Category — Japan

Font Park is an excellent, playful Flash site that allows you to choose oriental characters (you can also add your own roman characters) and push and prod them into witty illustrations!

Some people seem to have made a real, creative effort and have submitted their designs to the gallery, which you can view.

Try out Font Park

Thanks Stefan!

Technorati Tags: design, fonts, Japan, oriental type, type, Font Park

I read about these before, but apparently, “cat cafés” are a phenomenon in Tokyo. The Japanese pay about $8-$12 an hour to play with someone else’s cats.

Why do they do this? Josh Spear states that:

Tokyo is one of the most overworked cities in the world, with its denizens facing long commutes and hours of unpaid overtime. Residents lack the time and space to devote to pets of their own, but need the stress-relieving benefits of a feline companion..

Via JoshSpear

Technorati Tags: culture, cat cafés, Japan, Tokyo

The film Iron Man is slowly moving out of our minds (until Iron Man II comes out!) but that hasn’t stopped the Japanese company Hot Toys creating 1:6 scale Iron Man Mark I, II and III figures that feature an absolutely extraordinary level of detail.

Check the Mark I figure below! Not sure when the figures will come out, but they’re looking damn good!

Via gizmodo

Technorati Tags: Hot Toys, film, Iron Man, Iron Man toys, Japan, toys

A Japanese company says it has made an airbag designed to stop elderly people injuring themselves by falling over. The device is strapped around the body and inflates in 0.1 seconds if it detects it is accelerating towards the ground, the manufacturers say.

The Tokyo-based company, Prop, says the product is designed to cushion a fall using two separate pockets of air.

One pocket will be behind the head and the other around the hips. It does not protect those who fall forward. The president of Prop, Mitsuya Uchida, says it is aimed especially at old people with epilepsy, who are very vulnerable to injury.

From the BBC - Visit to see a video showing the wearable airbag in action!

Photo via Ubergizmo

Technorati Tags: airbag, gadgets, Japan, Prop, wearable airbag

TokyoMango posted this digital watch, which looks like the signage for the Yamanote train line in Tokyo. The Yamanote line is the green-and-silver train that does a big loop around central Tokyo.

I think it looks quite nice, in a designer sort of way, but I can imagine some train geeks really loving this item. Not sure if I’d feel the same if it looked like London Tube signage though - I’d break out in a sweat every time I looked at it..

The Yamanote Line digital watch on TokyoMango

Technorati Tags: digital watch, gadgets, Japan, watches, Yamanote train line

Equal parts ninja geekery and pop-cultural satire, The Ninja Handbook falls into that odd category of book that presents fiction as reality.

Branded as an “Official Product of the International Order of Ninjas,” it’s an exploration of the lessons a non-ninja, or nonja, needs to learn in order to become a ninja. Of course, the book is subtitled “This Book Looks Forward To Killing You Soon,” so one might expect that the lessons to be taught aren’t quite so easy, or ordinary.

The book offers introductory advice and information about ninja, including how to form a ninja clan and make a clan flag. It also teaches the Path to nearly ninja-hood, broken up into subsections that cover (in turn) the Nonja (non-ninja), those who are Ninjaish, the Ninjalike, the “Whooooooooo,” (the sound of a gentle breeze) and then the I.T.A.N. (”Is That A Ninja?”).

Take with a pinch of sashimi!

Buy The Ninja Handbook at Amazon

More information on Slashdot

Technorati Tags: books, martial arts, ninja geekery, pop-cultural satire, The Ninja Handbook

Zoe Lacchei has a series of beautiful and slightly dark artworks under her “Geisha Project“.

See examples below. More on zoelacchei.com

Via Sexinart

Technorati Tags: art, geisha, Geisha women, Japan, Geisha Project, Zoe Lacchei

Hows this for an eco-concept? Shuhei Ogawara, a former city employee in Koriyama, Japan, built a four metre long canoe from thousands of used disposable chopsticks recovered from the city hall cafeteria.

Bothered that perfectly good wood was going to waste after a single use, Shuhei Ogawara - whose job at city hall involved working with the local forestry industry - spent the last two years of his career collecting used chopsticks from the cafeteria.

An experienced canoe builder, Ogawara spent over three months gluing 7,382 chopsticks together into strips to form the canoe shell, to which he added a polyester resin coat.

Now if only people could use these instead of cars, then we’d reduce any oil crisis.

Via the PinkTentacle

Technorati Tags: chopstick canoe, crafts, Japan