Nipponica

Starting this month, the large machine with enormous arms, a crude, disproportionately small Wall-E-like head and coke-bottle eyes mounted on a truck – which can drive on rails – will be put to use for maintenance work on the company’s network.

Sometimes living in Japan feels like living back in the 1980s. In this case, and basically any time robotics in involved, this is the FUTURE I was promised. Keep being weird, JR.

In the space of just a few years, the stand-up comic went from celebrated to shunned. Woman Rush Hour — his manzai comedy duo with Paradise Nakagawa — saw their annual TV appearances plummet from 250 to just one.

The reason wasn’t too hard to deduce. In 2017, Muramoto had a political awakening during a trip to an area hit by the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami. Suddenly, his routines became consciousness-raising tirades, exploring and exploding social taboos and scandals du jour while occasionally remembering to throw in a good gag.

Really curious to see this as I am not too versed in Japanese comedy. The review paints Nakagawa as a genuine guy that is just trying to help people think about issues using comedy as a tool, much like Carlin et. al. in the western context. And doing so in good faith, unlike some.

Japan will need 970,000 more foreign workers than it will have in 2040 to meet the nation's economic growth target, a new estimate shows, highlighting the country's challenges in attracting and retaining overseas talent.

The cultural and monetary barriers in place that keep workers from coming to Japan are working. Incentivizing pregnancies isn't working so Japan either needs to make the country more welcoming for immigrants or double down on robotification and hope Snatcher isn't brought to real life.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi told a news conference it was "regrettable" that China has set up a small buoy in the waters off Japan's western main island of Shikoku and north of the southernmost Okinotori Island "without explaining its purpose and other details."

The article later says that the alleged purpose of the buoy is for tsunami monitoring but an email or two to Tokyo would have been a nice gesture. A similar buoy was installed around the Senkakus last year.

On March 26 at around 2:30 p.m, the two suspects reportedly told their coworker, a 50-year-old man with an intellectual disability, "You stink! Get in the washing machine."

They allegedly proceeded to force him into the machine and turn it on, resulting in injuries that required two weeks to heal.

Besides the usual comments about harassment in Japanese working culture, I must also make note that this is also harassment of those with intellectual impairments. We all just need to love each other regardless of our differences and get along. This story is so sad.

Japan's capsule toy industry has come a long way from the corner of the supermarket, as it enjoys a new boom at home that is spurring multiple market players to set their sights on overseas expansion.

The whole Gacha Industrial Complex is fun on one hand but it is a kind of warm-and-fuzzy introduction to gambling for kids and adults. You get a prize every time but rarely the one you actually wanted, which encourages you to take another chance.

The old man will now leave the room and let joy return.

It had been raining since the morning, but the rain stopped occasionally during the parade. Sensing that the guests were losing energy in the heat, Baymax stopped the floats and splashed water on them. The guests cheered loudly.

Baymax for PM.

An entire set of Hiroshige’s colorful depictions of his native city was bound into a book, donated to the Brooklyn Museum and left in storage for 40 years before being unbound in the 1970s. Because it was probably intended especially for such a collection, this particular set was also a kind of luxury edition, made with extra care and details, like the use of reflective metallic dust, that ordinary consumer-grade prints, for all their intricacy, didn’t have.

Bit of a drive from Asia but if you are in the New York area, it is a must-see.

The poll also revealed 10 per cent of Japanese have set out to “tolerate” the heat no matter what in the coming months, while a further 33 per cent said they would try not to use the cooling device – but expected to relent if the temperatures become unbearable.

Alarmingly, most those saying they would attempt to get through the summer without air conditioning were elderly who live on pensions and savings, leaving them highly vulnerable to heatstroke.

This is more than just a climate crisis, it is now going to be a health and economic crisis.

SkyDrive sought to develop a flying taxi that can carry up to three people to showcase its technology at the expo as one of the event's main attractions, but it decided last month to withdraw the plan and only perform demo flights without passengers.

Taiwan Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu on Wednesday called for stronger relations between the island and Japan during his meeting with a group of Japanese parliamentarians in Taipei, emphasizing that lawmakers on both sides have the "responsibility" to maintain exchanges.