Twentythree

A taste of the U.S. via Okinawa.

Our intrepid reporter Mr. Sato was recently in Fussa, a part of Tokyo west of the downtown area, where he discovered Tampopo, a retro pachinko parlor that lets you try your hand at the game without worrying about the gambling part of it. Fussa has more invitingly old-school vibes to offer, though, as Mr. Sato found while walking along National Route 16.

National Route 16 is actually a bit of an international thoroughfare, since it runs right along the edge of the United States Air Force’s Yokota Air Base. The base’s exact boundaries have shifted a bit over the years, and some former base housing sites and structures are now part of the civilian cityscape, with many of them having been converted into shops and restaurants with nods to their former occupants.

There’s even a section of Route 16 that’s been dubbed the Fussa Friendship Promenade.

As Mr. Sato ambled down the road, heading towards Ushihama Station, the next stop over from Fussa Station on the Ome Line, he spotted another sign representing a meeting point between Japan and America.

Blue Seal is a Japanese ice cream brand from Okinawa, but before that it was an American ice cream brand…but still one from Okinawa. Originally, Blue Seal was produced on, and only available at, U.S. military bases in Okinawa, created to supply American personnel and their accompanying family members a taste of home at a time before ice cream became readily available in Japan. In the 1960s, Blue Seal became available on the civilian market in Japan, and while ice cream is no longer hard to find in the country, among Japanese sweets fans Blue Seal has a reputation for being some of the very best.

However, Blue Seal isn’t so easy to find in the Tokyo area, and it wasn’t until 2006 that the chain finally came to east Japan, when it opened this Fussa branch.

As its first location in east Japan, the Fussa Blue Seal has a special “Big Dip” designation on its sign, just like the main branch in Okinawa’s Urasoe. The Fussa branch’s flagship status means that in addition to 25 different flavors ice cream, it also serves apple pie.

With the sun shining down brightly on him, Mr. Sato couldn’t say no to some Blue Seal ice cream, so he decided to take a break from his walk and refuel. He opted for the Blue Seal Sundae, which lets you choose one flavor each of scooped ice cream and soft serve for 750 yen (US$4.80), and made his selections salty milk and almond pistachio.

▼ And yes, his smile was just as big after he was done eating it.

Blue Seal has only three other Tokyo branches, one in the Ebisu neighborhood, one in Kokubunji, and one inside Haneda Airport’s Terminal 2. Given the brand’s roots, though, Mr. Sato feels like there’s a special sense of fun that comes from making an ice cream run at the Fussa branch.

Shop information
Blue Seal (Fussa branch) / ブルーシール（福生店）
Addres: Tokyo-to, Fussa-shi, Fussa 2475 Yokotakichi-mae
東京都福生市福生2475 横田基地前
Open 11 a.m.-10 p.m.
Website

Photos © SoraNews24
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There aren’t enough breath mints in the world to save us, but we’re going in anyway.

Japanese folk wisdom holds that garlic is a food that boosts physical stamina, and it’s supposed to be helpful in dealing with the adverse effects of hot weather too. The actual science behind those claims gets a little indistinct, but for garlic lovers, we’re getting into a time of year that provides ample excuses to load up on the seasoning. Today that leads us to Yoshioka, a ramen restaurant in downtown Tokyo’s Mejiro neighborhood.

You might have a little trouble spotting Yoshioka, because it actually shares space with a branch of the izakaya (Japanese pub) chain Torimero, with Yoshioka operating in the hours when Torimero isn’t and vice-versa.

▼ The Yoshioka (吉岡) and Torimero (鳥メロ) signs, and the stairway that leads up into the hybrid eatery.

Making the place a little easier to find for us on this day, though, was the sign that was placed at the bottom of the stairs advertising Yoshioka’s Garlic Ramen (“Ninniku Ramen” in Japanese), which included the bold statement:

“Try it once, and you’ll never be able to go back.”

We weren’t sure if this open-ended prophecy was meant to imply that we would never be able to go back to less garlicky versions of ramen, or whether we’d have such strong garlic fumes coming out of ourselves that we’d never be allowed back into regular society. That second possibility might sound a little overly dramatic, but consider this: Yoshioka boasts that it uses 200 grams (7.05 ounces) of garlic in every bowl of its Garlic Ramen. To put that in perspective, an average-sized clove of garlic weighs about 5 grams, meaning that eating a bowl of the Garlic Ramen should be the equivalent of eating roughly 20 cloves of garlic.

And yet, when the restaurant staff set our bowl down in front of us, it had what looked like even more garlic than that.

This is an insane amount of garlic. Like, there’re enough cloves that you could eat them by the spoonful, like the world’s most powerfully pungent cereal.

Oh, and in addition to the dozens of cloves of garlic, you get a sizeable squirt of garlic paste waiting to be mixed it into the salty soy sauce-based broth too.

And the taste? Pretty much the fiercest punch of garlic we could imagine. This is an edible declaration of the idea that one can never have too much garlic, and if that’s a conviction you share, you’ll fall in love with this instantly.

The seasoning is so powerful that by the second bite of noodles it was no longer shocking, either because of the bliss we were wrapped up in or because we’d already consumed so much garlic that we were transitioning into a clove of garlic ourselves, and so the flavor now felt natural.

Speaking of the noodles, they’re of excellent quality, with a smooth and slippery surface and firm consistency. Actually, even the broth has a noteworthy texture, as there’s so much garlic in it that the liquid takes on some fluffy, sticky characteristics.

At 1,500 yen (US$9.70), Yoshioka’s Garlic Ramen is on the pricier side, but with how much garlic you get, it doesn’t feel like a bad deal at all, especially when you take into account that you’re allowed one refill of noodles for no additional charge.

All in all, the Garlic Ramen is an unforgettable food experience, but there is one potentially negative aspect to it. Remember how we said Yoshioka shares its space with another restaurant? Because of that, Yoshioka is only open for lunch, meaning you’re going to have to eat this garlicky-loaded bowl of noodles in the early afternoon, or maybe even the late morning, and there is no imaginable way that you won’t smell have the smell of garlic emanating from you wherever you go for the rest of the day. Still, if you’re a garlic lover, it’s worth it, and if you’d rather have some super-salty ramen, we can show you where to find that too.

Restaurant information
Yoshioka (Mejiro main branch) / 吉岡（目白総本店）
Address: Tokyo-to, Toshima-ku, Mejiro 35-13, Fujiya Building 2nd floor
東京都豊島区目白3-5-13 フジヤビルM2F
Open 11 a.m.-2 p.m.

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Cultural quirks have a hand in making the same name the favorite for dogs and cats in annual study.

Japan’s most famous fictional cat might be the one named Kitty, but when it comes to actual pets, owners tend to get a little more creative with their choices. To investigate what Japan’s most popular pet names are, Daiichi ipet, the pet insurance division of Daiichi Life Group, recently conducted a study of the animal companions it covers, and there’s a common theme among many of the top entries on its list of dog and cat names.

The rankings were compiled by examining the names of dogs and cats who were less than one year old when new insurance policies were taken out for them during the last fiscal year (April 2025-March 2026), and for the sixth year in a row, the most popular name for dogs is Mugi. Mugi is also the number-one name for cats, jumping up to take the top spot from last year’s most popular feline moniker, Latte.

● Top names for dogs
1. Mugi
2. Latte
3. Mocha
4. Cocoa
5. Komugi
● Top names for cats
1. Mugi
2 (tie). Latte/Luna
4. Kinako
5. Leo
6. Mocha

▼ There’s a pretty good chance that at least one of the cats in this photo is named Mugi.

Many pet owners choosing “Luna” are no doubt thinking of Sailor Moon’s cat mentor of the same name, and “Leo” which was the top pick for male cats, is clearly meant to invoke images of lions. Take those two out of the above-listed names, though, and every remaining name has something in common: they’re all food/drink related.

Mugi is the Japanese word for either barley or wheat, and komugi is wheat specifically. There are even more food/drink names if you look farther down the list, with Kinako (roasted soybean powder) and Marron (the French word for “chestnut,” but commonly used in Japanese by sweets fans) at numbers 6 and 8 for dogs, and Omochi (rice cake) and Cocoa at numbers 7 and 8 for dogs.

This isn’t a brand-new trend, either. All of the above-mentioned names were also in Daiichi ipet’s lists of the top 10 dog and cat names in 2024, and giving pets food/drink-related names has been a thing in Japan for much longer than that, and a lot of their enduring popularity probably comes from two reasons.

Let’s start with the obvious one, which ties in to another common thread between many of the most popular names, which is that almost all of them are some shade of brown in color. The exception is Omochi, which is usually white, but even rice cakes take on a golden-brown color if you roast them, as is often done in Japan. A lot of dogs and cats have coats of fur somewhere on the spectrum between brown and gold, so giving them a food/drink name is a way to reference that physical trait.

Another factor that’s likely that in play here, though, is that in Japan it’s not very common to give pets the same names that people have. While there are also-for-people names in English that might have someone thinking of a dog first (like Rex or Rusty), you’ll also often encounter pets in the U.S. with names like Max, Daisy, Penny, or Charlie (all of which are on the American Kennel Club’s list of the most popular dog names in the U.S. for 2025). By comparison, though, it’s rare for Japanese pet owners to give their animals a modern for-people Japanese name like Haruto or Himari, as it would come off feeling overly dry and self-serious. The common logic in Japan is that pets should have names that are playful and fun. A food/drink-based name checks off those boxes, and if it matches the color of the pet’s coat, then there’s no need to explain the name to other people either.

When picking names for pets in Japan, foreign for-people names have a bit more pizzazz (in addition to being the number 4 name for cats in Daiichi ipet’s study, Leo was also the number 8 name for dogs), but then so do foreign food/drink names like Latte, Mocha, and Cocoa. There’s an interesting wrinkle to this, though, that shows up when Daiichi ipet’s study breaks down the most popular names for dogs by breed. Mocha, Cocoa, and Latte were all somewhere within the top three names for toy poodles, Chihuahuas, Pomeranians, and miniature Dachshunds. However, for the Shiba Inu, all three of the breed’s most popular names were Japanese words for foods: Komugi, Azuki (sweet red beans), and Mugi. Odds are this stems from “Shiba Inu” itself being a pair of Japanese words that’ve come to be the internationally accepted way of referring to the breed, making a Japanese-vocabulary food name feel like the best fit.

Source: Daiichi ipet via Otona Answer via Livedoor News via Golden Times
Top image: Pakutaso
Insert images: Pakutaso (1, 2)
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A new line of decorative mini figures made from gold pay homage to pioneering manga artist Osamu Tezuka’s massive influence on anime and manga.

U-Treasure, a Japanese jewelry brand that frequently partners with pop culture franchises for fun but classy keepsakes, is now taking preorders for the first three pieces in a new collaborative series paying homage to manga legend Osamu Tezuka.

The Osamu Tezuka World Gold Collection celebrates the 80th anniversary of the God of Manga‘s 1946 debut manga The Diary of Ma-chan (a four-panel newspaper comic strip). Tezuka continued to churn out classic works of manga for the rest of his life that revolutionized the genre and Japanese popular culture forevermore.

The standout piece of U-Treasure’s trio of offerings is undoubtedly the miniature figure of Tetsuwan Atom, better known as Astro Boy to English-speaking audiences. Tezuka’s original Astro Boy manga was serialized from 1952-1968, inspiring a groundbreaking 1963 TV series that is considered to be the first-ever serialized Japanese TV anime. Countless adaptations and collaborations have been produced since.

▼ Astro Boy, the robot boy whom we can thank for modern manga and anime

Costing 121,000 yen (US$760), the figure is crafted from 18-karat yellow gold and stands only 15 millimeters (0.59 inches) tall.

Nevertheless, it’s a faithful creation of the character, with Tezuka’s trademark large eyes and Astro Boy’s pointy, distinctive hairstyle.

The figure comes specially packaged in a black box inscribed with “Osamu Tezuka World” and “Testsuwan Atom” in gold, retro-style font.

Precisely because of its small size, it’s an elegant trinket that will upgrade any desk or shelf without taking up too much space.

While Astro Boy is undoubtedly the most recognizable of the new pieces, the two other characters in this release also hold a space place in Tezuka’s legacy. First, the 9-millimeter-tall Hyoutantsugi is a gourd-like character that was originally inspired by a doodle made by Tezuka’s younger sister. It became a visual gag that randomly appears in almost all of his works.

▼ Hyoutantsugi miniature gold figure (165,000 yen)

Second, the 12-millimeter-tall Buddha captures the likeness of Tezuka’s rendition of the life of Siddhartha Gautama in his 1972-1983 eponymously titled masterpiece.

▼ Buddha miniature gold figure (220,000 yen)

All three miniature figures are available for preorder between May 20 and June 22 on U-Treasure’s online shop and at U-Treasure Concept Stores Ikebukuro in Tokyo and Shinsaibashi in Osaka (location information here).

We’re looking forward to seeing what the next set of characters will be in U-Treasure’s The Osamu Teszuka World Gold Collection–and something tells us it definitely won’t be any of the erotic animal sketches that his daughter discovered locked in his desk drawer just over ten years ago.

Source, images: PR Times
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We head to a unique restaurant for a harami bowl and a janken match.

It wasn’t all that long ago that you could find lots of restaurants in Japan offering “one-coin” lunches, so called because the meals were priced at 500 yen (US$3.25) or less, with 500 yen being the largest denomination of coin in Japan. With prices rapidly rising, though, one-coin meals are getting harder and harder to find, something that’s making both our wallets and our stomachs very sad.

However, we recently discovered a restaurant in Tokyo where you can not only get a one-coin lunch, but you don’t even need a 500-yen coin, because the place sometimes charges as little as just one yen for lunch!

The restaurant is called BBQ Terrace Nakano, and as the name implies, it’s located in the Nakano neighborhood, about a five-minute walk from Nakano Station on the Chuo train and Tozai subway lines. After heading out the north exit, we strolled partway down the Nakano Sun Mall covered shopping arcade, hung a right and cut down one of the side streets until we got to Fureai Road, then turned left and kept walking for a bit more…

…until we were at the building that houses BBQ Terrace Nakano.

▼ Keep an eye out for this sign.

Now, if you’re wondering if there’s some sort of insidious catch to BBQ Terrace Nakano’s one-yen lunches, like they give you a slice of plain toast and call that a “lunch” before trying to upsell you on all sorts of different expensive side dishes, you can put your mind at ease. The one-yen price is a special offer on weekdays between 11:30 a.m. and 2 p.m., and is applicable to the restaurant’s BBQ Harami (skirt steak) and BBQ Yakitori (grilled chicken) bowls, which give you the meat, rice, miso soup, and pickles, which are normally priced at 1,200 yen.

That said, there is a challenge you’ll have to complete in order to get these meals for just one yen: you’ll have to defeat the restaurant staff in a game of janken, a.k.a. rock-paper-scissors.

We opted for the harami bowl, and after we placed our order, we sat waiting with our stomach growling and our competitive juices gurgling. It turned out that we’d gotten a bit ahead of ourselves, though, since you do the rock-paper-scissors challenge at the end of your meal, right before paying. In hindsight, this is a smart way to structure the system, since it encourages customers to be accepting of possibly paying 1,200 yen for the meal, making the potential one-yen price feel like a 1,199-yen discount if you’re lucky enough to get it.

And honestly, even for 1,200 yen, this is a pretty attractive spread.

The slices of beef are nice and thick, topped with ito togarashi (shredded red chili pepper) and treated with a soy sauce-based sauce and egg yolk to make it even more moist and flavorful.

It really is an outstanding meal, so much so that we wondered if we’d feel a little guilty if we ended up paying just one yen for it.

But hey, BBQ Terrace Nakano had issued the challenge, and we were going to accept it! Once we were done eating, we headed up to the register, where waiting for us was BBQ Terrace Nakano’s owner himself, who personally takes on all comers in the rock-paper-scissors bouts.

Together, we recited the customary Japanese janken cadence (“Saisho we gu! Janken pa!”) and threw out our opening gambit, paper…

…only to see that the owner had had the same idea! Tying like this is called aiko in Japanese, and you reset by calling out “Aiko desho,” and while we switched tactics to rock…

…BBQ Terrace Nakano’s miscalculated and changed to scissors, giving us the win, and the one-yen price for our lunch!

▼ Though it’s technically the same gesture, at this point our janken rock had transitioned to being a victory fist pump.

▼ The single one-yen coin, worth less than 1 U.S. cent, which we paid for our lunch.

So if you’re feeling lucky, or just very confident in your rock-paper-scissors skill, you can have a great meal at a great price here…but you’ll also need to be quick. Initially, the plan was for BBQ Terrace Nakano’s weekday lunch janken promotion to run only until the end of May, and while the owner says he’s now thinking about extending it farther than that, it probably won’t be around forever.

Restaurant information
BBQ Terrace Nakano / BBQテラス中野
Address: Tokyo-to, Nakano-ku, Nakano 5-50-4, Rikamu Building 4th floor
東京都中野区中野5-50-4　リカムビル4階
Open 11:30 a.m.-11 p.m.
Website

Photos ©SoraNews24
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Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry conducts study to estimate damage to producers of anime and other Japanese media.

With Japanese entertainment media growing in popularity around the world, the Japanese government’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry is also growing more concerned about the effects of media piracy overseas. In its latest study of the situation, the ministry claims that damage from piracy has been rapidly increasing, but one of its proposed countermeasures might not really do much to solve the problem.

For its study, the ministry conducted surveys in six foreign countries, including the U.S. and China, regarding “content piracy,” “content” here being a loose term used for entertainment media including anime and digital manga. Based on the results of the surveys, the ministry estimates that 5.7 trillion yen (US$37 billion) worth of Japanese content was pirated overseas in 2025, roughly three times the amount estimated for 2022, the previous iteration of the ministry’s study.

For the 2025 investigation, the ministry also added a new category, estimating the amount of pirated “character goods” that were sold online outside of Japan, such as knockoff and unlicensed figures, posters, plushies, and the like. For this category, the ministry arrived at an estimate of 4.7 trillion yen, brining its total figure for pirated content and knockoff merch to 10.4 trillion yen.

The ministry is framing this as the amount of “damage” caused to the legitimate Japanese media/merchandising industry, which invites consideration of whether pirated media always directly correlates to lost sales revenue. Those of a more lenient viewpoint could argue that if someone pirates content which they weren’t going to pay for anyway, no actual damage has been done, and similar logic could be applied to pirating of Japanese content not available in the country of the pirating party. On the other hand, it’s naive to think that no one is pirating content they would have paid for in the absence of an illicit way to get it for free, and with such a significant amount of Japanese entertainment media now being distributed in major foreign markets in a fairly timely matter, it’d be disingenuous to try to frame piracy as strictly an issue of availability either.

As such, while the actual damage to Japanese rightsholders is likely less than the full 10.4 trillion yen that the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry is claiming, it’s also not like there are no negative effects from piracy, and so it’s not surprising that the Japanese government would want to look for ways to address the problem.

However, one of the ideas being floated by the researchers is to promote the use of AI in production to lower costs and secure profits. In addition to sidestepping the root causes of piracy (insufficient legal enforcement and/or local availability), a reliance on lower costs also ignores that a major reason Japanese content, particularly anime, has become so popular around the world is that many foreign fans see it as having a mix of high quality and unique narratives, neither of which are things that AI is particularly good at producing. Leaning on the technology as a method by which to address piracy could end up as a sort of monkey’s paw if, by eroding what makes Japanese entertainment content attractive to audiences in the first place, AI simply turns Japanese-made media into something that’s not worth watching.

Source: TBS News Dig via Livedoor News via Otakomu
Top image: Pakutaso
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