Bouncing Red Ball

Bandai Networks has announced the availability of their green-colored Gachapin-and-Mukku-themed netbook powered by Windows XP. Gachapin and Mukku are two popular Japanese anime characters: Gachapin is a 5-year-old dinosaur boy and his friend Mukku is a red yeti.
This decidedly unique netbook is anime-themed all over, from its custom system sounds (”oyaho”, “jaa ne” and “tadaima” [...]

After a recent spell of bad news, here’s a good one for Toyota.
The Winglet, Toyota’s personal transporter in the style of Segway, will start initial production next year, 2009. Aiming for corporate customers, Toyota will deliver the first batch of 10 Winglets to the Central Japan International Airport in Aichi Prefecture.
This early release of the [...]

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a Quicktime VR panorama may be worth ten times more. (Depending on your equipment, it may take up to 10 images or more to stitch a panoramic picture.) So for you out there who long to visit Tokyo but have neither time nor money to do [...]

Autumn is a good time to visit the Ushiku Daibutsu located in the city of Ushiku in Ibaraki, just north of Tokyo. (The photos below were taken in late summer.) The Daibutsu (literally “Big Buddha”) is a giant bronze statue that stands guard over the Jodo Teien Garden and the Jyoen Memorial Park inside the [...]

Streets in Japan, unless you’re in the middle of Shibuya on a weekend, are usually devoid of people. Even looking down Japan inside Google Earth, it’s hard to find a place where you will see a lot of activity. Except for one place: Tokyo Disneyland. In 2006 alone, over 25,800,000 people visited the most [...]

When a countrywide group of Japanese custom-car aficionados meet somewhere in the Kanto area of Japan, you’re sure to see some weird, deformed, barely rideable machines. I doubt these can be used on ordinary roads in Japan, but they’re kind of cool though, in a kinky kind of way. (Click on the pictures to go [...]

The NetTansorWeb (NTW) doesn’t have Kitty-chan’s looks nor Plen’s rollerskating skills but it does one thing that other robots can’t: it blogs. This is probably the world’s first robot blogger, if you discount splogs that are created by net bots.
This harmless-looking robot might actually replace real bloggers in the future.

This Wi-Fi enabled robot has a [...]

Just when I thought it couldn’t possibly get colder than this I just got word that it will probably snow tomorrow morning. I can’t make up my mind if that’s good or bad news. Still, the thought of spring brings happy memories of flowers, hanami, and runny noses. The picture above was taken last year [...]