South Korean media recently reported the bizarre and sad story of an elderly couple who spent the last decade of their lives hoarding tons of trash for their 40-something son who refused to leave the house and find a job.

SBS, a South Korean national television network presented the shocking story of Choi, a 75-year-old man from Gwangju, who over the last decade turned his two-storey house into a dump full of garbage gathered from the city streets and from trash cans. Convinced that one man’s garbage is another man’s treasure, the pensioner literally filled up his entire house with junk, before doing the same with the balconies and even the yard. As you can see from the photos below, the house was quite literally buried in trash.

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While most real-estate firms try their best to conceal potentially disturbing details about the properties they are trying to sell or lease, one Japanese company puts these details front and center, focusing on the advantages haunted or spooky houses have.

Jikko buken, the Japanese term for “accident properties” are a controversial aspect of Japanese culture. The term describes generally undesirable homes, be it because of their proximity to cemeteries or crematoriums, or because of disturbing events that took place in them, from suicide, to accidental deaths or even murder. Because Japanese law states that any potential buyer or renter needs to be notified about any such details, the term “accident property” is generally used. But while most real-estate companies avoid giving details about the “accidents” in their listing, Jobutsu Estate, aka Buddhahood Real Estate, has built its business model around giving potential clients as many disturbing details as necessary.

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Having been running for the last 15 years, TV Asahi’s Zenryokuzaka is one of Japan’s most longstanding television shows, which is a bit strange considering its simple premise.

Every night at 1:20 a.m., Monday to Thursday, thousands of people tune in to TV Asahi to watch the latest episode of Zenryokuzaka, a bizarre show featuring women running up steep streets. Each episode lasts no more than six minute, including the opening and closing credits, and focuses solely on following the protagonist as she runs up the street. It’s an extremely simplistic concept, even for late-night TV, but one that has somehow remained popular in Japan for the last 15 years.

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A Chinese woman was forced to lie to her grandmother, and even recruit someone to do the same, for 13 years, just to avoid breaking the old woman’s heart.

Chinese media recently featured the heartbreaking story of a young woman who decided to deceive her own grandmother for over a decade, knowing that the truth would be to much for her to bear. Cheng Jing, a 46-year-old woman from Xi’an, recently lost her grandmother, who died at the ripe old age of 100, but for the last 13 years of her life, she did everything in her power to make the old woman believe that her daughter was still alive. Jing’s mother had died in 2003, but knowing that the news would devastate her grandmother, she resorted to recruiting someone to imitate her mother’s voice over the phone to spare her granny the heartache.

Jing’s mother, Cheng Congrong, and her grandmother had always been very close, and even after Cheng developed lung cancer in 2003, she still called her mother as often as she could to let her know she was alright. Knowing that she didn’t have much to live, Congrong even recorded dozens of voice messages and asked her children to play them to their grandmother so she wouldn’t worry.

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A Buddhist monk in Shanghai, China, has dedicated more than half of his life to caring for stray dogs, rescuing and taking care of tens of thousands of them since 1994.

53-year-old Zhixiang is the head monk of the Bao’en Temple in Shanghai, but nowadays his disciples take care of most of the day-to-day business, as he spends all his time taking care of the rescued animals. There are currently around 8,000 dogs, not to mention hundreds of cats, as well as chickens, geese and peacocks in Zhixiang’s care, but he’s been rescuing abandoned and stray animals since 1994, so he is used to it. Over the years, he has learned to administer medicine and give the animals shots, as taking them all to a vet would be too costly, and only recently started taking donations from other animal lovers, as a ways to make ends meet.

Zhixiang’s mission as a rescuer of stray animals began in 1994. He was riding in a car on the highway when he witnessed a cat being hit by another vehicle. It wasn’t dead, but it was left severely injured, struggling to crawl to the side of the road with only two paws. It’s an image that the Buddhist monk hates to remember and the one that pushed him to start rescuing strays.

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The Aruka Shrine in Japan’s Ebina City is the oldest shrine in all of Sagami Province, but to the general public it’s known for a unique ceremony that involves a priest wearing a 2-meter-long headgear in the shape of a green onion.

Negi-san, the head priest at Aruka Shrine has been performing the green onion ceremony for about four years , but it only went viral last year, when photos of the priest wearing the bizarre headgear went viral on Japanese social media. It was a pretty weird thing to see, even by Japanese standards, but that only made it more interesting. Here was this masked priest wearing a green skirt and white shirt matching the green-and-white green onion on their head bending over to pass through a small circle wrapped in rope. It made no sense, and yet, everyone was intrigued.

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A new Japanese service is drawing attention for allowing both individuals and companies to rent out “fat people” for 2,000 yen ($18) per hour.

Renting people for various purposes isn’t anything new in Japan. From renting someone to befriend your cheating partner’s lover and convince them to back off, to renting middle-aged men for company, the offers vary a lot, and starting this month you can add another option to the list – renting fat people. Called “Debucari”, the new service allows virtually anyone to rent a fat person by the hour. Apparently, fat people – over 100 kilograms – are somewhat of a rarity in Japan, so the entrepreneur behind the service thought that making them available via an online service would be a great business opportunity.

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Hanging by the neck is considered dangerous, some would even call it deadly, but pensioners in China are increasingly turning to it as a form of exercise to treat back pain.

A bizarre exercising trend has become very popular among elderly fitness enthusiasts in China’s Liaoning Province over the last couple of years. Photos and videos show pensioners hanging by the neck on a special harness and either dangling in the air or swinging their bodies back and forth, and in a circular pattern. They attach these special neck hanging harnesses to trees in parks, or to metal bars at outdoor exercising venues, and they swear that the unusual exercises do wonders for their back problems.

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A Chinese man was browsing his favorite video app when he stumbled upon a recent video of his wife marrying another man in a neighboring town.

At age 35, Yin Cheng (pseudonym) is already considered an “elderly youth” in his in his home city of Bayannur, Inner Mongolia, so it’s no surprise that his family has been pushing him to find a wife. But that’s not an easy task in China nowadays, so earlier this year the man sought the help of a matchmaker, surnamed Li, who introduced him to (Nana) a woman who had reportedly already been married before. That didn’t really matter to him, and after talking to Nana over video calls a few times, he asked her to come to Bayannur so they could meet in person, and even sent her 1,000 yuan as a sign of good faith. Little did he know that he was falling for an elaborate scam…

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A young Lamborghini owner in China recently got his five minutes of online fame by trying to barbecue some skewered pork with the car’s fiery exhaust and incurring about $80,000 in repair costs.

A few days ago a group of men gathered around an orange Lamborghini sports car in an underground garage in Changsha, Hunan Province, to witness the cooking of what many have called the world’s most expensive skewered pork. Apparently, the luxury car owner and his friend decided that it would be fun to use the Lamborghini’s super hot exhaust to barbecue a small piece of meat skewered on a stick. The driver kept pressing the acceleration pedal of the parked car, while his smiling friend held the skewer. What could go wrong, right?

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Police in China have recently been issuing warnings about “fake women” using realistic-looking silicone breasts prosthesis to trick men into removing their clothes during online chats and then blackmailing them with the footage.

If the last couple of years have taught us anything, it’s that you should definitely not trust anything you see online. From commercially available apps like FaceApp, to advanced deepfake and artificial intelligence, technology has gotten so good at tricking the human eye that you just can’t trust your vision anymore. But it’s not just technology, either. According to recent reports, gangs of Chinese men have been using rudimentary tools like silicone breasts and makeup to pose as women online and blackmail gullible people.

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The Screambulance is a new haunted house experience in Japan designed to offer the most terrifying experience in a very tiny space, while abiding by social distancing rules.

The Covid-19 pandemic has really taken a toll on the entertainment business, and haunted house experiences are no exception. So now companies are coming up with creative workarounds to stay in business and offer people the scares they crave while abiding social distancing protocols. One such ingenious service is the Screambulance, a mobile haunted house experience in the form of a bloody, beatdown ambulance with an even scarier interior, and a zombie-like staff to boot.

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A 73-storey skyscraper in Shenzen, China, was recently evacuated after it reportedly started shaking for no apparent reason, sending inhabitants into a panic.

On Tuesday afternoon, SEG Plaza, a 20-year-old skyscraper in Shenzen, started wobbling visibly, prompting both people inside and those on the streets below to flee for their lives. Videos shared on social media by people in the vicinity at the time of the freak occurrence, show the giant edifice leaning from one side to the other,  and furniture on the inside shaking. By the time the Shenzhen Emergency Management Bureau evacuated the building, it had stopped shaking, but the plaza remained sealed off until the investigation into the cause of the wobbling was concluded.

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A 70-year-old Chinese woman has been dubbed “Super Grannie” after it was revealed that she is an avid runner, with over 100 marathons completed in the last two decades.

Most people choose to take it easy after they retire, but Liaoning-based Wang Lang is definitely not one of them. She only started running at the age of 50, as a way to keep in shape, but soon realized it was her passion. She ran her first marathon in 2004 and hasn’t stopped since, racking over 100 completed marathons under her belt. From 2005 to 2017 she completed the annual Beijing Marathon thirteen times, and this year she set a new record, becoming the oldest person to ever complete the 168-kilometer Liaoning marathon, within some 40 hours.

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A 23-year-old university student was recently sentenced to two and a half years in prison for swindling KFC out of about $31,000 in fast food, by taking advantage of an ordering loophole.

The student, surnamed Xu first discovered the glitch in 2018, and not only continued to use it to his benefit for the next six months, but he also shared it with friends and even profited financially from it. The Jiangsu-based student accidentally realized that he could order free food by paying for it using coupons in the official KFC app, and then immediately asking for a refund of the coupons using the company’s WeChat account. It was any KFC’s fan dream come true, all the fried chicken you could eat, totally free.

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