Even bishōjo have a thing for Fred.

Hat tip to Belacqui.

Course 2: bontanebi (still twitching shrimp) served with bits of wood ants featuring a lemon-scented pheromone.

Jeralyn Gerba undoubtedly pulled rank as a prominent travel blogger to get to the front of a 60,000+-long line of eager diners trying to catch a meal during the world-famous Copenhagen-based Noma restaurant’s six week long “pop-up” visit to Tokyo.

[M]y epic midday meal was like a thousand-year culture and history lesson served in a few dozen bites. …

I was psyched to hear the Noma philosophy straight from the horse’s mouth. How does a restaurant become the best in the world? How does such an outlandishly expensive operation create enough buzz to maintain the spotlight? You’d expect some flash (hello, 16-course tasting menu) and a few gimmicks (serving “technically dead” crustaceans covered in ants), but you might underestimate, as I did, the degree to which each and every item on the plate (not to mention the plate itself) has meaning, intention, and purpose. There’s an answer for everything, including moving to Japan. These guys are not messing around.

Read the whole thing.

Somebody actually paid a fortune to arrange the installation of video and other technologies providing the simulated appearance of full 1-to-1-scale giant robots, Zaku, called “mobile suits,” from the popular Gundam anime, at a high-rise Tokyo office building. Futher Gundam appearances have been promised.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

kintsugi-repair:

Guess what this is.

This is is a tool called taiki, which means tai fish tooth. Don’t say it’s creepy. It’s a traditional tool to polish gold. Tai fish has strong teeth, so it is one of the best tool to make sprinkled gold shinny.

My friend who also learns kintsugi is a chef, and he gave a dozen of teeth. it’s interesting to hand make kintsugi tools.

鯛牙をつくってみた！

これは文字通り鯛の牙を筆の柄にくっつけただけの道具で、昔から金を磨くのに使われているらしい。

金継ぎ友の友人が料理人で、鯛の牙をごっそりくれたのだ。ありがたや！

鯛牙はお店でも買えるけど、自分で作るとさらに愛着がわくねー

Via Collections & Recollections.

——————–

Wikipedia:

Kintsugi (金継ぎ?) (Japanese: golden joinery) or Kintsukuroi (金繕い?) (Japanese: golden repair) is the Japanese art of fixing broken pottery with lacquer resin dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum a method similar to the maki-e technique. As a philosophy it speaks to breakage and repair becoming part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.

In Kendo, you shout “Men!” as you strike at the head.

Hat tip to Madame Scherzo.

Yadome no jutsu, the Japanese art of cutting or blocking a flying arrow.

Silicon Beat:

It’s old news that the Internet has become an essential part of daily life. But now Yahoo Japan is offering to help people prepare for their eventual death online.

A new service called “Yahoo! Ending” promises to delete personal data from online accounts, send out a digital farewell message to friends and even host a memorial web page where people can leave condolences – once the service has confirmed that a subscriber has died.

That’s according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, which said the service will also help people plan their funerals and even compose their wills. (We checked out the Yahoo Japan site, but the English-language version provided by Google Translate left us confused about some details.)

This isn’t actually a new idea: We’ve reported previously on smaller companies that offer this kind of service. But it’s the first time we’ve heard of a comprehensive death package offered by a large Internet company. Yahoo Japan is a joint venture between Sunnyvale-based Yahoo and the Japanese giant SoftBank.

A US version would be poised to make a fortune.

The Japanese have an island devoted to rabbits.

Daily Mail story

————————————-

A great collection from Markus Sesko:

jigane ga deru (地鉄が出る) – Literally “the steel appears,” for example when a blade is polished so often that the shingane appears or the jigane shows more unrefined areas. As a saying, it means “to reveal one´s true character.”

Hat tip to John Antony Scott.

Hand-coloured albumen print photograph entitled Samurai, taken by Felice Beato and Charles Wirgman, c. 1865. Published in Photographic Views of Japan in 1867.

The subject of the portrait has his sword already started from its sheath in a ready-to-draw position, and his eyes and the expression on his face reinforce the pose. The subject’s natural pose of incipient violence reminds one of the readiness of a goshawk standing tiptoe on the branch or the lion crouched in the grass ready to charge. He has the same predator’s eye.

Hat tip to Madame Scherzo.

Kyūdō: 弓道 is the Japanese style of Archery.

Via Ratak Monodosico.

Aoshima, Japan: left by humans to the cats.

Via This Isn’t Happiness.