If you are in Japan and want to take your mind off all this crazy H1N1, you might want to rent a movie to relax. People have lots to choose from, starting with “Outbreak”, or the miniseries made from Stephen King’s “The Stand”. If you’re feeling a little science-fictiony, you might even try Attack of…
It seems that Hitoshi Matsumoto was not as forthcoming as he could have been in his press conference yesterday when he described his new bride as “an everyday person”. She is actually a 26 year old (19 years his junior) former tv announcer and television personality named Rin Ihara pictured below. Their baby is due…
All schools from kindergarten to college level in Hyogo have been closed for the week. You have to feel bad for the kids who happened to be at schools for which this was just announced. Much of them went to school only to be sent home, and if Hyogo prefecture is trying to hold off…
Forty-five year old Hitoshi Matsumoto from the Japanese comedic duo “Downtown” has gotten married. The new bride is not in the entertainment industry. Not much has been reported about her except that she is currently pregnant. Many people in the entertainment industry had Matsumoto pegged as a lifelong bachelor, however in a press conference he…
At least one case (possibly 3 at the time of this writing) cases of H1N1 influenza have been verified in Kobe, Hyogo Prefecture. The significance of these cases is that none of the high school students involved have been abroad recently, thus the flu must have come through a source in Japan. (The other cases…
As I was perusing the Google Maps page to check out information about the new Street View filming in Japan I happened upon another link that shows that Google Street View Japan is looking for “partners”. The following video illustrates: This video features the first ever Google Street View Japan partner filming which took place…
The refilming of Japan by the Google Street View team has begun and media reports say that the camera is about 40 centimeters lower this time. The new height for the camera is 205 centimeters from ground level. The camera’s height reduction could be in response to people complaining that the Google Street View Car’s…
The official Google blog recently featured a very cute video advertising Google Chrome which was made by the Google Japan team. I’ve embedded the video below for those of you who are interested… the interesting thing to me is that this video has been seen over two million times with its English language title on…
toothpastefordinner.com Toothpaste for Dinner, predicting the future. You gotta love it when there’s something on the net about Japan and the person who wrote it seems to have a clue. This is one of my favorite online comics so I was especially pleased to see a mention of Japan. If you like things like this,…
Newzjapan is a big Google fan, so we’ve written before about the long awaited appearance of Google Street View in Okinawa, Hiroshima, and other non-Tokyo locations, not to mention the debate about privacy and Google Street View in Japan. We even wrote about the first time that Street View came to Japan. Gigazine Japan recently reported…
On January 21 this year, during a free study period at a junior high school in Ibaraki Prefecture, a teacher (and head of the grade level) walked into a classroom to yell at two kids for going home too late the previous day. The two students were in their third year and had just returned…
In a nutshell, a 67 year old Japanese man is suing his country because the weekend and holiday reduced tolls are only applicable to cars that pay by ETC (the Japanese equivalent to EZPass or other automatic toll paying systems). He claims it’s unfair that he has to pay full price on weekends just because…