A 64-year-old employee of the waterworks bureau in the Japanese city of Kobe was recently fined and reprimanded by his superiors for going on his lunch break three minutes early, on more than one occasion.

The lunch break at the Kobe waterworks bureau starts at 12 pm sharp and lasts until 1 pm. However, an employee looking for “a change of pace” decided to leave his desk a few minutes early to go get himself a bento box from a nearby restaurant. Unfortunately for him, a senior colleague looking out the window from his office, saw the unnamed offender heading to the restaurant on one of his unsanctioned escapades, and reported him to management. An investigation revealed that the man had started his lunch break three minutes early a total of 26 times in the last 7 months, which they apparently decided was a huge deal.

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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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Japanese social media was abuzz this weekend with news of a 13-year-old boy who can allegedly contact UFOs telepathically. The photos of unidentified flying objects that he took last year have attracted a lot of attention from other UFO enthusiasts.

13-year-old Haruya Ido is being referred to as “UFO BOy” by Japanese media, for his alleged ability to attract unidentified flying objects. Toshitaro Yamaguchi, a known paranormal researcher and the man who first shared Haruya’s photos with the world, has described the boy as a classic UFO contactee with the ability to contact UFOs via telepathy.

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Okiku, aka “The Haunted Doll of Hokkaido” is a creepy old Japanese doll residing at a temple in Iwamizawa Temple that allegedly grows human hair. Obviously, it’s also said to be haunted by the spirit of a little girl.

There are various legends regarding Okiku, but the most popular one speaks of a traditional Japanese doll bought by Eikichi Suzuki, a seventeen-year-old boy from Hokkaido, who bought it for his little sister, in 1918. It is said that the tree-year-old girl, called Kikuko, loved the doll very much, took it everywhere with her, and slept with it every night. But, as is often the case in these creepy legends, young Kikuko died one day after catching a cold, and that’s when things started getting strange.

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A woman  who recently gave birth at a clinic in Miso, Japan, recently posted a series of photos of the food she was served there, and they make it look like she had her baby in a Michelin star restaurant.

When talking about hospital food, most people use phrases like “barely edible” or “tasteless” or “hard to stomach”, but Japan is proof that hospital food doesn’t have to be disgusting. Imgur user jenkinsinjapan, who  was recently checked into a small OB-GYN clinic in Miso for childbirth, shared some photos of the various dishes she had to put up with there and they look mouthwatering.

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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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Most alcohol-free beers mimic the real deal almost to perfection, minus the buzz and substituent hangover, which makes them a bit problematic to drink in places where alcohol consumption is frowned upon, like the workplace. But thank to Suntory’s new clear beer, people will just think you’re drinking water.

All Free All Time is a zero-alcohol, zero-calorie beer designed to protect consumers from judgmental attention from bosses coworkers and clients at the workplace. It is completely clear and comes packaged in small plastic bottles which make it look more like a bottle of water than beer. You can take a sip at your desk, while working, or in a meeting, without worrying about attracting unwanted attention to yourself.

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There are only a handful of glass beaches in the whole world, and it’s their rarity that makes them so popular. However, Japan is home to a beautiful glass beach that is so obscure it doesn’t even have a name.

Unlike California’s famous glass beach, or the one in Ussuri Bay, on Russia’s Pacific shoreline, where nature had to work hard to erode truckloads of sharp glass and porcelain shards dumped as trash into rounded pebbles that you can safely walk on, the colored glass grains of this nameless Japanese beach, in Omura City, were actually recycled beforehand. I guess the Japanese thought they’d give Mother Nature a break for a change and did the work for her.

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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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Mizuki Nakano, a former professor at the University of Tokyo, in Japan, has been consuming only fruit for the last eight years, even shunning water and relying on fruit juices for hydration. He recently came on a Japanese TV show to say that his fruit-only diet has caused his body to somehow convert nitrogen in the air into the protein it needs.

In September of 2009, Mizuki Nakano decided to see what would happen to his body if he consumed nothing but fruit all day, every day. Even back then, the scientific consensus was that a balanced diet that contained enough protein, fat and carbohydrates was the best way to go, and that relying solely on fruits for nutrition would deprive the body of needed nutrients and potentially cause serious health problems. But Nakano noticed that there was no scientific research on the long-term effects of eating only fruits, so he started an experiment with himself as the guinea pig.

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As a child growing up in Japan, engineer Masaaki Nagumo always dreamed of climbing into his very own Mobile Suit Gundam mecha. As an adult, he finally made that dream a reality.

Nagumo created the 28-foot-tall, 7-tonne-heavy LW-Mononofu robot as a project for his employer, industrial machinery maker Sakakibara Kikai, in Japan’s Gunma Prefecture. The metal colossus took six years to finish, and is probably the world’s largest anime-inspired robot that you can actually ride in and control. It can move its arms and fingers, turn its upper body, and walk forward and backward at a snail-like speed of 1km/hour. As any respectable mecha, it also has a weapon – a metal gun that fires sponge balls at a speed of 87 mph.

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We’ve heard of robots and artificial intelligence taking human jobs, but I bet mayors didn’t really think their jobs would be threatened any time soon. They were wrong, and the AI running for mayor of a Tokyo district is clear proof of that.

Artificial Intelligence can’t legally run for high-ranking public administration positions yet, but one mayoral candidate from Tama City, Tokyo, intends to maximize the use of artificial intelligence in running municipal affairs, so he’s running his campaign as ‘AI Mayor’. Basically, he’s proposing replacing human public officials with AI and having them collect city data and create fair and balanced policies that will benefit everyone.

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If you’ve always dreamed about climbing into a nine-foot-tall mecha suit and actually showing off your sci-fi fantasies to the whole world, now’s your big chance. A Japanese company is actually selling custom mecha suits for only 10 million yen ($93,000).

Skeletonics have been around since 2011, when a group of students at the Okinawa National College of Technology showed off their very first fully-mechanical exoskeleton. It didn’t do much except turn the wearer into a metal giant with increased reach, but it definitely looked cool, so the project made international headlines at the time. But while the team came up with several improved Skeletonics over the years, they were merely showed off online and at special events, so only a few fans ever got to give them a try themselves. However, everything changed last month, when Skeltonics finally announced that it would finally begin producing commercial versions of its popular exoskeleton.

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Tweezers have been around for thousands of years, but they’ve never really been regarded as one of the coolest tools man ever invented. Well, a Japanese company is looking to change that with its awesome Tweezers of Legend.

Having to pluck a rogue hair strand from your eyebrow or nose is not the most exciting task, but what if your tweezers looked like a legendary sword, the like of which you only see in over-the-top fantasy anime or video games? Now we’re talking, right? Well, thanks to Japanese company wāqwāq Inc., you can now battle your body hair like a fabled hero.

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