A 26-year-old model who was born in Ukraine and moved to Japan at the age of five was recently crowned Miss Japan, sparking a heated debate regarding national identity.

Carolina Shiino speaks and writes impeccable Japanese, she spent most of her life in Japan and identifies as Japanese. But she wasn’t born in Japan and, most importantly, she doesn’t look Japanese, and for many, as the newly-crowned Miss Japan, that’s a big problem. Ukrainian-born Carolina is the first naturalized Japanese citizen to win the national beauty pageant, and while some accepted her win as a “sign of the times,” for others it is a tough pill to swallow. Everyone acknowledges the young woman’s beauty, but the fact that a European woman was voted Miss Japan is simply unacceptable.

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An ingenious rice cooker designed to be used with rolled newspaper instead of gas or electricity has proven surprisingly useful during the recent earthquake that hit Japan.

The Tiger KMD-A100, aka ‘Tiger Kamado’ used to be ridiculed by people who simply didn’t believe in the premise that you could cook soft, fluffy rice with only a few newspaper pages as a power source. But the Japanese don’t mess around when it comes to rice, and the earthquake that rocked Japan on January 1st proved just how efficient and effective the ingenious Tiger Kamado could be. A Japanese man from the earthquake-affected Noto Peninsula recently took to X (Twitter) to praise the rice cooker his family had scolded him for buying last summer, claiming that it provided them all with hot meals at a time when gas and electricity were not available.

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Don’t you hate it when you can’t remember if you locked the front door when you last left your home? It’s a dreadful feeling that you don’t have to experience again thanks to a cool little accessory called CheckKEY.

Developed by Japanese lock manufacturer company Miwa, the ChecKEY is a sleeve-like accessory that goes over the top part of your regular key and features a small window that indicates whether you locked your door or not. The ChecKEY comes with a built-in mechanism that detects when you turn the key clockwise or counterclockwise and changes color accordingly. When you turn the key into a lock clockwise, the little window on the ChecKEY turns white, and when you turn it counterclockwise, it turns orange. The mechanism is entirely mechanical, so it never runs out of batteries. This way, when in doubt, you can just look at your key and tell if you really locked your door on your way out.

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A Japanese company that has been developing crow repellants for 15 years claims that its Crow Buster, a translucent piece of yellow plastic, is more effective than any scarecrow.

Crows are auspicious omens in Japanese culture, but in day-to-day life, they can be quite pesky pests. Notoriously intelligent and highly adapted to both rural and urban environments, crows have been known to cause serious damage to fruit and vegetable farms, rummage through garbage in search of food, and attack smaller birds, animals, or even humans, if they perceive them as threats. Because of their higher-than-average bird intellect and excellent memory, crows can be very tough to deal with, so even the most realistic of scarecrows may prove ineffective. However, one Japanese company claims that all you need to keep crows at pay is its surprisingly simple Crow Buster.

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Japanese media recently reported the controversial story of a 35-year-old Japanese man who allegedly has four wives and three small children but hasn’t worked in over a decade.

35-year-old Ryuta Watanabe of Sapporo, on Japan’s Hokkaido Island, has become an overnight sensation in his home country due to an unconventional lifestyle. Watanabe reportedly lives with three of his four wives – who get along great with each other – and relies on them for most of the family’s financial needs, as he hasn’t had a job in the last 10 years. The polygamous family’s daily life was recently featured on Japan’s AbemaTV news program Abema Prime and sparked quite a heated debate in Japan, a country where polygamy is officially banned. To bypass Japan’s polygamy law, Ryuta’s four wives are currently in what is known as a ‘common-law relationship’ with him, but they plan to register their marriages and then divorce him, one at a time, so they can take the surname ‘Watanabe’ and pass it on to their children.

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Mori Ouchi, a cozy cafe in Tokyo’s laidback Shimokitazawa district, is famous for only catering to pessimists and people with a generally negative mindset.

Negative people tend to get a bad rep and are constantly told to be more positive, but, if you think about it, is there really anything wrong with being negative? The founder of Mori Ouchi, a small cafe in Shimokitazawa, Tokyo, certainly doesn’t think so. A self-described gloomy person, he got the idea for like-minded people over a decade ago but only decided to open it three years ago, during the COVID-19 pandemic. The man had always felt like negative people were more sensitive and more easily hurt than others, so he created a space dedicated exclusively to them.

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Tokyo restaurant Sushiya no Nohachi reportedly serves great sushi, but it is most famous for its gimmick – making the world’s smallest sushi with a single grain of rice.

Located in Asakusa, a slightly quieter part of Tokyo, Sushiya no Nohachi is the place to go if you want to enjoy the tiniest, most adorable sushi in the world. Each piece is made with only a grain of rice and a tiny slice of topping wrapped in the thinnest piece of nori. Every served piece is actually perfect, which hints at the amount of work and patience that goes into making them. They are the work of Hironori Ikeno, the chef of Sushiya no Nohachi, who came up with the idea in 2002 when a client asked him how small he could make his sushi. He answered, “as small as a grain of rice”, and proceeded to demonstrate that he wasn’t kidding. Over the years, the eatery became internationally famous for making the world’s smallest sushi.

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Tokyo’s Ikebukuro shopping district is home to the world’s largest gashapon capsule toy store – a 1,250m² area decked with over 3,000 gashapon machines filled with various figurines.

Gashapon machines have been a big part of Japan’s recreational culture for over half a decade, but while these toy capsule-filled machines are ubiquitous in the Asian country, the Mecca of gashapon machines is the Gashapon Official Store in Ikebukuro, Tokyo. It features over 3,000 coin-operated machines and probably millions of collectible toys and figurines. Using most of these machines requires a few hundred yen – from ¥200(~$1.33) to ¥500 (~$3.32) – but if you’re feeling generous, you can spin the wheel at the much more expensive ‘premium’ machines, which can cost up to ¥2,000 (~$13.27) on average for one random toy.

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Toyota recently teamed up with Japanese artist Masumi Yamaguchi to celebrate the return of the iconic Land Cruiser 70 SUV to the market in a unique way.

SUVs aren’t known for being the lightest of cars, but the one created by Masumi Yamaguchi is probably the lightest ever made. Even though it is a 1:1 model of the legendary Land Cruiser 70, it can easily by lifted by just two people. That’s because this special SUV is actually made of styrofoam parts sculpted and assembled by Yamaguchi. Everything from the body of the car to the windows and the tires is made out of styrofoam and then painted to create the illusion of a real vehicle. The only things that give it away are the reflectionless windows and the unusually matte paint.

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Remember those funny banana hammers we featured a few days ago? Well, they recently went viral in Taiwan and the Japanese manufacturer is struggling to keep up with demand.

Iron Factory Ikeda, a typical precision metal manufacturing plant in Hiroshima, Japan, started making banana-shaped mallets in 2019 and followed it up with steel banana hammers a year later. Over the years, the company developed different variations of the wacky product, including smaller versions modeled after baby bananas. They were popular enough to remain in production, but last month, banana hammers went viral online and sparked newfound interest among consumers not only in Japan but around the world. For example, people in Taiwan are apparently ordering them like crazy…

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The Willtex ‘Willcook’ microwave bag looks like a stylish laptop bag but is actually made out of conductive fabric that allows the user to heat the inside all the way up to 250 degrees Celsius.

Say what you will, but there’s nothing more comforting than a nice hot meal on a cold winter day, especially when you’re out and about. But what if you have no way of heating your lunch or ordering a hot meal? That’s where the world’s first microwave bag comes into place. Made out of an innovative fabric developed by Japanese company Sanki Consys Co. Ltd., the Willtex ‘Willcook’ bag looks like your average laptop bag, but it can heat up whatever you have stored inside to a temperature of 80 degrees Celsius in just 5 minutes. The bag itself weighs just 160 grams, while the rechargeable battery pack powering it weighs an extra 120 grams.

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A Japanese izakaya bar has come under fire for offering patrons the rather controversial service of being slapped on their faces before having their meals served.

The Shachihoko-ya izakaya in Nagoya served its snacks with a hearty side of slaps delivered by its female staff. The bizarre service is said to have revitalized the establishment’s business, attracting an increasing number of patrons willing to try the painful experience. In the beginning, the face slapping was done by just one member of the izakaya staff, upon request, but as demand grew, management hired several girls willing to dish out some slaps and even started charging a fee of 100 yen (90 cents) per slap.

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A Japanese precision part manufacturing factory recently went viral for its bizarre new product – a line of hammers shaped like realistic bananas.

Hiroshima-based Iron Factory Ikeda is not your typical precision metal manufacturing plant. They specialize in precision metal processing for creating original products with the potential to go viral online. Over the years, they created all sorts of geeky products, from anime-inspired robot masks, figurines, and realistic metallic replicas of various fruits and vegetables, from pineapple to broccoli, but their most popular product so far has to be the banana hammer. It has been around for a while but the company recently launched a new variant and it went viral on social media again.

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Himenii (ひめにぃ様) is a Japanese male influencer who rose to fame by cosplaying as a young, cute girl and then giving himself away by speaking in a deep voice.

Japan is home to many male cosplayers who choose to wear female clothes and fool everyone with their appearance, but Himenii is one of the few who uses this talent to create funny content for his online fans. Himenii’s cosplaying talent is superb, but he is actually famous for his funny videos, in which he either interacts with random people, speaking in a loud voice while disguised as a girl, or stages sketches while filmed by a friend.

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A Japanese man planted three banana trees in the median strip of a major road in Kurume City and watered them daily for two years before anyone noticed their existence.

A 50-something man from Kurume City, Fukuoka Prefecture, was recently ordered to remove three banana trees he had illegally planted and cared for in the median strip of a busy city road for a couple of years. It’s unclear why the man chose to plant the trees on public property, and in a median strip of all places, but they eventually got so big that they began affecting motorists’ field of view. It wasn’t difficult for authorities to identify the man responsible for the trees, as he had been watering the tropical plants at least twice a day for the last two years. He was ordered to remove the trees, or risk spending up to a year in jail or pay a fine of 500,000 yen ($3,350).

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