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.

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

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).

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.

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.

Japan – Heartbeats of Time

The Moments Between, Episode 1: Japan

Click here to view the embedded video.

Trey Ratcliff, who is blind on one eye, has a lot of really neat photos in HDR technique on his web site at StuckInCustoms.com (the Japan category is here).

A note for the technically inclined: the slow-motion footage in the above videos was achieved using a Casio EX-FC100 digital camera. This little gadget costs only about $200 and can capture up to 1000 frames per second.

Banana vending machine. (Source: http://www.shibukei.com/headline/6996/)

In Japan, you can find vending machines for drinks, ice cream, noodles, umbrellas (!), and many other things. But bananas?

Japan’s first banana vending machine by Dole, installed recently in Tokyo, has become a big hit, selling its entire stock on the first and subsequent days.

The cooled vending machine has been installed in Shibuya Station in an underground connection between the Tokyu Denentoshi Line and Hanzomon Line. In the future, the maker hopes to sell other fruits in vending machines directly inside offices and universities. Dole is apparently targeting people who live alone and don’t have much time to prepare or shop for food.

However, since eating in public is traditionally considered taboo in Japan, most people who buy the bananas take them home, to their office or school.

One banana from the vending machine costs 130 Yen (about $1.50) while a bunch of 5 or 6 bananas costs 390 Yen (about $4.50).

The pyrotechnic festivity with 20,000 fireworks — and about the same amount of spectators — lasted about an hour and a half.

What’s really great about Japanese hanabi is that fireworks last really long — the rockets keep exploding without breaks for an hour or even more. Organizers spend months preparing for these events.

We dug up a couple of videos showing this year’s sparkling Sumidagawa Hanabi. Watch:

Discovery of the tree in 1968 on the small southern island Yakushima sparked moves to protect the forests on this island which is designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Jomon Sugi, the oldest and largest known specimen of Cryptomeria japonica, is located on the north face of Miyanoura-dake, the highest peak on Yakushima, at an elevation of 1300 meters (4300 ft). Here are some more technical details: the tree’s height is 25.3 meters (83 ft), trunk circumference is 16.2 meters (53 ft), and the volume measures approximately 300 cubic meters (10,000 cubic ft). For visitors, access is restricted to an observation deck at a distance of 15 meters (50 ft) from the tree.

The island of Yakushima has developed a very rich, interconnected ecosystem. As many as 30 different species of trees, herbs, plants, and mosses have been observed growing from the surface of some of the greater sugi trees here (via link).

Top: Jomon Sugi, the oldest tree in Japan (source: Wikimedia Commons). Bottom left: size of tree compared to a human (visitors aren't allowed to take photos this close at the actual tree). Bottom right: location of the Yakushima island.