Honey, dubbed by activists and animal lovers ‘the world’s loneliest dolphin’, died last month, after almost two years spent by herself in a small pool at an abandoned aquarium in Japan.

We originally featured Honey’s tragic story back in October 2018, when footage shot by Japanese animal rights activists showing a single bottlenose dolphin floating in what appeared like an abandoned pool went viral online. It turned out that the video had been shot with a drone at the Inubosaki Marine Park Aquarium in Choshi, Chiba Prefecture, months after it had closed down. The dolphin, named Honey, and some penguins had remained behind and were being fed by an employee every few days. Still, the dolphin suffered from skin burns under the hot summer sun, as well as stress and loneliness. The story made international headlines at the time, but that did nothing to change Honey’s fate. After almost two years spent in that pool alone, she died last month…

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A Japanese mother-of-two has been getting a lot of attention on social media sites like Instagram and Pinterest for her incredibly detailed and colorful anime-themed bento boxes.

If you’re even a little familiar with Japanese culture, you probably know about “kawaii”, the people’s affinity for all things cute, and the attention to detail present in almost every aspect of daily life. Food is no exception, not even the school lunch Japanese mothers prepare for their children every day. While some just patiently arrange rice balls, sliced rolls or pickled veggies nicely in a box, others spend extra time creating an entire ensemble, complete with rice balls shaped like panda bears or sausages carved to look like octopuses. And then you have mothers like @ryiuyuda, who take the process of arranging a bento box and turn it into an art form.

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Japanese men mastering the art of makeup and photo-manipulation to pose as girls seems to be a current trend in the land of the rising sun these days…

Puutan, whose real name is reportedly “Tatsuya”, is a Japanese 18-year-old boy who has been posing as a schoolgirl online and messing with people’s minds. You see, looking at Puutan’s Instagram profile, it’s virtually impossible to tell that he is a man. He genuinely looks like an Asian schoolgirl, and no matter how much you squint at the photos, you’re not going to spot any clues of his real gender. But click on his YouTube link and you’ll be shocked to find another person entirely. He still has girly clothes on as well as long hair , but you can sort of tell that he’s just a guy in drag.

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Even you’re not the kind of person who keeps their business cards in a bespoke holder, heck, even if you don’t have business cards, you’re going to fall in love with this awesome steampunk card holder.

Looking at this crazy contraption created by Japanese design company SMD Factory, you’re tempted to think it’s some kind of futuristic device from back in the 1930’s. It’s all metallic, but features decorative elements like a small osciloscope and an astrolab, as well as interconnected gears and latches. It’s as steampunk a device as you can imagine, but it’s really just a card holder, a really cool card holder.

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Twitter user Lalarstein (@silver_eel) recently stunned his followers with an insanely realistic 3D-printed mask of his own face, perfect right down to the tiniest detail.

Lalastein, a self-described “professional 3D scanning expert and professional camera man who has appeared in the credits roll of many Japanese films”, unveiled his insanely realistic 3D-printed on Twitter last month, and the photos went viral almost instantly. That’s not exactly surprising considering how incredibly realistic his creation turned out. As he is holding the mask next to his face, you can tell that it is nearly perfect, right down to the hairs on his eyebrows and the tiny moles on his cheeks.

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Japan’s “Class of Life” is a controversial school project that aims to teach students about valuing their food and the environment by having them raise and then eat animals like fish and chicken.

We first featured the Class of Life a couple of years ago, when a video showcasing its implementation at an agricultural high-school in Japan’s Shimano Prefecture went viral on Chinese social media, leaving most viewers in a state of shock. The footage showed students preparing chicken eggs for hatching, raising the chicks for several months, and finally killing, cooking and eating the chickens. The Class of Life has been a part of Japanese curriculum at certain schools for over six decades, so most Japanese people are familiar with it, but even they were stunned recently when they saw elementary school children taking part in the class.

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Photos of what looks like an Alien scene featuring dozens of xenomorph eggs ready to burst have gone viral on Japanese social media, but there’s nothing alien about it.

If you’ve ever seen Sigourney Weaver blasting xenomorph in any of the classic Alien movies, you probably get goose bumps just looking at the photos below. I can’t blame you, seeing those creepy Facehuggers bursting out of slimy Ovomorphs was one of the most disturbing experiences of my childhood, but the things pictured in these photos are perfectly natural. Posted on Twitter by a Japanese farmer, the viral pics simply depict Chinese cabbages in the early days of Spring, when the water in the outer layer freezes, giving the common vegetable an eerie look.

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A popular Japanese cosplayer known for transforming herself into real-life versions of hot female anime characters, recently came out as a man who uses makeup, wigs and various accessories to achieve a shockingly feminine look.

With over 65,000 followers on Twitter, and several other thousands on Instagram, Rei Dunois can safely be described as a fairly popular female cosplayer. But appearances can be deceiving. Despite having made a name for herself by transforming into various female anime characters over the last couple of years, Rei recently left her fans with their mouths wide open by revealing that she was actually a “he”. After keeping the appearances up for so long, the talented cosplayer apparently decided to reveal the truth and convince people that they shouldn’t believe everything they see on the internet.

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Every year, landscaping experts from all over Japan get together to compete in the Key Truck Garden Contest, a unique event that has participants turning the beds of mini trucks into the most impressive miniature gardens they can.l The results are nothing short of awe-inspiring.

The Kei Truck, or “kei-tora”, is a small yet practical utility vehicle invented in Japan, but used throughout Asia, primarily in construction and agriculture. It’s been a part of Japanese culture for decades, and people love it because it provides plenty of space and it’s easy to maneuver on narrow streets. But once a year, Key trucks take center stage as canvases for ingenious landscaping masterpieces, during the Key Truck Garden Contest, a special event sponsored by the Japan Federation of Landscape Contractors. As you can see in the photos below, these mobile miniature gardens are something else!

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In what can only be described as an intriguing childhood experiment, a Japanese boy has been trying to stop weeds from growing in his backyard – without using chemical weedkillers – for the last three years. This year, he’s off to a promising starts.

It all started three years ago, when Twiter user @peco3575’s son finished elementary school and decided to conduct a “study” on weed annihilation solutions that didn’t involve the use of herbicides. He was inspired by his personal desire to clean his home backyard of weeds, because that summer they had grown so tall that he actually couldn’t play there anymore. He then started coming up with strategies to combat the weeds, write them down, apply them to his backyard, and note the conclusion. For the past three years, his ideas all failed, but 2020 is off to a surprisingly good start.

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A Japanese man is facing serious charges for allegedly causing serious financial losses to his favorite baseball club after reserving and then cancelling nearly 1,900 seats for two of their league games, so he could have more space and stand out on TV.

41-year-old Kiyoshi Shibamura, a fan of the Orix Buffaloes baseball club from the Japanese city of Osaka, came up with an ingenious-yet-costly plan to watch his favorite team compete against the SoftBank Hawks at Osaka’s Kyocera Dome on the 28th and 29th of September, last year. To make sure he stood out on TV and enjoyed some serious privacy, he went through the trouble of creating 1,873 fake names and reserving the same number of stadium seats online. He then cancelled all but his own reservation right before the end of the reservation period, making sure than no one else managed to snatch the seats.

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An agricultural field is one of the last places you would expect to find a tourist attraction for fans of Hayao Miyazaki’s anime, but this one farm in Japan’s Miyazaki Prefecture is actually home to a popular Totoro Bus Station.

If you’ve ever watched Miyazaki’s “My Neighbour Totoro” anime, you’re probably familiar with the simple yet iconic bust stop scene where Totoro appears next to the main character of the animated film as she waits for the bus in the rain. There are actually several real-life Totoro bus station across Asia, from the one in Saikai City, Nagasaki, to one in Taiwan’s Taichung area, but the most popular one these days seems to be the one created by an elderly couple in the middle of a field in Takaharu, as a present for their grandchildren.

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I don’t know what it is about Japanese men and bicycle seats, but for some reason some men can never have enough of these seats. Just a few months after writing about a man who stole 159 bike seats in a year, we now have the story of another Japanese man who claims to have stolen over 5,800 seats over the lasts 25 years.

Hiroaki Suda, a 57-year-old truck driver, was arrested on Feb. 13 after surveillance cameras caught him stealing two bicycle seats worth about ¥8,000 ($75) on Nov. 29 and 30, 2019, at a train station and a parking lot for bicycles in Higashiosaka, Japan’s Osaka prefecture. Suda admitted to the charges, and for some reason confessed to police that he had started stealing bicycle seats about a quarter century before, and had since put together quite and impressive collection.

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Japan has always been a rich source of wacky news and ideas, and it doesn’t look like things are going to change anytime soon. Its latest offering – a YouTube channel focused mainly on cooking various foods on a hot computer CPU.

You probably already know that CPUs tend to get very hot, especially under load, but you’ve probably never thought of using a CPU as a hotplate to cook various foods on. Well, one Japanese YouTuber recently has and his videos have been getting quite a lot of attention recently. To be honest, he has been at it for at least six years, but the quality of his videos has drastically improved over time, which may explain why we’re only now seeing his works shared on social media. From boiled and fried eggs, to tiny wagyu steaks and even tiny donuts, there’s nothing this guy won’t try cooking on a hot computer processor.

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Japanese housewife and amateur designer Pico grew up collecting faux-fur animals and now spends whatever free time she has creating her own. And, as you can see, she’s really good at it!

A self-described cat enthusiast, Pico first attracted media attention five years ago, when photos of one of her incredibly realistic creations went viral on Japanese social media. It didn’t take long for her creations to transcend national borders, and soon photos of her most impressive cat bags started circulating on Instagram, Facebook and the like. But despite the massive interest in her works, Pico was quick to announce that she only sold her works in Japan, and only rarely accepted commission projects. As a mother of two, she preferred to dedicate most of her tim to her children.

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