Designed by Michael Kritzer, an industrial designer with Red Dot, iF, and Cannes Lions awards to his name, Dollights are inspired by creative Kokeshi dolls, those beautifully varied Japanese wooden figures that range from traditional to wildly expressive. The connection isn't literal. You won't mistake these for dolls on a shelf. But the DNA is there in the proportions, that satisfying relationship between a rounded head and a tapered body, the way each silhouette feels like it has its own quiet personality.
He has been filmed multiple times being dragged and chased by older Japanese macaques inside the enclosure. Early clips showed him wandering alone with the toy after being pushed away by other monkeys, and clutching it tightly while being harassed. Viewers were briefly relieved when later videos emerged of another monkey grooming and comforting him. However, just days later, new footage showed Punch once again being targeted this time dragged aggressively in a circle by a much larger monkey.
Virtual Cram School Wish High is a new online school by Tokyo-based company Luminaris. According to the publication, all teachers are "active VTubers," meaning streamers who use digital avatars to represent themselves instead of showing their real faces. Tuition at the online academy is the equivalent of around $63 per course per month, on subjects including mathematics, English, physics, chemistry, world history, Japanese history, and geography.
You've got your obvious bangers, such as Frieren: Beyond Journey's End and Jujutsu Kaisen, but there are at least twenty weekly releases currently airing that are worth watching. Hell's Paradise, Fate/Strange Fake, Sentenced to Be a Hero, My Hero Academia: Vigilantes, Trigun Stargaze, Golden Kamuy - I could go on, and that's without including the stuff that just finished airing, such as Spy x Family and To Your Eternity.
The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter tells of an elderly bamboo cutter who discovers a tiny, radiant girl inside a glowing stalk of bamboo. He and his wife raise her as their own daughter, naming her Kaguya-hime. As she grows, she becomes extraordinarily beautiful, attracting suitors from across the land. Five noblemen seek her hand in marriage, but she tests them by assigning each an impossible task-such as retrieving the Buddha's stone begging bowl or the jewelled branch of Mount Hōrai. Each suitor fails.
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One of Japan's most recognizable cultural practices - the Japanese tea ceremony, known as chanoyu, or chadō - is being reshaped by tourism, wellness culture and social media. Matcha, the Japanese powdered green tea that is used during the ceremony, has entered the global marketplace. Influencers post highly curated tearoom photos, wellness brands market matcha as a "superfood," and cafés worldwide present whisked green tea as a symbol of mindful living.
Come join us for the clash (more like a love-fest) of two beloved San Jose staple nights! Satori and Atomic have been putting on memorable dance parties in San Jose full of new and classic Goth, Darkwave, New Wave, Electro, Indie and Industrial for decades. For one night only, we unite to play all the bangers until you just can't dance anymore!
The Bud­dhis­ti­cal­ly inflect­ed " ichi-go ichi‑e" is just one in the vast library of yoji­juku­go, high­ly con­densed apho­ris­tic expres­sions writ­ten with just four char­ac­ters. (Oth­er coun­tries with Chi­nese-influ­enced lan­guages have their ver­sions, includ­ing sajaseon­geo in Korea and chéngyǔ in Chi­na itself.) It descends, as the sto­ry goes, from a slight­ly longer say­ing favored by the six­teenth-cen­tu­ry tea mas­ter Sen no Rikyū, " ichi-go ni ichi-do " (一期に一度).
Okamoto was instrumental in Japan's 2023 WBC title win. In seven games, Okamoto slashed .333/.556/.722 with an OPS of 1.278. He knocked in seven RBIs and two homers, with one of those coming in the championship game against the United States. After being selected for Japan, Okamoto is one of several Blue Jays' confirmed player suiting up for the WBC, following Ernie Clement for Team USA, Alejandro Kirk for Team Mexico and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. for Team Dominican Republic.
Kintsugi 金継ぎ is known as the Japanese art of putting broken things back together, like broken pottery, using materials mixed with powdered gold and other elements. Instead of hiding damage, this technique celebrates the restoration of an object once viewed as broken, flawed, or imperfect. This same process can be seen as a metaphor for addiction recovery. Even for people with addiction who willingly choose recovery, there's an element of being remade that can't be ignored. Addicts often go through a period of denial.
but thanks to the opening of Pokemon's first ever amusement park on 5 February, this year, they are likely to come earlier. Unlike the rollercoaster-filled thrills of Tokyo Disney Sea or Universal Studios Japan in Osaka, PokePark Kanto is essentially a forest populated by models of the creatures from the perennially popular games. Nestled in the quiet Tokyo suburb of Inagi, half an hour from the city centre, the park is a walkable forest with more than 600 Pokemonin it.
Behind [Mount Fuji's] beautiful landscape is the reality that the quiet lives of citizens are threatened. We have a strong sense of crisis. To protect the dignity and living environment of our citizens, we have decided to bring the curtain down on the 10-year-old festival, he added in his statement. Authorities cited repeated incidents of disruptive behaviour from tourists in the city, which lies to the west of Tokyo.
One Piece's Monkey D. Luffy joined the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade floats, the latest Demon Slayer film earned $780 million at the worldwide box office in 2025, and the animated musical KPop Demon Hunters (though not technically anime) became the most-watched original Netflix movie of all time. As someone who had no one to talk to growing up during the days of Naruto and Dragon Ball Z, it's tough to even process that the genre has reached mainstream status around the globe.
Finally, we are one step closer to a full-on Pokémon land coming to a theme park in the United States. Universal Studios Japan just made the first move in making our Poké friends into an amusement park staple. Pokémon International and USJ are expanding their collaboration by creating "an unprecedented, innovative experience" that will first debut at Universal Studios Japan before expanding to other theme parks globally.
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
The show, simply titled " Samurai," dives into the myth of the samurai and how it came to be, to teach viewers how this fierce warrior class emerged during the early medieval period in the 1100s and evolved over the next few centuries to become an elite class of bureaucrats. The exhibition also examines portrayals of samurai in modern-day popular culture, and how that compares to reality. Yes, the samurai started out as fierce fighters, but their identity is much more complex than that.