Twentythree

The traditional, reusable cloth that can be converted into a bag is part of a new campaign designed to “Keep Tokyo Clean.”

As we’ve covered before, public trash cans are a fairly rare sight throughout Japan. They were largely removed from public spaces following the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin gas attack as an added security precaution since they would be an easy place to conceal explosives. Instead, Japanese people are taught to bring their trash home with them, a system that works well up till a certain point. Given the sharp rise in international tourists over the past few years, many of whom don’t know the system well or how to sort their trash appropriately, officials have noticed an uptick in the amount of littering happening, and consequently, some areas of Tokyo have implemented strict anti-littering fines this year.

As a further step to promote cleanliness, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government is in the process of rolling out a new Tokyo Clean-Up Action campaign with the catchphrase “Keep Tokyo Clean,” which is designed to spread awareness about the importance of not littering. Part of this campaign is the distribution of a furoshiki–Japan’s original eco-friendly piece of cloth–that can be easily converted into a bag used to carry your trash home with you while on the go.

▼ Furoshiki are a reusable piece of fabric, usually square in shape, that can be adapted for a variety of uses, including as wrapping cloths, bags, or decorations. They often feature traditional or fun patterns, such as these cat-themed ones found at Tokyo’s Nippori Station.

© SoraNews24

The Keep Tokyo Clean furoshiki are made from recycled polyester and feature images of Tokyo’s three AI-powered PR avatars the Tokyonauts, designed by artist Atsuko Nishida of Pikachu, Bulbasaur, Charmander, and Squirtle Pokémon design fame. Simply fold the furoshiki using the provided instructions to create a fun and handy bag in the face of your avatar of choice. The resulting bag’s size is big enough to fit a standard plastic drink bottle inside.

▼ The green owl-like character is Fukuhou, the red turtle-like character is Kikukame, and the yellow cat-like character is Tsutaneko.

If you want to get your hands on this practical and cute keepsake during your Japan trip, the Keep Tokyo Clean furoshiki will be available at various accommodations, lodgings, tourist information centers, and public events throughout Tokyo Prefecture for the next several months. It will similarly be up for grabs at a special kick-off event for the campaign on August 22 from 11 a.m. through 5 p.m. at the Omotesando Hills shopping complex in basement level 3’s Space O, where Tokyo governor Yuriko Koike will give a speech on the importance of maintaining a clean capital city.

For another method of keeping your space clean that leans on traditional craft, check out this old-school way of making trash containers from old papers.

Related: Keep Tokyo Clean official website
Source: Keep Tokyo Clean, Tokyo Bureau of the Environment, Nikkei via Hachima Kiko
Top image: Keep Tokyo Clean
Insert image © SoraNews24
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Family Mart has an “it’ll do” pair of sunglasses that might become your favourite pair.

Sunglasses can be a bit of a hot-button topic amongst tourists visiting Japan, as they’re not commonly worn here due to their association with the yakuza. However, as Japan’s summers become increasingly hot and intense, attitudes towards sunglasses appear to be shifting. In the last couple of years, some prefectural police departments have started allowing officers to wear sunglasses while on outdoor duty (previously only officers on motorcycles and boats were encouraged to wear shades) and more and more stores are now selling them, including convenience store chain Family Mart.

Introduced this summer as part of the chain’s hugely popular Convenience Wear line, the new sunglasses retail for 2,490 yen (US$16.50), making them an affordable purchase when you’re out and in a pinch.

That’s what happened to our reporter Takashi Harada recently, who spotted the sunglasses at Family Mart on such a bright day that he decided right then and there that they would be worth the investment.

▼ The Family Mart sunglasses are unisex, with polarised lenses and UV protection.

▼ Most importantly, the lenses aren’t particularly dark.

In Japan, dark lenses are said to give off “iatsukan” (“intimidating presence”) vibes, which is one of the reasons they’re so stigmatised. That’s the reason why a lot of people who do wear sunglasses in Japan prefer lighter lenses that allow others to still see their eyes.

It was as if Family Mart knew exactly what would resonate with local customers, and although Takashi initially bought a pair as an “it’ll do” type of purchase, they ended up becoming his favourite pair.

As soon as he put them on, he was impressed by how well they fit. One of his pet gripes with glasses is how they can sometimes feel excessively tight on the temples and behind the ears, but these slid on like they’d been designed specifically for his face.

▼ The tiny Family Mart design details are another nice touch.

The lenses also suited him – although they have a Visible Light Transmittance of 30 percent, he had no complaints. Sure, they didn’t completely block the glare when the sun shone directly into his eyes, but they did a good job of reducing the sunlight for his purposes, which was taking a stroll outdoors.

▼ As long as you’re not staring straight into the sun, these do the job nicely.

What he liked most about the sunglasses, though, was how he didn’t have to worry about the way he handled them. He does own a pair of sunglasses that cost significantly more, but whenever he uses them he has to take a lot more care not to scratch them or drop them. At 2,490 yen, the Family Mart sunglasses aren’t quite as precious, so he now finds himself reaching for these a lot more often than he does his regular pair.

Family Mart actually sells two types of sunglasses – the Square style, which he purchased, and the Wellington style, which was released last year and has since sold a total of around 40,000 units. There are also brown lenses in addition to black, but they weren’t in stock at the store he visited, perhaps because of their popularity.

With shops like Uniqlo and Muji now selling sunglasses for less than 2,000 yen, Family Mart’s isn’t necessarily the cheapest option, but they do the job nicely, while looking stylish as well. Plus, there’s something special about being able to walk around with a pair of convenience store sunglasses on your face, elevating them from an “it’ll do” pair to what might just become your favourite sunglasses.

Photos ©SoraNews24
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Mimirin in Gion gives us a new way to embrace Japanese culture… literally.

Japanese kimono are an important part of the country’s cultural identity, but with changing lifestyles there are now less and less opportunities to wear them. This has led some people to come up with new and creative uses for kimono, to help keep the culture alive in the modern world, and one of those people is Mina Ichikawa, who came up with the brilliant idea to turn kimono into teddy bears.

Ichikawa, who studied Japanese culture at university in Japan and sustainability at Lund University in Sweden, first thought of the idea when her mother began working as a kimono dresser several years ago. After becoming aware of the huge number of kimono that were being discarded, despite the beautiful fabrics and traditional craftsmanship that went into making them, Ichikawa sought to find a way to repurpose them.

▼ She found her answer in the teddy bear – an object that transcends borders, appealing to people regardless of age or nationality.

Determined to make her dream a reality, Ichikawa worked hard on the designs, right down to the choice of fabric.

Through the use of auspicious motifs and patterns, she was able to imbue each teddy bear with symbolic meaning, making them even more personal and special.

After a successful crowdfunding campaign, which raised 550,050 yen (US$3,700), exceeding its 500,000-yen target, 24-year-old Ichikawa opened her first store, Mimirin, in Kyoto’s Gion district on 8 August.

With Mimirin’s slogan, “Bringing tradition into the palm of your hand” as its guiding principle, each Mimirin teddy bear is made using kimono fabric or an unused bolt of kimono cloth, and because the fabric is cut differently for every bear, no two are exactly alike.

Even bears made from the same kimono can look completely different depending on which part of the pattern is used and how the colours fall across the finished bear.

Combining beauty and symbolism, the bears make for meaningful gifts, and are perfect for souvenirs or special occasions like a birthday or new baby celebration. Some of the motifs you’ll find on the teddy bears are cherry blossoms, to represent new beginnings, asanoha (hemp leaf) for healthy growth and protection from evil, and chrysanthemums, which are traditionally connected with longevity and nobility.

▼ The bears start at 8,600 yen (US$53.98) for the small size, and go up to 18,000 yen for the medium and 26,000 yen for the large.

The shop also offers a custom-made service using customers’ own beloved kimono, so that rather than sitting unused in storage, a treasured garment filled with memories can be transformed into something meaningful that can remain with its owner for years to come.

By giving kimono a new life in the form of teddy bears, Mimirin hopes its products can carry the stories and wishes traditionally woven into kimono patterns into the future. The new shop in Gion, an area of Kyoto teeming with tradition, is said to be the first step towards achieving this goal, with plans to open more stores in tourist destinations around Japan and overseas in years to come.

Store information
Mimirin [Kimono Teddy Bear Shop] Kyoto Store / Mimirin [Kimono Teddy Bear Shop] 京都店
Address: Kyoto-fu, Kyoto-shi, Higashiyama-ku, Miyoshicho 334, SRSX 1F South
京都府京都市東山区三吉町334 SRSX 1階南
Open 10:30 a.m.-7:00 p.m.
Website
Instagram

Source, images: Press release
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Karaage no Tensai invokes the name of Jiro-style ramen, and we head out for a taste test.

It’s been said that there’s a fine line between genius and madness, but might that line be deep-fried and covered in cheese? It was the search for the answer to that question that recently led us to downtown Tokyo’s Uguisudani neighborhood.

We were here to visit the local branch of Karaage no Tensai, a restaurant chain whose name translates as “Genius of Fried Chicken.” Part of the Watami restaurant group (most famous for the Watami chain of pubs), Karaage no Tensai opened its first branch in 2018, so it was poised to reap the benefits of the boom in popularity for karaage/Japanese-style fried chicken that took place during the pandemic, when people across the country were looking for hearty comfort food that was takeout-friendly. By the middle of 2021, Karaage no Tensai boasted 100 branches, but these days the chain has dwindled back down to just six locations.

It’s kind of a shame, as Karaage no Tensai’s fried chicken (pictured above) is perfectly tasty stuff. Still, it’s hard to stand out when there’s so much competition in the karaage sphere, which is perhaps what led the Uguisudani branch to take the bold move of offering heavyweight ramen-style cheese karaage rice bowls.

Exclusive to the Uguisudani branch, Karaage no Tensai calls this creation the Jiro-kei Cheese Karaage-don, brazenly invoking the name of the style of ramen popularized by the Ramen Jiro chain, which has no connection to Karaage no Tensai or the Watami group. Jiro-style ramen, for those who haven’t tried it, is characterized by an extra salty and oily broth, copious amounts of garlic, and lots of bean sprouts.

▼ Ramen Jiro ramen

So how does Karaage no Tensai translate this into fried chicken form? Like this.

Visually, the 1,408-yen (US$8.85) Jiro-kei Cheese Karaage-don definitely makes an impact, with such a large quantity of toppings that they look like they’re about to overflow from the bowl and a surprisingly vivid cheese sauce squirted all across the top.

Starting from the bottom, the bowl is filled with rice, bean sprouts, six nicely sized pieces of karaage, cloves of roasted garlic, and cheese.

The cheese here is kind on an outlier, since it’s not an ingredient you’ll find in Jiro-style ramen. As our taste-testing reporter P.K. Sanjun took a bite, though, the reason for its inclusion became clear. The cheese sauce is strongly salty, and combined with its creaminess, seems to be Karaage no Tensai’s intended facsimile for Jiro-style ramen’s salty, oily broth.

However, the saltiness found in the cheese sauce isn’t present in the other ingredients in the Jiro-kei Cheese Karaage-don, and while the roasted garlic obviously tastes garlicky, P.K. couldn’t detect all that much seasoning to the bean sprouts of fried chicken. As such, salty cheese was the dominant flavor from start to finish, and the taste started to get a little repetitive part-way through the meal, prompting P.K. to munch on a mouthful of bean sprouts from time to time when he found himself wanting a palate cleanser or just a little variety.

All that said, the Jiro-kei Cheese Karaage-don wasn’t a bad meal. It may not actually scratch the Jiro-style ramen itch because of how different the fried chicken bowl ends up being, but it’s still a filling guilty pleasure of a rice bowl, even if it doesn’t really fulfil the promise in its name.

Restaurant information
Karaage no Tensai (Usguisudani branch) / から揚げの天才 うぐいす谷店
Address: Tokyo-to, Taito-ku, Usuisudani 1-1-24
東京都台東区根岸1-1-24
Open 11 a.m.-2:30 p.m., 3:30 p.m.-10 p.m. (weekdays), 11 a.m.-10 p.m. (weekends)
Website

Photos ©SoraNews24
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A single vacation can lead to near-forced souvenirs and apologies to the entire office.

Japan is world-renowned for its hospitality, respect for tradition, and attention to detail. In Japanese business culture, there’s also a dedication to politeness, where many customs were originally introduced to ensure smooth interactions and avoid conflict. However, as working styles modernize, some of these thoughtful gestures have transformed into tiresome daily chores. To see which workplace rules have outlived their usefulness, Tokyo-based media company Mfro (via its Craudia crowdsourcing service) surveyed 493 working adults, 366 women and 127 men ranging from their 20s to 50s and older.

The top five mysterious workplace manners that Japanese employees secretly wish would disappear are:

5. Mandatory souvenir sharing (4.7 percent)

Bringing back local snacks (omiyage) for co-workers after a vacation or business trip is a way to share experiences and show gratitude, but when employees feel pressured to spend extra time and money hunting down treats, it becomes less of a thoughtful gift and more of a chore.

▼ “I heard you went to Okinawa. Where are the snacks?”

4. Excessive greetings (9.1 percent)

For anyone who has studied even just the basics of the language, you’ll know that polite greetings are the bedrock of Japanese communication. However, some offices take this to extreme levels that actually put a halt to productivity. These offices require staff to walk around the entire floor or department to greet every coworker individually upon arriving or leaving, or physically stand up at their desks whenever an executive enters the room.

3. Over-the-top chat messaging (11 percent)

Messaging apps like Slack, Line, and Teams are intended to speed up communication in the office, and yet traditional corporate etiquette has managed to sneak right into the group chats. Instead of quick, informal updates, workers feel forced to start every single message with long, formal greetings when sometimes a simple emoji reaction would wrap up the conversation effectively.

2. Vacation apologies and snacks (15.4 percent)

Paid leave is a legal right, but in a culture heavily focused on the collective team and the business instead of the individual, taking time off can leave workers feeling guilty about passing their workload to their teammates. Before taking a planned day off, employees might have to announce it to the entire office during morning meetings and, upon returning, they often feel obligated to go desk-to-desk apologizing for their absence and distributing snacks, even though they didn’t technically do anything wrong.

1. Rigid email etiquette (21.5 percent)

Japanese business emails are notoriously formal, requiring elaborate standard set phrases and seasonal blessings, and some offices even insist on listing all internal email recipients in strict order of corporate seniority, which feels like it’s wasting precious extra minutes that could be spent on real work.

▼ “Should I be using ‘intense heat season’ (酷暑の候, kokusho no ko) or ‘lingering heat season’ (残暑の候, zansho no ko) here?”

When asked about the biggest stress caused by these rules, 35.3 percent of respondents said it was “mental fatigue”, followed by taking up time (27.0 percent) and taking extra effort (26.6 percent).

Even if a significant portion of employees find the rules exhausting, it’s not as simple as just deciding to stop following them. The primary reason for not stopping was that they fear what others will think (36.1 percent), followed closely by the fact that it has already become the default norm (32.9 percent). In group-oriented work dynamics, stepping out of line risks making coworkers and your boss think you are rude or uncooperative. Among the respondents, some did mention that they had quit these mysterious manners, but are now looked at strangely by others at the office due to it.

So, these mysterious customs are more of a product of peer pressure and the traditional office environment, rather than being driven by pure logic. As remote work grows and generational turnover occurs, office atmospheres could potentially shift naturally, and these unwritten rules could slowly fade out of existence. However, to truly tackle these issues, the leadership needs to step in, recognize these problems, and create safe environments for employees to voice discomfort without the fear of social friction.

Source: PR Times via Livedoor News
Top image: Pakutaso
Insert images: Pakutaso (1, 2)
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Chiikawa contacts are a cute way to add some subtle anime flair to your look.

In Japanese, there’s a phrase, “Me ni irete mo itakunai,” which translates literally to “It won’t hurt even if you put it into your eye.” What could be so wonderous that you wouldn’t mind doing something ordinarily so painful? Why, something very, very cute, of course!

Me in irete mo itakunai is most commonly used by people to describe their children, grandchildren, or pets, but if we’re talking about cute things, we can’t forget about the anime/manga character Chiikawa, whose very name is a contraction of the words chiisai (“small”) and kawaii (“cute”). So today we’re going to be putting the compactly adorable Chiikawa into our eye…or at least onto it.

Allowing us to do this is En Giorno, a brand of contact lenses from Japanese cosmetics and merchandising company Shobido. En Giorno’s Chiikawa collaboration lineup consists of four models, Chiikawa Pink, Hachiware Greige, Usagi Brown, and Momonga Gray.

We opted to try out the Chiikawa Pink version, and naturally the character is featured on the packaging. There’s more to this crossover than that though, because Chiikawa is also on the contact lenses themselves!

Wasting no time, our Japanese-language reporter Natsuki Gojo promptly put Chiikawa onto her eye, and just like the saying had assured us, it didn’t hurt at all, though that probably has more to do with En Giorno’s precision manufacturing methods than the character’s cuteness.

Still, these lenses are indeed cute, and even more so than Natsuki had at first expected. It wasn’t until she had them in that she noticed that Chiikawa is surrounded by some illustrated sparkles, adding yet another dose of manga-aesthetic style to your eyes.

With the Chiikawa contacts in, Natsuki was looking forward to the excited reactions of friends and family throughout the day. Things didn’t unfold exactly as she’d expected them to, though, since no one, on their own, noticed her new ocular occupant.

This is, perhaps, something we should have seen coming. The En Giorno Chiikawa illustration really does follow the directives of both parts of the character’s name, as it’s very cute, but also very small.

▼ The Chiikawa contact lenses next to a Sylvanian Families baby plushie, the international scientific community’s widely accepted standard for scale comparisons.

On the other hand, every single person who Natsuki pointed out the Chiikawa illustrations instantly got a burst of giddy excitement from the revelation, and actually, the subtle size is probably a plus. For one thing, the illustration is compact enough that it doesn’t affect the wearer’s field of vision, and since it doesn’t immediately stand out, these lenses are pieces of Chiikawa flair that you can wear without disrupting your overall look.

▼ The En Giorno Chiikawa contact lenses come in both prescription and non-prescription versions, and are priced at 2,200 yen (US$14) a pair on the Shobido online store, Amazon, and Rakuten.

So while they’d be an apt choice for a meetup with fellow fans or when heading out to a Chiikawa event or anime screening, they’re also something you can use when just going about your daily life, so that if and when you do run into something unpleasant during the day, you can tell yourself “It’s OK, I’ve got Chiikawa with me.”

Photos ©SoraNews24
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All in a day’s work.

Whenever major natural disasters hit Japan, I’m always amazed by the engineering feats that were set up in various places to minimize casualties and damage. It’s hard to feel a sense of joy or pride at times like the 7.1 magnitude earthquake that hit Kumamoto recently, but at the same time it feels like a lot of hard work and ingenuity that goes into damage prevention often gets overlooked.

One prime example I noticed in the immediate aftermath was scenes of elevated highways sheared into two completely disjoined sections. It was constantly played on a loop as a symbol of the catastrophic power of the earthquake without any explanation as to why the roads looked like that.

▼ It was basically the exploded AEON Mall, broken smokestack, and broken highway, over and over again for the first day.

The highways were designed to break like that in the event of an earthquake to prevent even bigger devastation. If the entire overpass was one solid unit, one weakened section would cause the entire structure to fall down, as happened in the 1995 Awaji-Hanshin earthquake.

▼ A news report in the aftermath of the Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake showing the massive destruction of elevated expressways. In the latter part, Prof. Fukuwa explains that the flaw in the design was using combinations of materials that vibrated at different frequencies together in a rigid structure.

The news footage seldom, if ever, showed what was going on underneath those detached segments, which is where the real magic happens. Systems can vary as needed, but often these cables, rods, and stoppers not only reduce overall damage but make repairs easier and faster.

▼ This video is in Japanese, but the images alone should demonstrate how well-thought-out these mechanisms are, built on lessons learned from past disasters.

And speaking of fast repairs, with earthquakes an ever-present threat, crews are well-trained to react to damage quickly and thoroughly. A good example of this can be seen in a time-lapse video of a highway repair in Kumamoto done by workers for NEXCO, Japan’s privatized company that manages the nation’s expressways.

▼ “We are currently doing reconstruction work on the southbound/outbound lane of the Katanogawa Bridge along the Kyushu Expressway, after it was damaged in the 2026 Kumamoto Earthquake. This video shows the asphalt work in progress. The entire team is working in close coordination, prioritizing safety above all else. We will keep on working toward a fast recovery.”

令和８年熊本地震により損傷した九州自動車道　片野川橋（下り線）の復旧作業を行っております。
動画は、アスファルト舗装の実施状況です。
工事関係者が一丸となり、緊密に連携を図りながら、安全を最優先に工事に取り組んでおります。
引き続き、早期復旧に向けて着実に工事を進めてまいります。… pic.twitter.com/RnlYfZX9aU

— 【公式】NEXCO西日本 (@w_nexco_news) August 9, 2026

In the video, a stretch of collapsed and heavily crumpled road on the Katanogawa Bridge becomes a pristine sheet of asphalt in seconds, which in real time was about 10 hours, but still extremely efficient. Unfortunately, the speed also makes it hard to see all the work that goes into rebuilding the underlaying structure of the road in addition to repaving it.

It’s also worth noting that the date on the video is 8 August, the Saturday kicking off the national holiday period known as Obon, where a lot of people take off work and relax. That combined with the overall heat of a Japanese summer would make roadwork a particularly grueling experience. Comments online were full of respect for those workers, with wishes that they stay safe and get a fat paycheck at the end of all this.

“Seriously incredible! Thank you for your hard work in this intense heat and during the holidays.”
“They did that in 10 hours?!”
“That’s fantastic to see. Truly supporting the arteries of Japan, and you can sense the pride in their work.”
“I hope they’re all given big fat bonuses for that.”
“I used to work in asphalt, and I have a huge amount of respect for people who work under that heat and those tight safety conditions. I hope they stay safe.”
“It’s sad that politicians get paid more than those people.”
“I wish they could do normal road construction that fast.”
“But after doing it so fast, is it safe to use?”

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that if any corners were cut and safety regulations were ignored in this particular project, NEXCO wouldn’t post incriminating evidence of it for all the world to see online. Then again, I’m not a marketing expert. Maybe that’s the cool thing for companies to do on social media nowadays.

It’s just good to see things are getting better there bit by bit, and people’s ability to prepare for, prevent, and recover from disasters here remains something to be admired.

Source: Twitter/@w_nexco_news, My Game News Flash
Image: Twitter/@w_nexco_news
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