According to the Japan Meteorological Agency, this was Japan’s hottest summer in the past 113 years.

From June to August, temperatures rose by 1.64 degrees Celsius higher than average, and the highest since 1898 when the weather agency started recording data.

Central Tokyo has seen 48 “tropical nights” with the lowest temperature of 25°C (77°F) at night. The average temperature in Tokyo was 27.1°C (80.78°F) which is 2.3 degrees higher than average. These calculations do not include the heat island effect in urban areas and other phenomena.

According to the forecasts, the country can expect daytime high temperatures to stay around 35°C (95°F) at least until September 14.

Heatstroke has so far sent more than 40,000 people to hospitals and claimed hundreds of lives, mostly senior citizens.

—

Source: http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201009020435.html

In Japan, comic books are as common as rice. They’re everywhere, anytime.

A sweaty salaryman on on overcrowded train with no oxygen barely finds any space to flip through the pages of the latest issue of Reluctant Soldier Princess Nami. A uniformed schoolgirl hypnotically follows Naruto’s adventures on the screen of her cell phone. A culturally-shocked tourist wanders around the maze of a six-floor specialized comic book store with thousands and thousands of titles. Manga cafés. Manga rental shops. Comic book fairs and conventions.

And then there is Rikimaru Toho who reads manga — the Japanese comic books — to the audience on the street.

Toho is a professional manga reader — also known as Manga Man — who had already become some sort of a celebrity here in Tokyo and has even been featured on MTV Japan and other TV stations.

Rikimaru Toho reads manga to audience in Shimokitazawa, Tokyo. (Source: http://sc.4connection.org/file/people.html)

Rikimaru Toho, with a towel wrapped around his head, every Saturday at 10 o’clock at night enthusiastically reads manga aloud to listeners in front of the South Exit of Shimokitazawa Station in Tokyo. On Sunday afternoons you can find him in the nearby Inokashira Park, just a few stations away. He’s been doing this for the past five years.

Before he was picked up by the media, Toho was unemployed. Now he gets offers to perform in theaters and clubs.

The audience can choose any of the manga from the wide selection he puts on the sidewalk, donate a few hundred Yen and the show can begin. For Toho, no character is out of bounds. A performance lasts about 10 or 15 minutes on average.

“The best thing about my manga performances is when audience members are sweating when they thank me after a reading. I’m the one who performed — but they’re the ones sweating,” says Toho. (Source)

By now, you’re probably wondering what it all sounds like. We dug up a couple of videos below:

Rikimaru Toho’s web site can be found here (in Japanese only).

Nikodama (ニコダマ) is a new Japanese high-tech toy: a pair of two gazing eyeballs that you can put on practically any object or surface.

But that’s not all. The fun part: once both eyes are aligned on a surface, they send each other signals and start blinking simultaneously.

Nikodama will make any object come to life.

A pair of Nikodama eyeballs which measure 7.6 cm (3 inches) in diameter is powered by 6 AAA batteries. The package comes with a decoration sheet so you can make the eyes look even more fun which decorative tears, eyebrows, nose and such.

Watch Nikodama in action here:

Nikodama is made by Cube and you can buy it on Japanese Amazon for 3130 Yen (about $36).

They throw them into trash bins for plastic bottle caps, of course!

PET bottle caps trash bin. Found in Adachi-ku City Hall, Tokyo.

In Japan, recycling is part of daily life. Besides separating caps from plastic bottles, people usually remove the labels from bottles as well before dumping them into recycle bins.

There even exists a special organization — The Council  for PET Bottle Recycling — established in 1993 for promotion, research and study of plastic bottle recycling.

A law for container and packaging recycling which also includes plastic bottles has been enforced in April 1997 by the Japan Ministry of the Environment.

This week marks 65 years since the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

These two and 200000+ others didn’t survive.

The incident brought an early end to the second world war and marked the beginning of more safer and a more peace-loving period, a true nuclear renaissance of humanity with yet more bombs, explosions and harmful psychopaths on the highest political positions.

A Japanese artist named Isao Hashimoto in 2003 released a video that shows all nuclear detonations between 1945 and 1998 on the map of the world.

The ten-minute show kicks off with the Manhattan Project’s Trinity test bombing in the desert near Los Alamos in the US and concludes with a majestic series of Pakistani nuclear tests in 1998. In the beginning, the explosions are relatively rare, so if you want real action, fast-forward to 1962. Total number of detonations is 2053; the players are the United States, Russia/USSR, France, United Kingdom, China, India and Pakistan.

The digits in the upper right corner are month and year. The bottom right shows the total count of explosions.

Like a computer game.