in Ginza that’s been taken over by sex dolls for the month of August! Tell me more about that!”

Oh. Well…if you insist.

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These kids’ driving simulator toys still work decades later! …kind of

The names of the toys – Turnin’ Turbo Dashboard; Fun-To-Drive Dashboard – might not ring any bells. But the boxy red plastic exterior, the click of the gear stick and the repetitive roar of the engine that drove parents to distraction? Yep, you know this game.

One Redditor recently pulled his Dashboard out of storage and was delighted to discover that it “still runs like a dream”. Cue reams of nostalgic commenters flung back into their playground days, when kids could be kids and sit alone all summer playing 100-mile-an-hour driving simulator without prompting any hand-wringing or moralistic wailing. It’s time to raid your stash of enormous dry cell batteries – we’re going for the drive of your life.

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We ask an Itamae how to order sushi like a pro

Japan’s sushi restaurants range from some of the finest cuisine in the world, to cheerful conveyer-belt gigs where everything is 100 yen (oh, alright then, 108 yen) and comes with a free toy. For those of us accustomed to the “sushi-go-round” that is kaiten-zushi, visiting a “proper” sushi restaurant in Japan where there’s no rotating belt of plates to choose from can be a daunting experience.

When there’s no menu, and you’re alone at the counter, quivering under the watchful eye of an intimidating chef armed with giant swishy blades, how do you order with confidence? Who better to ask than a sushi itamae, a high-end chef of Japanese cuisine. One of our intrepid Japanese reporters went to ask one of these top sushi chaps, who gave us his best three tips for sounding like you know what you’re doing at the counter.

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The science of Attack on Titan explained: Finally, a Titan tie-in that looks kinda cool

Who would win in a fight between a Titan and Ultraman? How were the Walls built? Seeing as Titans never eat or drink, are they surviving through photosynthesis? If these are the questions that keep you awake at night, then we’ve got some bedtime reading for you.

Kūsō Kagaku Dokuhon (空想科学読本, literally “fantasy science reader”) is a series that addresses, queries and explains the science behind popular Japanese anime and manga. This time around, writer Rikao Yanagita has turned his hand to the inescapable Attack on Titan series, in this 208-page illustrated work that promises to answer all your titanic scientific ponderings.

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Attack on Titan stamp rally perfect for Japanese-speaking train fans, probably sucks for everyone else

A stamp rally, a promotional event in which you rush, saunter or dawdle around a local area collecting rubber stamps from checkpoints, is a popular summer activity in Japan. It often takes the form of a themed rubber stamp chained to an inky board that can be found at each station along a railway line, thus encouraging kids (and their accompanying, ticket-buying parents) to visit a bunch of places by train during the summer holidays.

Rubber stamps aren’t just for kids, though. Adults are welcome to collect the stamps in a book to keep for themselves, or if you catch ’em all on the promotional leaflet and hand it in to the organisers, you can sometimes win some cool prizes or goods relating to the show or characters being promoted. And this summer, Attack on Titan attempts to bring the stamp rally kicking and screaming into the 21st century, with a railway rally entitled Attack on Chichibu. The twist: it’s a stamp rally where there aren’t any stamps.

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“Terrible, amazing things my teacher said”: Tweets from the Japanese classroom

Did you used to think that your teachers all lived in the school on the weekends? Lots of kids are shocked to discover one day that their teachers have private lives, families, and even friends outside of school. This collection of tweets are all from Japanese students – whose sometimes-cynical, sometimes-exhausted, pretty-much-always-awesome professors probably just wanted to remind them that teachers are people too.

That’s right – it’s time for a snappy little segment which we’ll be entitling, in honour of its Japanese hashtag equivalent, “This devastatingly amazing thing my teacher just told me!”

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“I know how it’s done!”: Japanese TV guest learns what not to say to a magician on live TV【Video】

If the first rule of magic is that the illusionist must never tell an audience how a trick is done, the second rule must be that you never interrupt a magician live on air to yell, “I’ve seen this one before! I’ll tell you how he’s doing it…”

Obviously, no one told studio guest Airi Taira that, because that’s exactly what she did during a live TV broadcast featuring Japanese-American magician Sero (セロ) on Tuesday night. Join us after the jump for one flying hoverboard, one defensive peeved magician and more awkward smiling than you can shake a stick at.

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Sumida River Fireworks Festival aftermath: Not everyone in Japan has perfect manners after all

Japanese soccer fans attracted plenty of praise at the World Cup last month when, having watched their team lose to Ivory Coast, they diligently cleaned up their trash from the stadium. Whether you think these supporters’ actions show how important it is to Japanese people to be considerate of others, or just good old-fashioned common sense that applies wherever you are in the world, everyone (well, almost everyone) agreed that taking your rubbish home with you is A Good Thing.

This week, however, Japanese Twitter users have breathed a collective disappointed sigh as photos of the trash left in the streets after the world-famous Sumida River Fireworks Festival show some people in Japan aren’t as super-considerate as we’d like to think. Is Tokyo an exception to the rules? Or is Japan’s reputation as a super-clean nation undeserved?

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That awkward moment when anime becomes reality

Here at RocketNews24 we’re always on the lookout for cases where life meets art, whether it’s characters from video games spliced into real-life falling-over gifs, or animals hanging out with giant fluffy figures at Disneyland. So when we saw this video that’s been dubbed “the anime fall in real life”, we knew it was the one for us.

These two handball players ended up in an awkward position when they collided on the court. Unfortunately for them, the moment – as well as their amused reaction – was captured and replayed in slow motion all over the internet, giving teenage boys the world over plenty to think about and anime fans reason to believe that their preferred medium of entertainment isn’t quite so removed from reality after all…

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Street Fighter: Assassin’s Fist to get theatrical premiere in Tokyo!

The brainchild of martial arts expert and lifelong Street Fighter devotee Joey Ansah, live-action series Assassin’s Fist was finally released on May 23 this year. Of course, you could stay home and watch the episodes on YouTube via Machinama‘s official channel, but if you happen to be in Tokyo on August 2, you could take in a special screening of the entire series in one night!

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