The Gomi Hiroi Samurai – “trash collecting samurai” – are members of a street performance group who walk the streets of Japan collecting trash with their katanas and trusty garbage grabbers.

These modern-day samurai are part of “Issei Ichidai Jidaigumi”, a performance group that originated in Kyoto but has since opened branches in other Japanese cities as well. They sport a very similar look to the samurai of old, but often spice up their appearance with stylish hats, and modern footwear. They are known for performing samurai-inspired songs, dances, and sword shows at various public events, but in the last few years, the Tokyo branch of the Jidaigumi has been making national news headlines for their theatrical trash-cleaning endeavours. They basically turn collecting street garbage into a performance worth buying tickets to.

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People turn to plastic surgery to copy the look of their idols all the time, but few of them, if any, manage to successfully turn themselves into lookalikes. One such case is that of He Chengxi, a young Chinese woman whose efforts to copy the look of famous actress Fan Bingbing have been so successful that she now gets confused with her all the time.

Despite currently being under investigation for tax evasion, Fan Bingbing remains one of China’s most popular celebrities. She is a successful actress, film producer, singer and a fashion icon, among others. Her attractive looks have captured the imagination of millions of people in China and abroad, so it’s no surprise that many women want to be just like her. Many have tried, but the only known successful attempt is that of He Chengxi, a 23-year-old social media star who reportedly spent tense of thousands of dollars on cosmetic surgery, over a period of 8 years, to make herself look just like her idol.

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Students at the No. 11 Middle School in Hangzhou, China, may want to think twice before dozing off or getting distracted in class as a new facial recognition system will be scanning their faces every 30 seconds to make sure they are paying attention.

Called a “smart classroom behavior management system”, the new monitoring solution recently installed at Hangzhou’s No. 11 Middle School is made up of three high-tech cameras positioned above the blackboard that constantly feed information to an AI-powered software that analyzes the students’ facial expressions and general behavior and assesses whether they are enjoying lessons or if their minds are wandering.

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Joe Quililan, a young snake catcher from the Philippines, has been dubbed “Venom Man” for his unusual habit of allowing poisonous snakes to bite him every week and even injecting small quantities of venom into his body in order to boost his resistance to it.

31-year-old Quililan, from Cagayan de Oro City, caught his first Northern Philippine Cobra when he was only 14-years-old. Back then, he didn’t have much experience handling snakes, so one day the cobra bit him, only instead of going to the hospital, the teen just brushed it off and got on with his day as if nothing had happened. Most people would have experience severe breathing problems soon after being bitten, followed by a loss of consciousness and then death, but not Joe. He claims that that first snake bite made him realize that he had an unusual resistance to cobra venom, and spent the following years trying to become completely immune to it.

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Authorities in Hejiang county, China’s Sichuan province, have come up with a controversial method of convincing borrowers to pay up their debts – showing their faces and names during short clips played in cinemas before the main movie starts.

Called “Reel of Shame”, the clip features an animated character who tells the audience “Come look at these laolai” before showing the borrowers’ faces, names and other details on the big screen. The derogatory term ‘laolai’ refers to borrowers who fail to pay their debts on time. To maximize the technique’s effectiveness, authorities show the borrowers’ faces in cinemas in their local area.

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Two Singaporean women recently contacted police after being conned out of $S1,450 ($1,080) by a man who sold them nine small bottles of “holy water” which he claimed could cure their bad luck and solve all their problems.

We’ve all heard of cunning snake oil salesmen using their power of persuasion to sell fake cures to gullible people, but it takes a special kind of talent to sell a small quantity of water for a small fortune. Well, either that or you need to find potential customers naive enough to fall for your lies. In retrospect, 30-year-old Ms. Yang, from Singapore, admits that she and her sister probably should have thought twice before spending a total of $S1,450 on nine small bottles of water just because the seller told them it was capable of turning their luck.

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Risa Hirako is a charismatic Japanese fashion model whose age-defying looks have become a hot topic among beauty bloggers and people looking for an anti-aging regimen that works. She is 47-years old, but looks better than most women in their 20s.

A successful model, fashion entrepreneur and the former wife of actor Eisaku Yoshida, Risa Hirako has been a celebrity in Japan for a relatively long time. However, her Instagram profile attracted a considerable number of western fans as well, many of whom started following her after falling in love with her youthful looks and charming personality. They just assumed that she was a young up-and-coming Instagram influencer, but then, a couple of years ago, someone shared a Wikipedia entry on Risa Hirako which mentioned that she was born in February of 1971.

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A 20-year-old man from the Japanese city of Himeji has been hailed as a modern-day ninja, after managing to live unnoticed in an elderly woman’s house for half a year.

The young squatter’s incredible run came to an end earlier this week, when his 90-year-old host’s son came to visit and cook her dinner. During his time there, the man heard some strange noises coming from the second floor of the house, and walked up the stairs to investigate. When he opened the door to one of the upstairs bedrooms, he was shocked to find a young man sleeping on a futon. Instead of losing his composure and confronting the intruder, he kept his composure, simply closing the door very slowly and going back downstairs to ask his mother if she new anything about someone else living in her house. The 90-year-old woman had no idea what her son was talking about, so the man called 110 (emergency number) to report the trespassing.

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A young passenger trying to get some fresh air on a crowded plane at Myanyang Airport, in China’s Sichuan Province, ended up accidentally opening the aircraft’s emergency hatch and triggering the inflatable escape slide.

Most passengers consider the flight crew’s instructions before a takeoff to be pointless, but this story is a clear example of why you should pay attention, especially if it’s your first time flying.

The 25-year-old man, known only by his surname, Chen, was waiting to leave the plane after touching down on Myanyang airport, when he decided that letting in some fresh air into the stuffy plane would do everyone good. So he pushed and turned the lever of what he claims he thought was a window, only to see a whole section of the fuselage pop out right in front of his eyes.

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For the past 60 years, every generation of freshman students at Izumo Agricultural and Forestry High School, in Izumo, Japan’s Shimane prefecture, has taken the “Class of Life”, a controversial six-month course during which the students help hatch and raise chickens, before having to slaughter and eat them.

Last year, the Class of Life at Izumo High School started in October, when they were presented with around 60 chicken eggs. Under the guidance of a teacher, they prepared them for incubation, washing them, arranging them in a special tray and learning to adjust the humidity and temperature on the incubator. For the next three weeks, they were in charge of monitoring the eggs and making sure that the right conditions for hatching were met. Once the chicks hatched, each student had to pick one and raise it as their own, knowing full well that in just a few months they would have to kill and eat it.

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Popular South Korean TV show Mars People XFile recently featured a young woman who claimed to have dated nearly 200 men in the last two years, purely for materialistic purposes.

The young and attractive woman, named Han Mirim, gives speed dating a whole new meaning, admitting that she sometimes broke up with men on the same day they hooked up, just because they wanted to split the bill at restaurants, or just didn’t seem willing to shower her with gifts or cover her many expenses. Mirim claimed that during the last couple of years, she had dated almost 200 different men and had received around 1 million won ($92,000) in gifts, like jewelry, clothes or gadgets.

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A young Chinese doctor was recently set free after spending three month in jail for claiming that a certain brand of medicinal wine was toxic and couldn’t cure heart disease and arthritis, as the manufacturer claimed.

It all started last December, when Guangzhou-based  physician Tan Qindong published a short article on Chinese social media platform Meipian, stating that the popular Hongmao Medicinal Wine was not only toxic, but also ineffective in treating serious heart conditions and arthritis, as advertised by the manufacturer. His post apparently drew a lot of attention, as Hongmao soon filed a defamation lawsuit against the 39-year-old doctor, claiming that it had “maliciously discredited” the brand’s reputation and had caused “significant financial losses” of as much as 1.4 million yuan ($223,000).

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A 50-year-old woman in Wuhan, China, was recently diagnosed with severe spinal neuron damage caused by a lack of vitamin B12. The woman had been on a strict vegetarian diet for over thirty years, and did not take any B12 supplements.

The woman, surnamed Chen, reportedly turned to a vegetarian diet in her 20s, in order to lose weight, and after seeing some truly amazing results, decided to stick with it for the rest of her life. Standing at 160-cm-tall, Chen told doctors that she used to weigh 55 kg when she was young, but managed to drop to 45 kg after becoming a vegetarian, a weight that she was proud of having maintained for over three decades. However, she never imagined that her seemingly healthy diet would put her at risk of becoming paralyzed.

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They say “no good deed goes unpunished” and one Chinese billionaire learned that the hard way after spending tens of millions of dollars on hundreds of luxury villas for all the residents in his home village, only to see them remain deserted as greedy recipients continue to argue over who should own multiple houses.

Five years ago, Chen Sheng, the founder and chairman of drinks company Tiandi No 1 Beverage Inc, committed 200 million yuan (US$31.9 million) to the construction of 258 luxury villas on a plot of land offered by authorities in the village of Guanhu, China’s Guangdong province. Each property measures 280 square meters and the three-story villas feature five bedrooms, two reception rooms, a garage and a small garden. The new village also has a small stream passing through it, several pedestrian bridges, basketball and badminton courts and even a public stage for various cultural events, but even though everything was completed last year, the place remains deserted.

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A Japanese animal lover risks her life every single day by venturing into the Fukushima exclusion zone to feed a heard of 11 cows abandoned after the 2011 nuclear disaster.

The earthquake and subsequent tsunami that hit Fukushima in 2011 claimed the lives of over 20,000 people, and forced another 160,000 to leave everything behind and flee to safety. But while people were able to escape the threat of radiation from the damaged reactor at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, animals could not. The area was home to over 3,500 cattle which became known as the “nuclear cows of Fukushima” after being exposed to high levels of radiation. Most of them are dead now, killed by starvation or euthanized by the government, but the few surviving cows now rely on the kindness of humans brave enough to risk their lives to bring them food and water.

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