This video is stupendously good fun - all the tunes you hear at all the stations on the Yamanote line in Tokyo in a groovy retro gamer stylee.

Ninja Train, originally uploaded by [douglas japonicus].

In case anyone still had any doubts about whether pirates or ninjas were better, the little town of Iga Ueno in Mie prefecture puts forward its argument - the Ninja Festa 2008. JapaniCan describes it thus -

Wearing loaned ninja clothes, you can have an experience of learning ninja skills at ninja schools.

And you even get free travel on the Iga Tetsudo (see picture) if you’re dressed up like a ninja. Sweet.

Beat that pirates.

The Ninja Festa 2008 started on April 1st and runs until May 6th. Break out dem shurikens.

You can also see a rather mad video by going to the Iga City website here.

(WARNING: contains mind melting images of dogs dressed as ninja.)

Owing to staff shortages, Mount Fuji will be closed to climbers this summer - but only on Sundays. The authorities have been having trouble finding people willing to spend the whole season on the mountain, and so have decided to restrict access on Sundays. This effectively means that those who want to do a weekend climb have to be off the mountain by midnight on Saturday, although the most detailed news report I found made no mention of penalties. Perhaps they’ll leave you stranded up there…

I’m also not sure if this means the Self Defence Forces will have to find somewhere else to train as well, although to be honest, no-one really cares about them. Especially North Korea.

(more info here.)

Japan is internationally renowned for its love of cute. This is oft exaggerated, but isn’t entirely without merit. What is often missed is the side effect of this obsession, whereby nearly every business, organization, event - or indeed, just about anything - irrespective of size or purpose, seeks to get itself a mascot.

The Aichi expo had these guys -

The Japanese police have this guy -

Hikone Castle has this guy -

The Japanese military settled, famously, on this guy (the one on the left, who won’t be fingerprinted on coming to Japan) -

Nara, one of Japan’s most popular tourist destinations, site of the ancient capital, and famous for deers and temples, didn’t have a mascot. This oversight needed correcting, obviously, so the city government contracted themselves a nifty looking logo that they thought would sum up the charms of their city as cutely as possible.

This is what they got -

According to Yahoo news, there have been a few complaints that it isn’t cute enough. I’m inclined to agree.

source - Yahoo news (only Japanese)

Remember Gunkanjima? The little rock in the ocean, off the coast of Nagasaki, that once saw duty as a coal mining town? No? Well, you can review the original post from way back when here, and perhaps you might want to take a look at the wikipedia entry here. It’s a beautiful, haunting place, a testament to how we interact with our environment and what happens when we just stop.

It would look really, really good filled with zombies.

Something more grounded in reality, and a lot more moving than that suggestion can be found below - a video taken when someone who grew up on the island in its heyday goes back to see the ruins. Stunning, moving and fascinating.

via videosift.com

Once upon a time, there was a world where you couldn’t buy a piece of plastic that had a microchip embedded in it. In this world before IC cards, you had to allow yourself enough time to buy a ticket when you went to the train station.

Seriously, who has time for that? No-one, that’s who. So some bright spark came up with the precursor to the IC card - commuter passes. Pieces of plastic, it is true, but flexible! Bendy! No microchip! And best of all, they came in all manner of varieties. With pretty designs.

Sadly, the convenience of the IC card behemoths, Suica & Passmo, means the end of these commuter passes - it’ll all be over come the 14th of March. Which is a shame, as I’d just started collecting them.

Here’s a little gallery of the ones I’ve gathered to date.

Slideshow