A 72-year-old man in China melted the hearts of millions after it was reported that he spends most of his time promoting makeup and other beauty products online in order to treat his sick grandson.

People will do all sorts of crazy things for their loved ones, and 72-year-old Zhu Yunchang is a perfect example. The Chinese pensioner has been dedicating a lot of his time to his unusual job, that of makeup-wearing beauty blogger, for which he applies all sorts of beauty products, from creams to lipstick and mascara for fans all over the country. It’s not exactly typical behavior for a man Zhu’s age, but then again, his is not a typical story.

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A popular Japanese hotel has been forced to issue a public apology after it was reported that employees at its cafe fermented a citrus drink by using the bacteria on their own hands.

The AWA Nishiizu Hotel in Numazu, Japan’s Shizuoka Prefecture, has come under fire for putting its clients’ health at risk by breaking basic hygiene rules. On April 23rd, the popular TV show ‘Beat Takeshi’s TV Tackle‘ showcased how much Japan’s travel trends have changed in Japan by featuring a ‘health’ drink sold by a hotel cafe in Shizuoka. The orange concoction kept in large plastic jars was apparently a syrup made with squeezed summer mandarins and sugar, but the secret ingredient that set it apart from similar drinks was the fermentation process. According to an interviewed employee, the syrup was fermented with the help of bacteria indigenous to the human hand, so they would just stick their hands in the jar and stir it…

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A young man from China’s Sichuan province spent over 20 hours kneeling in front of his ex-girlfriend’s workplace hoping to convince her to take him back.

A lovesick man became the talk of Chinese social media this month after spending almost 21 hours kneeling outside his ex-girlfriend’s workplace in Dazhou City. The man reportedly started the extreme attempt to get back into his ex’s good graces at 1 pm on March 28 and remained on his knees until 10 am the next day, braving the rain, the cold, and the curious stares of passers-by. At first, no one really paid attention to the lone man kneeling on the street with a bouquet of red roses next to him, but as the hours passed, people started noticing him and asking what he was doing. Before long, a crowd had formed around him.

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Nanami Kana (Nanamiかな) looks like a Japanese teenage girl in most of the photos she posts on Twitter, but she recently shocked her fans with photos of herself from 12 years ago in which she appeared as a bearded, overweight man.

A Japanese influencer with around 35,000 Twitter followers, Nanami Kana is actually just the online persona of a 45-year-old father-of-one who simply enjoys putting on women’s clothes and posing as a teenage girl. He does a remarkably good job of it too, as most of the people who visit his Twitter page for the first time declare their disbelief at the fact that he is a man and a 45-year-old one at that. But Nanami really blew her fans’ minds last year, when he first posted photos of himself 12 years ago, revealing that he was over 60 kilograms (132 pounds) heavier than today.

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Raccoons are not native to Japan, yet in the last few decades, the furry critters have become naturalized in 44 of the country’s 47 prefectures, causing all sorts of problems for humans and other animal species. And to think it all started with a cute anime series…

In 1963, American writer Sterling North launched his most popular book, Rascal: A Memoir of a Better Era. It told the story of a young boy called Sterling who went on adventures with his raccoon sidekick Rascal, and it became such a huge hit that Disney decided to turn it into a live-action movie. In Japan, Rascal’s adventures inspired a 52-episode anime series called Rascal the Raccoon (Araiguma Rasakaru), which ran for a year in 1977 and made raccoons the most sought-after pets in the country. There was just one problem – there were no raccoons in Japan, so people started importing them from the United States at a rate of about 1,500 raccoons per month.

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Bees are considered an omen of good fortune in China, so when a man found a swarm of bees building their nest in his car, he decided to just drive the car with his new winged companions.

A man from China’s Anhui province recently went viral after posting a series of videos of himself calmly driving in his car with bees swarming around inside the vehicle. Most people would freak out at the sight of a single bee flying around their head, but the Chinese driver, surnamed Yao, was all smiles and even boasted that he was ‘going to be rich,’ referring to the belief that bees visiting one’s home was an auspicious omen. It’s unclear how the bees got into the car or why they chose it as their place of congregation, but the viral videos gave many on social media goosebumps.

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A Chinese man whose best friend’s wife had introduced him to his online girlfriend of over a year recently learned that the woman he had fallen in love with had actually been his friend’s wife trying to scam him.

Mr. Zhou, a middle-aged man from Xuchang, China’s Henan province, had been trying to raise money to start a family by growing watermelons in Myanmar. He had been gone for years, but he still kept in touch with his best friend, Xiao Li, to whom he confessed last year that his business was going well and that he wanted to meet a good woman. Li told him that his wife had a girlfriend who was also single and that she could introduce them. Because Zhou was still abroad tending to his fruit business, online dating was the only viable option. The two hit it off and agreed to continue their long-distance relationship until Zhou returned to China.

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A Thai man is taking his ex-wife to court, accusing her of concealing a lottery win of 12 million baht ($352,000) from him before breaking up with him over the phone and marrying someone else.

Narin, a 47-year-old scorned man from Thailand’s Isan region, recently hired a lawyer to help him wage a legal battle against his wife of 20 years who allegedly left him to marry another man after winning the lottery. The man claims his ex-wife, 43-year-old Chaweewan, with whom he has three daughters, took advantage of the fact that he was working in South Korea to support the family and simply broke off with him over the phone last month without so much as an explanation. He returned home at the beginning of his month to confront the woman only to learn that she had already married another man, a local police officer, just days earlier.

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A mountainous river valley in China’s Hubei province is home to one of the Asian country’s most impressive pieces of infrastructure – a highway bridge that runs through the middle of a river.

Finalized in 2015, China’s ‘river highway’ is widely regarded as an infrastructural wonder.  Designed to link the town of Gufuzhen in Xingshan county to the main highway running between Shanghai and Chengdu in southwestern China, this unique suspended highway doesn’t make much sense at first glance. Why have a massive bridge built in the middle of the Xiangxi River, when you could just have it run alongside it, on land? In fact, there was already a road running along the river, which meant it could obviously be done, so why not build the highway that way? Well, apparently, Chinese engineers decided that a suspended highway running along the middle of the river was not only cheaper to build, but more efficient.

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A father who caught his young son playing video games on his phone at 1 am on a school night punished him by making him play on his phone until he could play no more.

Too much of a good thing becomes harmful or bothersome over a large period of time, and one Chinese boy from Shenzen found this out the hard way a couple of days ago, when his father caught him playing video games on his phone after midnight, despite knowing he had to get up for school the next morning. The parent told the Metropolis Times that he was furious when he found his son playing on his phone when he should have been sound asleep, but he didn’t know how to react at first. He wanted to teach the boy a lesson he wouldn’t easily forget, so instead of scolding the boy he just told him that he could play on his phone instead of sleeping, adding that he could even take a day off from school so he could play some more.

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A Chinese man who carried out a gas station robbery in 2009 and walked away with 156 yuan ($22.50) spent the last 14 years of his life hiding from the cops in a remote mountain cave.

Liu Moufu, from a village in  Enshi City, China’s Hubei province, was in his mid-30s when he took part in a gas station robbery along with his brother-in-law and another accomplice. They ended up with 156 yuan ($22.50) between them, 60 of which they quickly spent on some food and fireworks, which left them with just 32 yuan ($4.6) each. The three men parted ways, but it wasn’t long before police found Liu’s accomplices and arrested them. The man realized it was only a matter of time before authorities showed up at his doorstep, so he decided to go into hiding rather than risk prison time. Little did he know he would spend the next 14 years in a prison of his own making…

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A Chinese man ended up taking his daughter to court after she refused to neglect her duty as a university student in order to come home and take care of him following a car accident.

The man, surnamed Zhang, allegedly started calling and messaging his daughter after being involved in a car accident in his home city of Puyang, China’s Henan province. After repeatedly trying and failing to convince the young college student to come home and care for him, the man was shocked to find that his daughter had blocked his phone number. In a fit of rage, he filed a complaint with a local family court, asking her for 1,500 yuan ($215) in monthly alimony. Article 26 of the Chinese Civil Code stipulates that “adult children have the obligation to support and protect their parents”.

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SpoGomi, a combination of ‘sport’ and ‘gomi’ (Japanese for rubbish) is a popular competition in which teams of 3-5 people try to pick up the most trash of the highest quality in a set period of time.

Japan recently announced that it would host the first SpoGomi World Cup in November of 2023, with teams from all over the world scouring the streets of Tokyo in search of trash to pick up. Each team of three players will have 60 minutes to gather the most trash from a designated area while trying to sort it correctly into color-coded bags for each type (burnable waste, recyclable plastic, metal cans, etc.). When the time is up, the trash will be weighted and checked for proper sorting, and the team with the most trash wins. In case of a tie, the winner is determined by the quality of the trash, with points awarded by type (cigarette butts win the most points).

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A man in China had what was supposed to be one of the happiest days of his life turned into a nightmare when a number of ex-girlfriends showed up to sabotage his wedding ceremony.

On February 6th, attendees at a wedding in Hengdi Village, China’s Yunan province, were stunned by an unusual display. Around a dozen women showed up outside the wedding venue with a large red banner that read “We are Chen Song’s ex-girlfriends, and today we will destroy you”. At first, many believed the unusual scene to be part of a friendly prank, but it was later revealed that the women were indeed Chen’s scorned ex-girlfriends out to ruin his big day.

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A company in Chengdu, China has been praised for asking both job applicants and recruiters to wear masks in order to avoid discrimination based on looks.

Chengdu Ant Logistics recently made news headlines after a video showing its recruitment process went viral on Chinese social media. Shot by one of the interviewees, the short clip shows several masked people waiting to be interviewed by a recruiter, who was reportedly also masked. The company has since put out a statement on the matter, claiming that the video was shot at its recent biannual recruitment fair and that the masked were introduced to eliminate bias based on looks.

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