Random Japan

NEWS FROM THE ANIMAL KINGDOM

A research team led by a professor at Keio University has found mice can tell the difference between paintings by Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian.

In response to wild deer causing damage to local plant species in the Oze marshlands, Fukushima officials say they’ll start “shooting the animals with high-pressure water guns.”

Japanese scientists have determined a class of insecticides aka neonicotinoids may be responsible for colony-collapse disorder, which is threatening the global honeybee population.

Police in western Tokyo arrested a man who ran a health clinic despite having no medical license. None of the man’s 8,000 “patients” reported any ill effects from the treatment.

stats

70

Percent of Japanese who support the idea of “preparing a document in advance specifying their wishes on medical treatments,” according to the health ministry

3

Percent of Japanese who have prepared such documents

38.2

Percent of Japanese workers who are considered “non-regular” employees-a record-according to the internal affairs ministry

Survey suggests that most Japanese smartphone users couldn’t care less about mobile sites

by Andrew Miller

It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that smartphones and mobile technology in general have changed our lives in ways that we might never have imagined even 10 years ago. Communication between people on either side of the globe has become almost instant, with a wealth of information quite literally at our fingertips, and we now have more processing power in our back pockets than the PCs that took up most of our desks in the late 90s.

But is it possible that we are becoming a little too obsessed with making our data-loving life as streamlined as possible? What we’re talking about here are the mobile versions of websites that users are often redirected to when trying to visit a website on their smartphones. Often, these smartphone-friendly sites help us navigate more easily and avoid having to pinch to zoom or pan around the screen to read their contents. But due to their simplicity, many mobile versions lack many of the features of their PC-version brethren and we spend time trying to find what we really want.

Hello

My Name Is

“Glorious Mission Online”

Let’s Be Nationalistic Assholes

Channeling

His Inner Adolf

A Japanese perspective on traveling in the U.S.



By Preston Phro

Today, we bring you a Japanese perspective on visiting the United States of America. While many Japanese people enjoy visiting the United States, there are some things that can end up being a bit… disappointing.

For most Japanese people, “America” means steak, pizza, cheeseburgers and other delicious foods. And considering how big of a deal food is in Japanese culture, this isn’t a bad thing at all. On the other hand, there are a few things that the average Japanese traveler abroad might wish were different. One of our Japanese friends recently took a trip to the U.S., and, though he generally had a great time, there were a few things that could have been better.