A 39-year-old former hostess and model from Japan recently went on national television and revealed that she spent over 30 million yen ($280,000) on cosmetic procedures in the last 21 years, after becoming traumatized that her mother had never been satisfied with her looks growing up.

Tsubaki Tomomi had her first plastic surgery when she turned 18, right after graduating high-school. By the time she turned twenty, she had already fixed her teeth, had eye shaping surgery and gotten breast implants. She has been on a never-ending quest to enhance her physical appearance ever since, and doesn’t plan on stopping until the day she dies. Although Tsubaki claims to have embraced plastic surgery as a way of keeping herself looking youthful, she says that her obsession with it started in her childhood. Her mother used to always complain about her looks, calling her “unsightly” in front of other people, so she just got it into her head that she had to make herself look more pleasing. As soon as she got old enough to undergo plastic surgery, she did so. She claims to have spent over 30 million yen ($280,000) on cosmetic procedures since then.

Read More »

A Chinese man who recently turned up at a hospital in Yunnan Province with a swollen eyelid and excruciating headache was shocked to learn that his condition was caused by several pieces of wood stuck in his brain.

The 41-year-old man, surnamed Zhou, told doctors that he first realized something was wrong about two months ago, when an old scan on his right eyelid became swollen and his occasional headaches started getting worse. Unable to deal with the pain, he finally went to the First People’s Hospital in Yunnan Province for treatment, where a computerized tomography scan revealed that he had several pieces of wood with a combined length of 11 cm stuck in his brain. Asked how on Earth he had ended up with so much would deep inside his skull, Zhou recalled an accident that had occurred half a decade prior.

Read More »

Outside the Japanese town of Otsuchi, on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean, there is a white, glass-paneled phone booth with a black rotary phone connected to nothing and nowhere. Ever since the tragic tsunami of 2010, which claimed nearly 20,000 human lives, thousands of grieving people have visited the booth to “call” their lost loved ones as a way of coping with their loss.

The Wind Phone, as the now famous Otsuchi telephone booth is commonly known, was actually built a year before the 2011 tsunami that ravaged Japan’s Tōhoku coast. Otsuchi resident, Itaru Sasaki, had lost his cousin in 2010 and decided to build a phone booth in his hilltop garden from where he would call his dear relative as a way of dealing with grief. He would dial his cousin’s phone number on an old, unconnected rotary phone, and his words would be “carried on the wind” as he spoke. Even though no one would talk back to him, it made Sasaki feel a deeper connection to his cousin.

Read More »

A Chinese animal lover who took in hundreds of stray dogs over the last two years is struggling to make ends meet despite having a stable job and his own business. He has accumulated a debt of 600,000 yuan ($87,000), but he refuses to give up on his four-legged friends.

Up until two years ago, Zhang Kai, a 41-year-old man from Chengdu, China, had a peaceful, comfortable life. He was the manager of a state-owned company and had just opened his own travel agency. But everything changed when his 13-year-old dog, which he had raised since 2003 suddenly died. The tragic event left a void in his life, and somehow made him pay more attention to the countless strays in his city in need of a home. At first, he took in two of them and raised them in his travel agency office, but before he knew it he was taking care of eight strays. Things just snowballed from there, and today he is struggling to take care of 260 dogs, relying solely on bank loans and donations.

Read More »

Last week, a Chinese man went to the hospital after experiencing severe chest pain and was shocked to learn that his discomfort was caused by the house keys he thought he had lost the night before after getting drunk with his friends.

On June 7th, a 26-year-old man, identified solely as Chang, from Guangdong, China, went out for drinks with his friends, to celebrate the end of another long work week. When he got home in the middle of the night, he searched for his keys, but couldn’t find them, so he called someone inside and asked them to let him. He was pretty drunk, so he didn’t give his lost keys a second thought, instead going straight to bed. The next morning,  as the numbing effect of the alcohol started to wear off, Chang started experiencing a sharp pain in his chest, so he went to the local Dongguan Hospital to have it checked out.

Read More »

An 11-year-old boy from Xinxiang city, China’s Henan province, has been praised for taking on the mission of saving his father’s life by eating as much as he possibly can.

Lu Zikuan’s father was diagnosed with leukemia seven years ago and has been treated with medication ever since. However, last August his health started deteriorating drastically and doctors informed him that his only option was a life-saving bone marrow transplant. After screening members of his family for possible matches, they found that the only viable donor was Zikuan, who was 10-years-old at the time. Despite his young age, the primary school student was eager to go under the knife to save his father’s life. But there was one big problem, he weighed only 30 kg, and doctors told the family that they wouldn’t operate on him unless he gained at least 15 kg more. So in March of this year he started stuffing his face with as much fatty food as possible.

Read More »

A 27 -year-old woman who was caught raising a six-month-old endangered sun bear in her Kuala Lumpur condominium unit explained that it had found it on the side of the road and took it in thinking it was a dog.

On June 6, residents of the Sentrio Suites Condominium in, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, were shocked to hear the roars of what sounded like a wild beast coming from the building’s upper floors. Then they spotted what looked to be a bear poking its head through the window of an apartment and screaming its heart out. At first, most of them thought it was just someone trying to prank them by putting on a bear suit and making animal noises, but then one of the tenants living below the suspicious scene took a video and confirmed that it was indeed a real bear. That’s when the authorities were contacted to remove the threat.

Read More »

Deoco, a range of women’s beauty products that allegedly captures the coveted “young woman smell”, has become a huge hit in Japan, among both older women who want to smell younger and lonely men who crave the fragrance of a younger woman.

The story of this intriguing line of cosmetics began last year, when Japanese company Rohto Pharmaceutical announced that it had successfully isolated two fragrant chemical compounds, called Lactone C10 and C11, which younger women’s bodies seemed to produce in much larger quantities than those of older women. In a study that involved 500 women of all ages, from teens to adults in their 50s, Rohto’s scientists detected a “sweet aroma” that was stronger in younger women’s worn clothes. Subsequent research revealed that the scent came from two lactones, the levels of which were highest among teens, but dropped significantly in women over 35. After making the discovery and isolating the two compounds, Rohto quickly started working on Deoco, a line of body soaps and deodorants rich in Lactone C10 and C11.

Read More »

A Chinese woman recently took to social media to express her surprise at the gift she received from her boyfriend of May 20, one of three annual romantic holidays in China. She apparently received the usage rights to 210 hectares of open ocean.

Located off the coast of Shandong province, near Cheniushan Island, the stretch of ocean previously belonged to to a fish farming company and was acquired by the woman’s boyfriend via online auction. The man, surnamed Zhang, reportedly paid 682,662 yuan (around $99,000) for it and offered it to his girlfriend as a way to make amends for not buying her a gift on May 20. While not the most romantic gesture in history, it definitely gave the woman a chance to boast about her unusual gift on social media.

Read More »

There’s no question that artificial intelligence has come a long way in the last few years, but apparently it’s not yet advanced enough to tell the difference between someone using a mobile phone and someone scratching their face.

Chinese media recently reported the case of a man in Jinan, eastern Shandong province, who received a notification that he had broken the law by talking on the phone while driving. The letter also had a surveillance picture of his so-called offence attached, which showed him holding his right hand to his cheek. Only the man didn’t remember using his phone behind the wheel that day, and the picture didn’t show a phone either, just his hand in an awkward position near his face. It turns out the motorist was just scratching his face when the picture was taken. Even so, he learned that he would receive two penalty points on his licence and be required to pay a 50 yuan ($7.25) fine.

Read More »

A Chinese man has been labeled a victim of abuse after being slapped in public a whopping 52 times by his girlfriend, who was apparently upset that he hadn’t bought her a new smartphone for Chinese Valentine’s Day.

While most Chinese couples celebrated May 20th, or “520” – one of the Asian country’s three yearly ‘lovers’ days’ – in a romantic way, one pair in Sichuan province decided to cause a shocking scene instead. Videos captured by nearby surveillance cameras as well as passers-by and later shared on social media showed a young woman slapping her boyfriend in the street while viciously scolding him for allegedly failing to buy her a new smartphone as a gift. Although the footage doesn’t show all the slaps, police later confirmed that the man endured no less than 52 of them under the shocked gazes of strangers gathered to witness his humiliation.

Read More »

If you’re not a confrontational person, having to argue with someone can be a daunting task. Luckily, Chinese online marketplace Taobao now offers people the chance to hire a “professional quarreler” to argue on their behalf.

There’s a good reason why Taobao is considered the world’s largest e-commerce platform. You can find virtually anything there, from popular products like smartphones to homework-writing robots and even bizarre services like hiring people to eat your favorite treats so you don’t have to. The latest addition to Taobao’s seemingly infinite list of goods and services is ‘quarreling by proxy’, which gives people the chance to hire strangers to argue or simply harass someone on their behalf, for a small fee.

Read More »

For the seventh time in the last couple of years, a Chinese person has been arrested for trying to drop a handful of metal coins into an airplane engine, for good luck.

On Monday morning a 66-year-old woman surnamed Wang was detained for attempting to throw six metal coins into the engine of a Tianjin Airlines plane just before take-off, in an effort to guarantee a safe trip. Fortunately, the coins ended up on the ground instead of into the multi-million dollar engine, and were noticed by an airport worker before the plane’s departure. When an announcement was made, asking whoever threw the coins to come forward, Wang refused to take responsibility, but she soon identified using surveillance footage.

Read More »

52-year-old Simon Lee has been sleeping rough on the streets of Hong Kong for the last seven years, but unlike most homeless people, he didn’t just wind up there after some tragic, life-altering event. He actually chose to be homeless, giving up on his material possessions and a comfortable office job for a carefree, stress-free life.

You couldn’t really tell by looking at him, but Simon Lee graduated from university with a degree in chemistry, and until 1997 he had a steady office job. But one day he decided he didn’t need the stress of a white-collar job, so he quit and moved to neighboring Macau. He made a living tutoring children for a few years, but in 2004, he moved again, this time to Zhuhai, where he lived off of his savings, before going back to Macau two years later. The casinos were starting up and rich gamblers were more than happy to share a tiny fraction of their winnings with someone less fortunate than them, so Simon decided to live on the street and survive off casino hand outs.

Read More »

A 42-year-old man in Shenzen, China, was recently hospitalized with a stroke after the staff at a local internet cafe noticed that he hadn’t got up from his seat in 50 hours.

According to CCTV footage, the unnamed man arrived at the internet cafe on the morning of March 31st and never once got up from his chair for the next 50 hours. It was only on the evening of April 2nd that the staff checked CCTV cameras and noticed that he had been there for over two days. When they checked on him, they found that he was paralyzed, unable to speak and suffering from incontinence. When he arrived at the Longhua District People’s Hospital, he was barely conscious and couldn’t move the limbs on the right side of his body. Doctors diagnosed him with massive cerebral infarction on the left basal ganglia and frontotemporal lobe, otherwise known as a stroke.

Read More »