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 (yuki-daruma) built by visitors to the festival, who attach written wishes for good luck.

The week-long festival held in early February is home to Japan’s largest snow and ice sculpture competition, and all sorts of wacky snow creations can be seen at venues around town — like this giant chihuahua and Asimo.

Or your favorite anime character. (Photo from Jonas’s Travels in Sapporo website.)

Or much more impressive creations like these dinosaurs. For more pictures from the festival, try a Google image search for “札幌雪祭り” (Sapporo Yuki Matsuri).

Of course, the Sapporo Snow Festival is not the only place to encounter snowmen — they appear wherever there is snow.

This photo, taken in the town of Kuroishi (Aomori prefecture), shows what is proudly labeled as Japan’s largest snowman. The 31-meter-tall (100 ft) monster has a face composed of local agricultural products, such as charred apple trees for the eyebrows, seashells for the eyes, rice for the cheeks, apples for the mouth, daikon radishes for the ears, and carrots for the collar.

This Namahage folk demon was spotted at last year’s Lake Tazawa Snow Festival.

These glowing snowmen were seen standing watch at Kanazawa castle.

And this one. Haven’t we seen this somewhere before?

Sometimes happy snowmen can be found where there is no snow — like in Tokyo. For this year’s Kanda Yuki-Daruma Fair in late January, organizers trucked in 70 tons of snow from rural Gunma prefecture and built 30 large snow creatures on the sidewalks of Kanda.

Here is a snowy incarnation of Baikinman, an evil character from the Anpanman anime series. (Photo via Mycom.)

And here are Kurohige Kiki Ippatsu (Pop-up Pirate game) and Shiisaa (a mythical Okinawan creature). For more from the Kanda Yuki-Daruma Fair, see these photos.

Ever wondered how much it would cost to build a working, life-sized Gundam robot? At least $725 million for the parts and materials, according to an estimate published on the SciencePortal website run by the Japan Science and Technology Agency. The price tag for this giant humanoid, which would stand 18 meters (60 feet) tall and weigh 43.4 metric tons (nearly 100,000 lbs), does not include the cost of labor (this is where an extensive pool of robot slave labor comes in handy), nor does it include the cost of the infrastructure needed to support the machine once you are ready to climb aboard and take it for a walk.

Estimated cost of Gundam parts:

Note that unlike in the anime, the Gundam described here would merely be able to walk — it would not have the ability to fly or have any fancy weaponry. Also, instead of Gundanium, the robot would be covered in aluminum alloy plating.

An IBM Blue Gene supercomputer would serve as the Gundam’s computer system ($1.5 million sounds like a steal), and its movements would be driven by 30 giant 400KW motors — 12 in the legs, 2 in the torso, 14 in the arms, and 2 in the neck. A 400KW motor is quite powerful — by comparison, the Shinkansen bullet train uses a 300KW motor. The motors alone would cost $7.8 million, but to power them would require the equivalent of 7 Apache helicopter engines (the helicopters cost an estimated $52 million each).

While $700 million is a lot of money (more than the GDP of Liberia, Grenada and a dozen or so other nations), it does not seem like so much when you compare it to the cost of other large-scale machinery. Military tanks costs around $4 to $7 million each, commercial passenger planes cost around $200 to $300 million, rockets can cost around $100 million to launch, expensive fighter jets can cost billions, and aircraft carriers cost about $5 billion.

A robot of this size and stature would face a number of physical challenges, such as the inability to walk without completely destroying the ground surface beneath its feet. When humans walk, we exert about 1.5 times our body weight of pressure on the ground (and on our feet) with each step. This poses a huge problem for a 43-ton humanoid, which would probably need to have very wide feet (to distribute the pressure over a larger area) and walk very very slowly. Dinosaurs found a way to get around, though, so giant robots probably can, too.

But perhaps the greatest challenge of all would be to find the funding for an enormous walking machine with no apparent practical or military application. With no money, this Gundam will forever remain just a dream.

[Source: SciencePortal]

To the delight of divers, and to the chagrin of fishermen, the swarms of giant Echizen kurage jellyfish (Nomura’s jellyfish) that invade the coast of the Sea of Japan each autumn are back.

These photos were taken 5 meters underwater just offshore from the coastal town of Echizen in Fukui prefecture, where the jellyfish mobs began to arrive about a month later than normal.

Manabu Nakamata, a 38-year-old diver from Nagoya and an admirer of the monster jellyfish, says, “They are surprisingly hard to the touch. They are big, and extremely impressive.” Big indeed — Echizen kurage can grow up to 2 meters (6 ft. 7 in.) in diameter and weigh up to 200 kilograms (440 lb.) each.

The local fishermen, however, are not impressed. Each year, the giant jellyfish wreak havoc on the fishing industry by destroying nets and crushing, poisoning and sliming other fish in the catches. In the latest move in the war on jellyfish, Fukui prefecture is developing new and efficient weapons designed to pulverize those that threaten their shores.

[Source: Sankei]

On October 31, Mitsubishi Electric unveiled a 2-meter tall, 7.5-meter diameter panoramic display system consisting of synchronized rear-projection displays arranged in a wall that encircles the viewer. The 150 million yen ($1.3 million) system, which was built-to-order at the company’s Kyoto factory where it was unveiled, consists of 17 pairs of 67-inch panels arranged in a 340-degree near-circle — the 20-degree gap presumably allows the viewer to enter and exit the walk-in display. The system uses Texas Instruments Digital Light Processing (DLP) technology and has a total resolution of 27 million (1024 x 768 x 34) pixels.

At the unveiling, Mitsubishi said it will deliver the panoramic display system to the customer early next year, but the company was unwilling to say who the customer was or how they intend to use the display. However, Mitsubishi did say it hopes to begin selling the system as a virtual reality display for use at museums or in applications such as traffic simulations.

[Source: Iza!]

On September 30, about 900 volunteers participating in a hands-on rice farming tour began the annual harvest of the Inakadate village (Aomori prefecture) rice paddy art, which this year depicted a pair of famous Hokusai woodblock prints created with four different varieties of rice.

View more photos of rice paddy art HERE.

[Photos via: Inakadate Village, Mainichi, Sankei, Yomiuri]

Each August in the city of Yokkaichi in Mie prefecture, a giant mechanical effigy of O-nyudo, a legendary Japanese monster, is paraded through the streets during the Grand Yokkaichi Festival. The mechanized puppet, said to be the largest karakuri ningyo in Japan, stands between 6.3 and 9 meters (20 to 30 feet) tall depending on how far its neck is extended. The giant O-nyudo wows spectators by swinging its arms, bobbing its head around on its long neck, moving its eyes and mouth, and sticking out its tongue as it is wheeled through the streets to the accompaniment of taiko drums.

Here’s a short video.

O-nyudo, whose name literally means “large monk,” appears in a number of folk tales across Japan. While his physical appearance and characteristics vary from story to story, he is always large, ranging anywhere from 2 meters (6 ft. 6 in.) tall to as large as a mountain. O-nyudo usually appears as a giant person or an indistinct shadow, though he is known to have the ability to shape-shift.

In most cases, O-nyudo is a malevolent figure that can cause people to fall ill simply by looking at them. Some stories identify him as being a fox or tanuki (raccoon dog) that has shape-shifted (a common ability for these animals in Japanese folklore), but in most stories, his true identity remains a mystery.

The Japanese Wikipedia entry for O-nyudo (大入道) includes a nice selection of stories from different areas and time periods. Here are a few.

In Hokkaido during the Kaei period (c. 1850), native Ainu communities reported seeing O-nyudo near Lake Shikotsu and Mt. Fuppushidake. It is said that he could drive people to madness and cause them to lose consciousness just by looking at them with his large eyeballs.

In Toyama prefecture, people with medical conditions staying at the Kanetsuri hot springs to cure their diseases claim to have seen a 15- to 18-meter (50 to 60 feet) tall O-nyudo, who was described as being surrounded by a beautiful rainbow-colored halo.

In 1937 near Akabane station in Tokyo, a military officer delivering an akagami (draft card) had a frightening encounter with O-nyudo at a railroad crossing near Akabane-Hachiman Shrine. Here, O-nyudo appeared as a soldier. Four days later, the officer was hit by a train at the same railroad crossing. While stories rarely identify O-nyudo as a human spirit, this story suggests the O-nyudo was the vengeful ghost of either a new recruit that had committed suicide or a soldier that had been accused of failure and bludgeoned to death by a superior officer.

In some cases, O-nyudo is helpful. For instance, according to an old story in the town of Ishii in the Myozai district of Tokushima prefecture, an 8.5-meter (28 feet) tall O-nyudo would show up to help mill the rice whenever it accumulated at the local water mill. However, the O-nyudo only worked alone, and if anyone tried to observe him while he worked, he would turn angry and frighten them away.

Yokkaichi’s O-nyudo also appears to have been rather friendly, according to this website. One day long ago when Yokkaichi was a little merchant town, a large young man appeared at a small local shop and asked the owner to hire him. The shop owner, named Kyuroku, politely refused to employ the large man because the shop was too cramped to accommodate him. But the young man insisted, explaining to Kyuroku that he had just arrived from the countryside in search of work. Kyuroku eventually decided to hire him and gave him a room in his house behind the shop.

Mysteriously, the business began to thrive. Things went so well that after three years, Kyuroku asked the young man to marry his daughter so that he could one day inherit the shop. The young man refused the offer, saying he only wished to continue working as he had been.

Late one night the next summer, Kyuroku woke from his sleep and decided to step outside for some cool air. As he walked past the young man’s room, he noticed the glow of an oil lantern inside, visible through the shoji screen. The light cast a large shadow on the shoji that stopped Kyuroku dead in his tracks. He saw the ghastly, dark shape of a head attached to a long sinuous neck, slowly twisting and turning back and forth. Kyuroku watched in horror as the shadow snaked its head to the lantern and began to lick the oil. The head at the end of that horrible neck clearly belonged to the young man.

Kyuroku passed out from fear and fell to the floor. After waking the next morning, he cautiously went to the young man’s room and peeked inside. The room was empty except for the man’s striped kimono, which lay neatly folded on the floor. He had disappeared without a trace.

Nobody knows what happened to the large mysterious man, but the town of Yokkaichi built the mechanical O-nyudo effigy to pay him their respects and wish for his safety.

[Photos/video: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Each year, farmers in the town of Inakadate in Aomori prefecture create works of crop art by growing a little purple and yellow-leafed kodaimai rice along with their local green-leafed tsugaru-roman variety. This year’s creation — a pair of grassy reproductions of famous woodblock prints from Hokusai’s 36 Views of Mount Fuji — has begun to appear (above). It will be visible until the rice is harvested in September.

The residents of Inakadate have been drawing pictures with rice since 1993. Here are a few crops from the recent past, found at this site.

2006

2005

2002

While Inakadate is Japan’s most famous rice paddy decorating town, a couple of other places in Japan have joined in the fun.

Yonezawa, Yamagata prefecture, 2007

Yonezawa, Yamagata prefecture, 2006

Nishio, Aichi prefecture (2005, 2006)

UPDATE (Oct 1, 2007): Check out photos of the 2007 harvest HERE.

In early ’90s Japan, mobs of hungry primeval men hunted gigantic prehistoric creatures in a series of fanciful “Cup Noodle” commercials featuring stop-motion animation by Kim Blanchette.

Sea creatures

Uintatherium

Moa

Saiga antelope

Check here for other beasts in the series, including the mammoth, pterodactyl and giant warthog.

In the latest development in Japan’s war against giant jellyfish invaders, scientists studying the biochemistry of echizen kurage (Nomura’s jellyfish) have discovered a previously unknown type of mucin in the sea creatures.

Mucins, the main structural components of mucus, are complex proteins found in human saliva, gastric juice and the lining of the stomach, all of which play a key role in the digestive process. The recently discovered jellyfish mucin, according to the researchers from the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN) and science equipment manufacturer Shinwa Chemical Industries, can be put to use in a variety of pharmaceutical, medical, food and cosmetic products.

While the researchers have yet to release the details about the molecular structure of the jellyfish mucin, they claim it has a simple structure similar to a type of glycoprotein (organic molecule composed of protein and sugar chains) found in human digestive fluid, suggesting it could be used as a digestive supplement for elderly people with weak gastric juice. In addition, the researchers see potential uses for jellyfish mucin in products such as eyedrops, artificial saliva and surgical adhesives.

At least 12 types of mucins are known to exist in various locations in the human digestive tract, as well as in saliva and in the mammary glands. While mucins are also known to exist in animals and in some plants such as okra, lotus root and yams, only a few sources of the slimy substance have been tapped for large-scale commercial production.

To harvest the jellyfish, RIKEN says it is investigating the possibility of enlisting the help of Japan’s fisheries to catch the giant echizen kurage, which can grow up to 2 meters (6 ft 7 in) in diameter and weigh up to 200 kg (440 lb) each. The group is also considering harvesting moon jellyfish, the culprits responsible for disrupting output at nuclear power plants last year after they clogged seawater coolant intake pipes.

Business negotiations are now underway between 20 organizations, including pharmaceutical companies, medical institutions and food and cosmetics manufacturers.

[Source: Fuji Sankei]

This video clip from NHK’s “Planet Earth” shows the scene at dinner time on the deep ocean floor. The footage, which appears to have been shot by the Japanese submarine Shinkai 6500 in Okinawan waters at a depth of over 1500 meters (5,000 feet), shows sea-floor scavengers fighting for their piece of a fish carcass that has drifted down to the bottom. Crabs, eels and giant isopods (Bathynomus giganteus), which look like 30 centimeter (1 foot) long wood lice, join in the feeding frenzy that lasts several hours. Here it is time-lapsed to about 20 seconds for maximum impact. Itadakimasu.