The Doesn't-Surprise-Me-After-All-They-Are-Japanese Thread

[Suzanne]

Nose fetish? You're not alone...



  Pinocchia Gallery I  | II

[Suzanne]

Weeeeee! It's the gadget we've been waiting for for all our lives:



The Hello Kitty Fire Extinguisher

 

[Suzanne]

I vant your blood...

The Japan Red Cross Society is offering a number of new “services” they hope will entice people to donate blood. Among these are hand massages by young women in maid outfits, manicures, hair health evaluation, and fortune telling.

At the Akiba Blood Donation Room in Tokyo’s Akihabara district, home of the country’s maid-loving otaku culture, donors are met by a young woman dressed in a maid outfit who provides a 10-minute hand massage.

Read on

[Suzanne]

Chindogu

the not-so-ancient Japanese art of inventing ingenious everyday gadgets that, on the face of it, seem like an ideal solution to a particular problem. However, Chindogu has a distinctive feature: anyone actually attempting to use one of these inventions, would find that it causes so many new problems, or such significant social embarrassment, that effectively it has no utility whatsoever. Thus, Chindogu are sometimes described as ‘unuseless’ - that is, they cannot be regarded as ‘useless’ in an absolute sense, since they do actually solve a problem; however, in practical terms, they cannot positively be called ‘useful’.

Read on

[Suzanne]

Evidence That There Is Something Very Wrong With The Japanese

[Suzanne]

Arggh.. I seriously need a new brain now.  

[strumpetwindsock]

Here are some relevant artifacts I found on boingboing.net

You might think they'd use this to scare small children into NEVER eating there. Sadly, it's probably not true:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q16KpquGsIc&eurl=http://www.hiltonjapan.com/2008/02/japanese-video-edits-insane-ronald-san.html

This is just wrong:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/playmo91/2317532489/

Make sure you go to the photostream at top right. It comes with its own monkey, pre-pubsecent boys and masked children. Wouldn't it be ironic if he morphed into a Japanese Santa-cult figure a few hundred years from now?

And finally:
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/12/20/fake-breasts-from-th.html

If its any consolation, I am sure some of the things we come up with seem just as weird to the outside observer.