A Japanese couple who can’t agree on their last name has agreed to divorce and remarry every three years so they can take turns using their respective last names.

Japanese law clearly states that couples must agree on a single last name to use after they get married, but what happens when two lovers just can’t decide which one of their family names to use? That was the conundrum a young couple from Hachioji city, on the outskirts of Tokyo, found themselves in when they decided to tie the knot, after a few months of dating. Only when it came to settling on their last name, she made it clear that she intended to keep her maiden name, something that her husband didn’t agree with at all. They argued about it for a while, but then they decided that they weren’t the first couple to have this problem and that there was a way to solve it.

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Souki Socks, a small sock factory in Japan’s Nara Prefecture, has devised a machine that allows people to knit their own socks by pedaling on a stationary bicycle.

Unless you’re a fan of knitting, making socks doesn’t exactly sound like a fun experience. This was the reality that the brilliant minds Souki Socks were confronted with when they set out to make sock-making exciting for the masses. Luckily, despite having the odds stacked against them, they managed to come up with an ingenious contraption that combined a mechanical sock knitting machine and a bicycle to allow virtually anyone to knit their own socks just by pedaling. Named “Charix,” the machine has been very popular with tourists ever since it was inaugurated in 2017.

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Japanese tech giant Kawasaki caused a lot of raised eyebrows at the world’s largest robot trade show in Tokyo, with Bex, a rideable robot goat.

The 2022 International Robot Exhibition featured a lot of ingenious creations, but few as attention-grabbing as Kawasaki’s latest invention, a robot goat that can carry approximately 220 pounds of cargo. Named after the Ibex, a species of large wild goat native to parts of Eurasia and Africa, the Kawasaki Bex can transport human riders or different materials, but it also has a fully modular top half, so it doesn’t need to be a rideable goat. But let’s be honest, why would you want to ruin a good thing? After all, what’s cooler than a robot goat?

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A Japanese company is selling metallic shelters that can be installed in apartments and small houses, for protection against natural disasters and even radiation and missile strikes.

You’ve probably heard of millionaires and doomsday preppers building their own luxury underground bunkers, but one Japanese company claims you can ride out the nuclear apocalypse from the comfort of your own home, with one of their indoor shelters. WNIshelter specializes in compact shelters designed to resist anything from natural disasters like earthquakes and floods, to missile strikes and radiation. They come with their own air filtration system and come in a variety of sizes, to accommodate anywhere from one to seven people.

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A young Japanese office worker has allegedly been doing ab wheel exercises every day for the last year in order to attain the muscular body of his favorite anime character, Inosuke Hashibira.

On March 1st, 2021, the 33-year-old office worker, known only by his Twitter handle (@InosukeWorkout) posted photos of his body on the microblogging social network, announcing that he was going to start doing ab wheel exercises in order to achieve the toned physique of Inosuke Hashibira, one of the main protagonists of the Demon Slayer: Kimenu no Yaiba manga/anime. Sporting the character’s iconic wild boar mask, the mysterious man then started daily videos of himself doing ab wheel exercises, and documenting his progress through photos.

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Yakei, a 9-year-old female Japanese macaque at the Takasakiyama natural zoological garden, shocked staff by fighting her way through several strong males to become the first female alpha in the troupe’s 70-year history.

The story of Yakei’s rise to power sounds like the plot of a Hollywood epic. Born into the 677-strong troupe B at the Takasakiyama zoo in Japan’s Oita city, the female inherited the rank just under her mother, as per the rules of macaque society. The higher an individual’s rank, the greater its access to food, mates and resting locations. Last March, Yakei fought her own mother and won, becoming the leader of the other females in her group. For most females, this would have been more than enough, but for Yakei it was only the first step to a much more ambitious goal – leader of the entire troupe.

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The Onagadori (‘honorable fowl’ in Japanese) is a rare chicken breed known for its exceptionally long tail, which can reach over 10 meters, putting even peacocks to shame.

Of the seventeen chicken breeds considered Japanese national treasures, the Onagadori is the only one to have “special” status. Ever since it received this status in 1952, exports of Onagadori birds and eggs were forbidden, so there are very few specimens, if any, found outside of Japan today. The breed is famous for the non-molting, and thus incredibly long tails of roosters, which, if kept in the best conditions with high levels of animal husbandry, can grow for the lifetime of the bird.

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Aria, a 25-year-old self-taught artist from Japan, specializes in 3D color pencil drawings that look ready to jump off of the sheet of paper they are drawn on.

Despite what your eyes are desperately trying to make you think, Aria’s works are all two-dimensional. She just has this innate ability to draw a variety of objects in great detail, and present them from an angle that creates the illusion that they are three-dimensional. Every one of her artworks takes hours to complete and consists of several layers of colored pencils, but the end result is definitely worth the work.

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Idegami Baku looks like she should be in a popular idol group, only she is actually a 19-year-old boy with perhaps the most striking androgynous appearance in the world.

Men using makeup and photo manipulation technology to pose as women online has become a really popular trend in recent years, but no one does it better than”the most feminine boy in the world,” Idegami Baku. We first featured Idegami back in 2018, when he rose to fame following his participation in Japan’s popular talent contest JUNON Super Boy, where his feminine looks first caught the public’s eye. Even though he didn’t win the contest, people couldn’t get over how pretty he looked, and he amassed a massive online following on social media in record time.

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The Japanese Bobtail is a rare car breed whose distinctive feature is the presence of a short, bunny-like tail, instead of the long, flexible tail of most other felines.

No one knows exactly when this unusual cat breed arrived in Japan, but it has been a part of Japanese culture for at least several hundred years, being frequently featured in traditional art and folklore. In the early 1600s, the breed played a major role in preserving Japan’s silkworm production, by taking on rodents, and by the next century, the bobtail was already the dominant cat breed being kept in Japan. No one knows whether it was because of its distinctive tail, which looked like it had been bent and broken, its friendly personality, or its talkative nature, but the Japanese Bobtail became extremely popular in the Japanese country and remains so today. However, it remains extremely rare outside the borders of Japan.

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A Japanese restaurant has been getting a lot of attention for its unique Miso ramen dish which comes with a soft serve cone melting in the center of the bowl.

If you were to make a list of ingredients that you think best complement Miso ramen, milk and chocolate soft serve probably wouldn’t be at the top. But that just proves you’re not a gourmet visionary, like the people at Franken, a restaurant in Osaka Japan. On January 4th, Franken started selling its unique sweet-and-sour red miso ramen dish with a soft serve cone melting in it. Apparently, they went through many types of desserts, and the soft serve was just unexpectedly compatible with the ramen dish.

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A team of Japanese high-school students recently won a regional innovation competition with a high-tech device that divides cake and pizza into equal portions every single time.

It’s a problem as old as the world – cutting a round treat into more than two equal parts. You either end up with portions that are not exactly the same size, or you’re left with a smaller extra slice that everyone has their eye on. Well, thanks to the ingenuity of a group of Japanese students from Kundong High School in Japan’s Oita Prefecture, dividing a cake or a pizza into perfectly equal portions need no longer be an issue. They have created a high-tech device that calculates the angle at which the tasty treat needs to be cut, depending on the number of necessary slices.

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Japanese lingerie manufacturer Wacoal recently launched a line of lace boxer briefs for men that are said to be both beautiful and functional.

Lace lingerie doesn’t sound like the most masculine thing ever, but reputed underwear company Wacoal didn’t just jump into this project blindly. In November of last year, they tested the waters of this ultra-niche market by offering the Lace Boxer on Japanese crowdfunding platform Makuake. The company knew it had a winner on its hands when its product smashed its modest crowdfunding goal of 300,000 yen ($2,627.87) by 1,090 percent, earning about 3.27 million yen ($28,578.92) in pledges. The Lace Boxer went straight into production, and now Wacoal offers an entire line that consists of seven colors.

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A Japanese engineering university in Kumamoto is famous for holding a unique competition, challenging students to build toothpick towers that can resist a simulated earthquake.

As you probably already know, because of its location in the Circum-Pacific Mobile Belt, where there is constant seismic and volcanic activity, Japan is the world’s most earthquake-prone country. Even though Japan takes up only 0.25% of the land area on our planet, 18.5% of earthquakes in the world occur here. So I guess you can say that building earthquake-resistant architecture is paramount for the Japanese nation. To that end, one engineering school has been challenging students to come up with toothpick tower designs that can resist a simulated earthquake.

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Japan recently unveiled the world’s first Dual-Mode Vehicle (DMV), a contraption that runs both on roads, like a bus, and on rails, like a train.

The unique bus-train hybrid was unveiled last month, in the town of Kaiyo, Japan’s Tokushima Prefecture. The mini-bus-like contraption didn’t win anyone over with its looks, but it definitely made an impression in terms of practicality. It runs with normal rubber tires on the road, but when it needs to switch to train mode, a pair of metal wheels drop down from the vehicle’s underbelly. The front tires are lifted off of the track, while the rear wheels stay down to propel the vehicle. Switching between road and train modes takes only about 15 seconds.

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