Turn on the TV in Japan and you’re bound to see someone slicing up a tuna on a cooking show while commentators ooh and aah. It’s no wonder, then, that during the current heat wave frying Tokyo, people are heading north for chills and eye candy in the form of giant fish popsicles.
The Kori no Suizokukan (Ice Aquarium) in Kesennuma, northeastern Japan, packs about 450 specimens of marine life frozen in large columns of ice bathed in blue light. Some 80 species, including saury, octopuses, crabs, and skipjack, are preserved …

One recent sweltering summer’s day, a tour bus from Tokyo pulled up at a sun-kissed beach at Atami, a Pacific coast resort southwest of the metropolis, and disgorged more than a dozen excited, iPhone-clutching young men.
The determined youngsters, paying scant attention to the bikini-clad girls frolicking on the sand, instead headed straight for a bronze statue that depicts Kanichi and Omiya, a couple from an old love story set in Atami.
The focus of the men’s attention—and of their smartphone cameras—was a tiny black and white square, a two-dimensional barcode that, …

Foreigners who visit restaurants and bars in Tokyo’s Roppongi entertainment district are increasingly becoming the targets of credit card fraud in which they are charged for payments they did not make.
According to Azabu Police Station, which oversees the district, it has received more than 100 consultation requests from foreigners over such scams since last year, mostly involving people from Europe and the United States.
The number of Chinese tourists visiting the area has been sharply on the rise recently and they could also become targets of such fraud, the police said.
An …

A slew of luxury hotels are nearing completion in a number of Japanese cities, with operators delighted at the state of the inbound tourism industry
despite the strength of the yen against other currencies.
Figures released by the Japan National Tourism Organisation show that some 4.2 million foreign tourists visited Japan in the first six months of the calendar year, up a remarkable 35.8 percent from a year earlier and the second-highest figure ever recorded for the period.
To meet the surging demand for top-notch accommodation in Japan’s second city, the first St. …

Roller slide at Kodomo no Kuni park. Notice the on-foot technique used by the family in front.
My daughter and I riding the long roller slide in Kodomo no Kuni (Kids Country) park in Machida, Tokyo Japan. Just wish there wasn’t anyone in front of us so we could get some speed out of it.

Big Slide in Awase Okinawa

Super roller slide Japan

This video is from GaijinGuide and what follow is the rider’s description and playfully painful video of the experience.
The slide comes in at an incredible 82 meters …

A Zen Buddhist hall in Nara is the oldest wooden structure still in use and a century older than famed Horyuji temple previously thought to hold the crown, according to an expert in tree-ring dating.
Research by Takumi Mitsutani, a visiting professor of dendrochronology at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature in Kyoto, reveals that Japanese cypress wood in the roof of the Zenshitsu (zen room) building of Gangoji temple was logged around 586.
Mitsutani argues that his findings indicate that the structure of the hall was made 100 years before …

The Tokyo metropolitan government has an anime to highlight anime as a major sightseeing attraction and has filled it with great sightseeing spots.
The 11-minute video is subtitled in seven languages, including English and Chinese. It can be found on the capital’s English website under the Tourism, Culture and Sports section.
The subtitles are also available in French, Spanish, German, Italian and Korean. Tokyo spent a cool 49 million yen to create the anime entitled, "Welcome to Tokyo".
See the site: Welcome to Tokyo

Two pedals, inches apart, one for gas and the other for brakes. For years, a Japanese inventor has argued that this most basic of car designs is dangerously flawed.

Mr. Naruse’s pedal accelerates the car when pressed with the side of the foot and triggers the brake when pushed down.

It was a cloudy morning when I set out to visit Zuigakuin on Mt Takigo in Hatsukari. I’m now staying in Uenohara which is perched on a mountain. The JR station is located in the valley below on the other side of the Chuo expressway. I walked to the station below. Along the way birds of prey were circling above the mountain tops. There were very few people about. I passed a young girl walking her dog and a father pushing his child in a stroller. The ramps that connect …

Angelina Jolie and her four oldest kids — Maddox, 8, Pax, 6, Zahara, 5 and Shiloh, 4 — look like one big family as they hold hands and travel through Japan’s Narita International Airport on Monday morning (July 26).