This article is reproduced from the discontinued, but much loved Mainichi Waiwai column by Ryann Connell. Read more about this at the bottom of this article.
Tucked in a corner of the Aichi Prefecture city of Toyota, the Homi Danchi housing estate most famous for its racial problems, may offer a vision of the Japan of the future, according to Spa! (12/4).
The estate opened in 1975 and, like many public housing complexes at the time, was then a highly desirable residence for many families.
Up until now we have never introduced any angles on picking up in Japan, or for that matter anything to do with romance in Japan in general (except that is, for our unfinished series on Japanese Love Hotels). This is for several reasons, the first being that most of us have been here for more than ten years, and picking up ladies in Japan seems to have become “second nature” – so much so that most of us ended up marrying one (or two!) of them. By no means does this mean that we claim to be pick-up machines, but it just didn’t seem to be a topic that needed airing amongst our mostly long term Japan resident readership. Despite running Stippy Friends (the best online deai spot to meet real Japanese girls), we thought that writing about the same would be slightly crass, and would turn people away from discovering our other more serious, and sometimes humorous perspectives on Japan. It seems we were wrong. Continue reading Picking Up in Japan – Part One: Leading→
This article is reproduced from the discontinued, but much loved Mainichi Waiwai column by Ryann Connell. Read more about this at the bottom of this article.
Modern day members of the Tokugawa clan — the xenophobic dynasty of Shoguns that shut Japan off from the world for centuries — are up in arms because the man set to one day become head of the family has married a non-Japanese, according to Shukan Shincho (9/20).
Iehiro Tokugawa, who is poised to one day become the 19th head of the clan that ruled the country as Shoguns from 1603 to 1868 and maintained a rigid ban on foreigners entering Japan, has tied the knot with a Vietnamese woman.
This article is reproduced from the discontinued, but much loved Mainichi Waiwai column by Ryann Connell. Read more about this at the bottom of this article.
A disgusting and twisted restaurant in the Tokyo entertainment district of Roppongi is enticing warped rich folk with the opportunity to figuratively have their cake and eat it, too — with animals, according to Jitsuwa Knuckles (9/25).
Roppongi’s bestiality restaurant is being regarded by its main nouveau riche patronage of young company presidents and venture capitalists as a decadent practice only possible among the wealthy.
This article is reproduced from the discontinued, but much loved Mainichi Waiwai column by Ryann Connell. Read more about this at the bottom of this article.
Posh women are increasingly returning to the arms of their old beaus, even if they’re as fat, bald and stinky as their husbands, in a phenomenon Shukan Gendai (8/18-25) labels “recycling sex.”
“Mie,” as we’ll call the 38-year-old housewife, comes from a more expensive part of Tokyo and is a case in point.
This is part two of our writeup and perspective on IDNs, especially double byte Japanese domain names. See Part One (where we went into some detail of explaining the history of the technology surrounding IDNs) before reading on. Without going into too much more history or spurting out much more technical jargon, lets explore some day to day aspects of double byte domains, how they are (or rather aren’t) used, and why they just aren’t the glowing future of Japanese internet real estate that initially they may seem to be. Continue reading Double Byte “Internationalized Domain Names”: A Superficial Alternative (Part 2)→
Double Byte IDNs: “Interesting, but Useless Eye-Candy”
Internationalized Domain Names, heard of them? Double byte web addresses. You know the ones – the 日本.jps and the 価格.coms – you must have seen them lurking somewhere? Yes, these are called IDNs, or Internationalized Domain Names.
The Japan Defense Ministry Lolita Manga (Click to enlarge)
This article is reproduced from the discontinued, but much loved Mainichi Waiwai column by Ryann Connell. Read more about this at the bottom of this article.
From the successor of the government ministry that gave the world Pearl Harbor and the Rape of Nanking now comes a cutesy little girl cartoon character dressed as a maid with a hawkish stuffed teddy bear to give a simple explanation of Japan’s defense policies, according to Cyzo (August).
Growing numbers of government agencies have used borderline pedophile manga characters to promote their activities in recent years, but it’s the Defense Ministry’s little girl character that is attracting attention among Japan’s otaku, the monthly says.
This article is reproduced from the discontinued, but much loved Mainichi Waiwai column by Ryann Connell. Read more about this at the bottom of this article.
Japanese schools are getting filled with more kids that stink, according to Sunday Mainichi (7/8).
Growing disparity between the country’s haves and have-nots is believed to be behind the increase in unhygienic children. But broken homes and the increasing number of foreigners in Japan are also being blamed.
With our poem about Leaving Japan, we had quite a few comments from readers who previously lived – or currently live – in Japan, and what they love or hated about the place. In fact, some of the comments were longer than the article as many people expressed reasons for their deep attachments with Japan and its residents, even while they are aware of the fact that they will never melt in to their surrounds, remaining eternally gaijin. Just what is it that keeps us here? Continue reading Living in Japan: Utopia compared with the UK→
Up until now we have never introduced any angles on picking up in Japan, or for that matter anything to do with romance in Japan in general (except that is, for our unfinished series on 
This is part two of our writeup and perspective on IDNs, especially double byte Japanese domain names. See 
With our poem about 