With winter in full force, now is the perfect time to explore the frozen wilds of the Japanese web in search of happy fun snowmen.

Arguably the best place to see snowmen is the annual Sapporo Snow Festival, one of Japan’s most celebrated winter events. This photo (by Flickr user kozyndan) shows a sea of snowmen […]

As hay fever season approaches, Tokyo-based weather forecasting company Weathernews, Inc. is deploying a 200-strong army of beady-eyed, ball-shaped robots nationwide to monitor the pollen situation.
The so-called “Pollen Robots,” which weigh 1 kilogram (2.2 lbs) and measure 30 centimeters (1 ft) across, consist of a monitoring unit housed in a spherical styrofoam shell. A […]

Tokyo-based Zeus Computer is reaching out to deep-pocketed celebrities and the nouveau riche with a line of luxury personal computers housed in bejeweled cases crafted from precious metals. The selection includes an 80 million yen ($760,000) pure platinum “Jupiter” model and a more modestly priced 60 million yen ($570,000) solid gold “Mars” model, both of […]

The Osaka-based Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute (ATR) has developed a crowd-monitoring humanoid robot that recognizes when people are lost and helps them find their way.
In a series of demonstrations conducted from January 22 to 24, a souped-up version of ATR’s Robovie humanoid robot monitored people as they passed through a 100 square meter (1,076 […]

It is a common sight in winter to see octopi hanging out to dry along sidewalks in the town of Toba (Mie prefecture), according to the caption for this image from the Toba Photo Gallery.
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A 16-year-old male gamer infatuated with the gothic dress worn by the fictional princess in an online role-playing game has been arrested for hacking into the game company’s servers and scamming a boatload of virtual money.
On January 24, Tokyo Metropolitan Police officers from the “Hi-Tech Crimes Control Center” arrested the high school student from […]

A unique chocolate made to look like a beetle larva has captured the fancy of candy aficionados in Japan. Produced by the Komatsuya confectionery and bakery based in Akita prefecture, the bite-sized Larva Chocolates (Youchu Choco) have a grub-shaped body made from milk chocolate and corn flakes, a layer of skin made from white chocolate, […]

“Musashino Plateau” and “Japan” — a pair of 3D computer animations directed by Nobuo Takahashi — illustrate (in dramatic fashion) how Japan’s landscape changed during the postwar period of rapid economic growth. The animations begin slowly with the early postwar recovery years, but the pace quickens to a frenzy as explosive growth during the bubble […]

In 1984-1985, Pioneer featured the visions of H.R. Giger in a series of Japanese magazine ads for their Zone audio-visual component system.
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The Japanese landscape makes a stunning subject for high dynamic range (HDR) photography, as demonstrated by these images and the 500+ others in the Japan HDR Flickr Photo Pool.
Nihonbashi [Tokyo] — Photo: Altus
Wave Gate [Numazu] — Photo: Altus
Cloudy Day in Gotokuji [Tokyo] — Photo: stu72
No.6 [Kanagawa prefecture] — Photo: dokool
Machinery [Nippori station, Tokyo] — […]