Pop Culture

The Japanese language is rich with expressions and words that extol the virtues of corporal punishment aka taibatsu (体罰) but the penchant some older Japanese have for slapping their younger…

Japan, the Mother of World’s First Novel to Hosted its First International Literary Festival, this year.

Tora-san, Japan's most popular movie figure, doesn't have a home. He's a tramp, and a tekiya (的屋)--a street-merchant yakuza--who earns his living by traveling in remote Japanese towns and selling…

Mild Seven cigarettes are no more to be found in the smoker's paradise. Japan Tobacco Inc. changed the name of its flagship cigarette brand from "Mild Seven" to "Mevius" in…

Yesterday, February 5th, the International Fund for Animal Welfare released a report: The Economics Of Japanese Whaling: A Collapsing Industry Burdens Taxpayers, and held a press conference at the Foreign…

Blood-Stained Mai Love by Mamoru Oshii is a black comedy about a high school student with a fetish for donating blood and his strange friendship with Mai, a wandering Transylvanian…

Japan kept making cell-phone that weren’t compatible with the rest of the world and only worked well within the confines of Japan. The development of Japanese cell-phone and mobile technology…

“People’s clothing are the ‘social symbols’ which allows other people to understand whether he/she is a Buddhist monk, a Christian priest, a salary man, or a medical doctor. Therefore the…

It is difficult to say whether the wabori Japanese traditional tattoo (入れ墨） hurts more or less than the electric needle tattoo. Pain is like tickle, it is not a feeling…

Hello Kitty, yakuza working in the nuclear industry, coffee and cigarettes, 2012 was a year chock full of news. Here are some of our favorite stories we ran in 2012.