Finally a solution to a problem we could have easily solved by now if it weren’t for society’s double standards and ridiculous rules like decency and respect. No I’m not talking about solving unemployment through slavery, I’m talking about cold boobs.

The Japanese have taken it upon themselves to create the Bust Beauty Pad, a USB-powered bust warmer. Just plug it in to a USB port and insert the warming pads under your bra and soon the twins will be all cozied up. It probably also works on man-boobs too but… let’s not go there. Talk about trying to invent a better mousetrap, though! Last time I checked us men still had hands! And maybe you don’t know it Japan, but here in the western world some men are even willing to pay good money to solve this problem with this hands-on approach.

There’s supply, there’s demand. I don’t know, it seems like the free market could have solved this problem ages ago. Perhaps a cop and trade system is in order, see what I did there? Yeah I’m witty like that.

[Bust Beauty Pad / Via Tokyomango]

Our first night in Asakusa was pretty disheartening. Filled with the pains of leaving ‘our home’ and then wandering around for hours lost in the rain looking for our place of stay – it’s safe to say Asakusa wasn’t winning us over much. Thoughts that tended to fill our minds consisted of “This is shit”, “It’s raining”, “I wanna go back to Osaka” and “This is it?!”. But our first day in Asakusa was a turn around a corner for us all. The sky was clear, it was a damn nice day and the niceness of the locals shone through every person we came across. Asakusa is a pretty old town. Much like the kind of place where you might want to retire to, or a place you’d like to vacate to when you’re in your 60’s. Lots of convenience stores, cheap 99 yen stores, markets, Onsen’s, cheap restaurants, temples and no chronic hustle and bustle.

It’s easy to see the attraction to Asakusa when you truly open your eyes and look beneath the lack of neon signs, girls in knee high socks, arcades and electronics stores. There’s something really nice and warm about Asakusa that feels inviting, non-threatening and homely. The only problem with Asakusa, is that at times it can feel so warm and sedate that you tend to get complacent and forget you’re on a holiday, and that you’re in Tokyo at all!

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Japan is at it again, trying its best to have mecha out as soon as possible. This time they are not going the giant robot route, a la Gundam, but are once again pursuing the power suit, a la Patlabor. Engineers at Kyoto’s Activelink Co. have developed this little beauty you see above, called the Dual-Arm Power Amplification Robot, or DAPAR for short. Sure it needs a better name but it’s nearly fully movable and amplifies both arm and leg movement, enabling you to lift over 90 kg without a hitch.

Yeah, it cant hurl armored vehicles like pillows just yet but they are aiming to make it fully mobile and have it in practical use by 2015. Add a couple of extra years and they’ll have the DAPAR swinging an oversized sword and firing an enormous sub-machine gun.

[Boing Boing]

These above are all of the voice clips included in the Nanami Madobe, Windows 7-tan, theme for Windows 7 included in some of the Japanese editions. Sounds for all your basic windows actions, including the dings, the beeps and the system errors. Boy oh boy, I don’t think I’d mind constant system errors with this. This is the official complaint deterrent for obscure errors only found by geeks, it turns errors into features and nerd rage into a moe-induced trance.

At last, a little update on that whole Kirsten Dunst doing mahou shojou cosplay we reported on a while ago. It has emerged that the shooting was indeed a music video. In fact she was singing the much cliche’d and ad hoc song ‘Turning Japanese’.

What’s more though is that the video is to be part of a much larger film based on Akihabara culture directed by Takashi Murakami, who long time readers might remember as the director of this excellent superflat Louis Vuitton video we posted back in 2007. The film is titled “Akihabara Majokko Princess”. Above you’ll find a couple of images of Muramaki, the first being him in front of a giant print allusive to the film, you can even see the legs of a giant Kirsten Dunst in her infamous cosplay, terrorizing the city. The other image… well lets just say it’s quite titillating.

[Arrested Motion]

Sure the US has a cool president right now but it doesn’t hold a candle to Japan’s Ex-Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. Not only did he impersonate Elvis on his last trip to the US but now he’s going all superhero on us by voicing Ultraman King in the next big Ultraman movie, Giant Monster Battle: Ultra Galactic Legend. He’ll be voicing the iconic Japanese superhero at the urging of his son (cool dad points too). His raspy deep voice fits perfectly to the King of the Ultramen. Perhaps Obama should take a passage from the book of Conan Obrien and try his hand at anime dubbing. Perhaps he can voice himself.

The day had come. Where we’d say goodbye to the place my friends and I had affectionately referred to as ‘our home’. It’s insane how much of a connection we all felt to Osaka. Especially seeing as many of us felt very little towards the place before we got there. Not that we’d heard anything bad about the place. But we all had this idealistic image in our minds that Tokyo would be the best thing in the world ever, and immediately paled every other place in comparison to it. So we were more than a little surprised that Osaka turned out to be such an amazing place which we did not want to leave.

We were sure to see ‘our home’ out with a bang though. Albeit it an unplanned one. Said bang consisting of: heading to an Irish pub, then to a tiny little bar which was packed to the walls, and then onto to a nightclub to drink and dance our sorrow’s of leaving away. It seemed to do both the trick and make us feel worse. Because the night was so good and we’d met and made so many random friends on this one night, that we were ever more reluctant to leave.

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You go to Japan. You gotta do some karaoke. It’s an unwritten law. After all, Japan is the home of it (depending on who you speak to) and nowhere else in the world quite revels in it like Japan. Whilst the full on karaoke experience in the Western word is rather expensive and only of real value if you go with lots of people – in Japan it’s affordable and won’t burn holes in your pockets. Well…if you ease up on the food and drinks it won’t anyway. Everybody from school kids, to salary men, to part timers can just wander  into a Big echo to drop some karaoke un-planned and scrape together some Yen to belt their Nihongo classics, the Oricon’s chart toppers and the Eigo hits.

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One of my good friends is a Persona freak. He loves the games and owns every single PlayStation release of the series. A few days ago he’d got himself a copy of Persona 4. He was opening it as I was talking to him on the phone. “Oh, it comes with the soundtrack!” He put it on and as he skipped through the tracks, I caught a whiff of some J-Pop. “Stop. What song was that? Go back!” “My affection”. I have a soft spot for easy breezy J-Pop that are so sickly sweet and happy-go-lucky that it’s enough to make you sick and vomit an ice cream cone with a side of rainbow. And “My affection” has buckets of sweetness. All it took was the “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeeeaaah”’s and I was on the song like a fly on shit. It’s just a really nice song. It isn’t a main theme or a major centerpiece song or anything. It just plays when you’re wandering around a town! I love it. I’ll probably get too sick of it eventually. But for now, it’s my pleasure that I’m not even guilty about. The entire Persona 4 soundtrack is pretty spiffy. In the realm of RPG’s, many tend to forget there are other hot composers other than Nobuo Uematsu.

Now if you’d excuse me whilst I go sing my shit. “Your affectioooooooon! Your affectioooooooon! Take it for coffeeeeeeee!”

Listen: Your affection

Composed by Shoji Meguro
Performed by Shihoko Hirata
Shin megami tensei: Persona 4 original soundtrack
© 2008 Aniplex

For the mp3 players: Your affection

Whilst wandering around Nipponbashi, my friend and I couldn’t help but notice certain sights every 6 shops or so. At first we thought it couldn’t be. It had to be a ruse. We were goin’ crazy. Surely not on main streets, in broad daylight and clear view of everybody?! But turns out it was so. Porn shops. Lining the streets like any other shop. Unobtrusively. Just there in clear view of everybody who happens to wander past. Some of stores lucky enough to have forward thinking merchandisers even had HDTV’s set up at the front of the store with videos playing of big breasted Japanese ladies skipping, running through sprinklers in slow motion and bending over to music – all in 1080p. My friend and I figured: we’re guys, we are in Japan and people pounding the pavements didn’t seem to care or be objective and judgmental of the sex shops one way or the other – so we wandered into one or two…or three…maybe five. Okay, six!

It truly was surreal. There were other men wandering around in the shops with shopping baskets like they were walking down the aisle of their local Family Mart, which begged the question: How much porn do some buy in one go? I guess buying in bulk saves trips. It was funny watching other men mooch around like they were in HMV. Shop attendants aren’t as helpful as they are in HMV though. These stores are all about anonymity. The store attendants only acknowledge you if you approach them, which is fair enough. I guess no dude wants a store attendant creeping up behind him yelling “Irasshaimase! What kind of DVD are you looking for? We have a buy one get one free on guzzling and bum sex today!” A couple of the stores have till points where a piece of non-transparent plexiglass or a curtain is placed between the cashier and the buyer, so the transactions were faceless. Again, adding to the anonymity, and also killing alibi’s in cases where a husband is buying porn when he should be buying his family that new rice cooker or heated toilet seat instead.

Sex is a weird thing in Japan. It’s still a bit of a taboo subject, yet it isn’t at the same time. But it sure is funny.