Twentythree

Pokémon franchise celebrates its 30th anniversary with a partnership with the Spanish luxury ceramics craftsmen.

When looking for a Pokémon to grace your home, the usual choice is between a cuddly plushie or a stylish plastic figure. With the franchise celebrating its 30th anniversary right now, though, there’s another option: a beautiful porcelain figurine.

While the Pokémon franchise’s multimedia mix is diverse enough to include video games, collectible cards, anime, fashion, and food, high-end ceramics are a bit outside the Pokémon Company’s ordinary areas of expertise. So for these figures of fan favorites Pikachu and Eevee, they’ve teamed up with the artists at Lladró, the Spanish company best known for its handcrafted porcelain sculptures.

The Pikachu figurine stands (well, technically it sits) 25 centimeters (9.8 inches) tall, and the preview photos show it to have the eminently smooth texture and liquid-like luster to its glaze that’s become a hallmark of the Lladró brand. The craftsmen took special care to apply just the right amount of finish to the eyes to give them a feeling of energetic brightness but also a sense of visual depth.

In addition to the solo Pikachu, there’s also a figure of the face of the franchise hanging out with Eevee.

The combo piece doesn’t reuse the same Pikachu as the stand-alone, either, as it has its own pose and expression. It’s also larger in scale, with the maximum height, from the bottom of the base to the tips of Pikachu’s ears, being 37 centimeters.

In addition to being the 30th anniversary of the Pokémon franchise, this year is also a milestone for Lladró, as it marks 70 years since they started making porcelain figurines.

Of course, as ceramics otaku know, Lladró was actually founded in 1953 and spent its first three years making vases. As ceramics otaku also know, their level of handmade quality comes at a commensurate price, and the Pikachu figurine is being offered for 143,000 yen (US$920) through the Lladró online shop here. No price has been publicly listed for the combination Pikachu/Eevee piece on its page here, but seeing as how its roughly double the size, available through prior reservation only, and limited to 288 production units, it won’t come cheap either, but it will look really, really nice.

Source: PR Times, Lladró (1, 2)
Top image: PR Times, Lladró
Insert images: PR Times
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Nanohana, fuji, and more reasons to get out and see Japan’s springtime flowers.

All of the seasons are celebrated in Japanese culture, but there’s a special mix of liberation and fun that comes with the arrival of spring. As the snow thaws and flowers start to bloom, many people are in the mood for their first extended outdoor excursions in weeks, if not months, and ready with suggestions is Japanese travel portal Jalan.

Jalan conducted a survey, collecting 1,054 responses from its users between the ages of 20 and 59, asking them to pick Japan’s best spring-feeling flower-viewing spots, and for the sake of greater variety, it looks like the Somei Yoshino, the most prevalent cherry blossom variety, has been excluded from the list (though we’ll still see some other kinds of sakura in the selection).

Let’s take a look at the survey’s top 9 results.

9. Ashigaike Agricultural Park/Sante Park Tahara (Aichi Prefecture)
Website

Located in the city of Tahara on a peninsula that sticks out into Mikawa Bay, Ashigaike Agricultural Park, also know as Sante Park Tahara, has bicycling paths, a small farm with ponies and pigs, and a produce market. Those are in addition to its beautiful flower fields, though, and in late Marach and early April the star of them all is the park’s giant tulip circle, which measures 25 meters (82 feet) across.

8. Tsukigae Bairin (Nara Prefecture)
Website

When most tourists think of Nara, the things that come to mind are temples and deer. If you’re headed to Nara City between late February and mid-March, though, don’t forget about the ume, or plum blossoms. Situated along the bank of the Satsukigawa River, the Tsukigae Bairin is a forest of over 10,000 plum trees that’s been considered one of the most beautiful places in Japan to see the flowers for more than a century.

7. Hirota Bairin Fureai Park (Hyogo Prefecture)
Website

We’ve got another bairin (“plum grove”) here, this one in the town of Awaji on Awajishima Island in the Seto Inland Sea. Hirota Bairin is actually a revival of a previous plum garden that had occupied the same plot of land, with the project starting 50 years ago when 50 new trees were planted. Today, Hirota Bairin boasts roughly 450 trees, with 13 varieties of plum blossoms ranging in colors from vivid pink to pure white. With Awajishima being located halfway between Japan’s main island of Honshu and the island of Shikoku, scattered around the garden are also small spots of worship dedicated to the 88 sites of the Shikoku temple pilgrimage, allowing you to make a pseudo circuit while admiring the flowers. The ume here tend to bloom a little sooner than in Tsukigae Bairin, making mid-February to early March the best time to visit.

6. Kamiyubetsu Tulip Park (Hokkaido Prefecture)
Website

We’re going all the way up to Kamiyubetsu, a town in Japan’s northernmost prefecture, for this entry. Not only does Kamiyubetsu Tulip Park have roughly 200 different varieties of tulips, since warm spring weather comes to Hokkaido a little later than it does to the rest of Japan, the park’s tulips tend to start blooming in early May and reach their peak in the middle of the month, giving travelers a chance to see them during the Golden Week vacation period.

5. Ashikaga Flower Park (Tochigi Prefecture)
Website

We’ve talked about this place before, as it’s arguably the best garden in Japan in which to see wisteria, or fuji, as they’re called in Japanese. The park’s 350 wisteria trees create breathtaking tunnels and canopies of flowers between mid-April and mid-May, including those of its Great Wisteria, which is more than 160 years old whose branches cover an area of more than 1,000 square meters (10,764 square feet).

4. Nanohana Park (Nagano Prefecture)
Website

Sitting on the eastern bank of the Chikuma River in Nagano’s Iiyama, this is another spot where a cool climate creates opportunity for later-in-the-season flower viewing. Those cheerful yellow flowers are nanohana, what Japan calls rapeseed flowers, and the vibrant carpet they create starting in early May makes for a striking contrast with the blue alpine skies of the Nagano highlands.

3. Inabe Nogyo Park (Mie Prefecture)
Website

We’ve got one more bairin on the list, this one in Inabe, a city in Mie Prefecture. With some 2,000 plum blossom trees across around 50 different varieties, the flowers create an incredible mosaic, especially when seen from the park’s observation deck which also provides a view of the Suzuka mountain range beyond. The ume here bloom from late February to mid-March, with early March offering the best mix of varieties at their peak beauty.

2. Shiroyama Sakura (Shizuoka Prefecture)
Website

As promised, we’ve got some cherry blossoms on the list too. Instead of the Somei Yoshino that bloom in late March or April, the sakura along this 400-meter (1,312-foot) stretch of roadway in Izunokuni, a city at the top of the Izu Peninsula, are Kawazu sakura. Kawazu sakura generally have a darker shade of pink, and they bloom much earlier than other varieties, with mid-February to early March being the best viewing time here.

1. Minami no Sakura to Nanohana Matsuri (Shizuoka Prefecture)
Website

And finally, we’re staying in Shizuoka for Jalan’s top springtime flower spot. At the southern tip of the Izu Peninsula is the town of Minamiizu, where a two-kilometer (1.2-mile) riverside road has not only 800 Kawazu sakura trees, but also fields of nanohana growing between them. Head there on a sunny day between early February and early March, and you’ll get to see the vibrant combination of the flower’s yellow and pink petals with the blue of the sky, and at night the area is illuminated so that after-sundown visitors can enjoy a magical atmosphere too (this year’s light-up runs through March 10).

With flowers being fickle things, they don’t always stick to their standard schedules for coming into bloom, so a quick check of the parks and gardens’ official webpages is a smart idea before heading out to see them. What you can be sure of, though, is that the flowers will bloom at these places every year, and that they’ll all be special memories of your Japan travels if you time your visit right.

Source: Jalan (1, 2), PR Times
Images: PR Times
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Shinjuku Ward Office has a restaurant that’s open to anyone, but have they kept up their quality and value since our last visit?

With Tokyo being as big as it is, it isn’t really practical to have all of its 14 million-plus residents use the same single city hall. Because of that, each ward of the city has its own ward office where you can take care of official paperwork and procedures, such as updating ID cards, registering marriages, and make health insurance payments.

Oh, and in the case of the ward office in downtown Tokyo’s Shinjuku neighborhood, you can also get a really good lunch at a restaurant hardly anyone knows about.

You’ll find this restaurant on basement level 1 of the Shinjuku Ward Office’s Main Building, which is located next to some of Shinjuku’s most popular shopping and nightlife areas. Called Keyaki, it’s technically classified as the Ward Office’s “employee cafeteria,” but it’s open to the general public too, so you don’t need to be a resident of Shinjuku, or even a resident of Japan, in order to eat there.

With SoraNews24 HQ being just a few blocks away from the Shinjuku Ward Office, we stopped by to try Keyaki a few years ago, and came away very happy from an amazingly affordable curry rice lunch that had cost us just 460 yen (US$3). But with prices for pretty much everything rapidly rising in Japan, and inflation hitting restaurant dining especially hard, we figured it was time for a return visit to see if this under-the-radar restaurant is still a friendly-to-the-wallet option.

Stepping inside the entrance, we saw that Keyaki has upgraded to a new meal ticket vending machine, and that they now accept payment not only in cash, but also by prepaid rail cards like JR’s Suica. But we also noticed that the pork curry is no longer the 460-yen bargain it used to be, and now costs 600 yen.

▼ ゴロゴロ野菜のポークカレー = Pork curry with lots of vegetables

Another sad change is that while Keyaki used to offer free upgrades to extra-large portions of rice for its set meals, rice bowls, and curry rice, these now charge an additional 100 yen for the service, meaning that an extra-large curry rice, which used to be 460 yen, now costs 700 yen, a price increase of more than 50 percent.

▼ The extra-large rice button

Still, in today’s economy, a restaurant curry rice lunch for 600 yen is still a decent deal…provided, of course, that Keyaki had kept up its quality. So we bought a ticket for the curry rice and handed it to the staff. They dished up our order, and as soon as we saw it…

…we felt confident that this was going to be good.

This is exactly what we think of when we think of curry rice. It’s not trying to be clever or fancy in any way, shape, or form, and instead sticks to the beloved baseline of the dish, with carrots, potatoes, onions, and pork in a well-balanced roux with a flavorful spice but not so fiery that you can’t dig into it with unguarded gusto.

It’s pretty much the perfect home cooking-style curry, something that’s so committed to comforting the palate instead of challenging it that it’s ironically sometimes hard to find when eating out. It’s not just delicious, it’s downright reassuring in how well it does what it’s trying to do. This is basically the curry rice equivalent of a big, comfortable blanket, and after we happily scarfed down every last bite, we didn’t just feel full, we felt emotionally warm and fuzzy too.

So yeah, even though the price has risen to 600 yen, this is still a great, semi-secret spot to grab lunch on a weekday (Keyaki isn’t open night or weekends). And if we ever do somehow get tired of eating the Shinjuku Ward Office’s curry rice…

…they’ve got a whole bunch of noodle bowls and set meals in the 400-700-yen range, and we’ve got a hunch those are all probably pretty good too.

Restaurant information
Keyaki / けやき
Address: Tokyo-to, Shinjuku-ku, Kabukicho 1-4-1, Shinjuku Ward Office Main Building B1F
東京都新宿区歌舞伎町1-4-1 新宿区役所本庁舎 B1F
Hours: 10:30 a.m.-4:00 p.m. (food served 11 a.m.-3 p.m.)
Closed: Saturdays, Sundays, and public holidays

Photos ©SoraNews24
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Driver driven to not drive by customer complaint.

Late last month, someone posted online about an incident that occurred on a Toei Bus line departing from Tokyo Big Sight. At the time the driver of the bus closed the doors just as a passenger was approaching. The passenger got angry and shouted at the driver, “You saw me there! Why did you close the doors?”

At that point, the driver contacted Toei Bus, told them he wasn’t in the right mental state to drive, and requested for his bus to be suspended. The company agreed, and the bus was taken out of service right then and there. The original post was critical of the driver, possibly due to frustration from having their bus canceled at the last minute. They also pointed out that the driver then drove the empty bus back to the depot themself.

However, the response to the incident was overwhelmingly supportive of both the driver and Toei Bus’s professional handling of the situation, and as the news spread, even more support came out in online comments.

“Nice!”
“The person who harassed the driver should have to compensate the other passengers.”
“Everyone’s different, but I experienced first-hand how getting yelled at can impair your judgment or field of vision, so that is a smart way to prevent accidents.”
“I’m glad the company made the rational decision.”
“Harassing customers are the lowest form of scum.”
“It’s dangerous to push yourself too hard while driving.”
“Well done to the driver for recognizing he had a problem and to the company for accepting it.”

There were also some comments that mentioned the incident was rather mild compared to other cases of customer harassment, and felt the driver was over-reacting. However, they don’t call it “the straw that broke the camel’s back” for nothing, and who’s to say what that person had gone through up until that point? Even if it was only that incident, the fact that he had other people’s lives in his hands made erring on the side of caution the right choice.

Toei Bus also deserves credit for disrupting their services for the sake of safety. Although buses aren’t quite as meticulous as trains when it comes to punctuality, they still take it seriously. Moreover, the bus industry is dealing with a serious driver shortage these days. Toei Bus themselves recently had to cut 200 trips per day across Tokyo because there weren’t enough drivers, so every bus counts.

Cynics might also argue that this is still just a matter of yen-counting since an accident would be devastating to the company brand and the financial risk simply wasn’t worth it, but Toei Bus is run by the Tokyo government and isn’t nearly as vulnerable to bad PR as a private company would be. In that way, you could even say it makes their response to the situation even more surprisingly compassionate.

According to the Tokyo Metropolitan Bureau of Transportation, although there have been disruptions due to conflicts with customers in the past, this is the first time service was suspended for the specific reasons of mental instability. They would also like to ask passengers to refrain from using intimidating language and will notify the police if it continues.

▼ It’s equally important for customers to exercise some courtesy and restraint as it is for drivers. Just ask our own model passenger, Mr. Sato.

At least it’s nice to see that society is improving such that bus drivers can seek help for mental health issues when they need it, unlike the ’50s, when they would go home and threaten to punch their wives so hard they would fly up towards the moon (The Honeymooners was a documentary, right?).

Source: Shukan Josei Prime, TBS Radio, My Game News Flash
Photos ©SoraNews24
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This crustacean does more than just keep time on your three-minute instant noodles.

Back in October, ramen lovers in Japan began scrambling for a hot new noodle accessory called the Crab-shaped Cup Ramen Timer. As the name suggests, this little crustacean keeps time so you can know when your three-minute noodles are ready, and it does it in such a cute way that it instantly became a sell-out hit.

So when we were at a branch of drugstore chain Welcia the other day, we did a double take when we saw the crab looking up at us from inside a plastic box.

We weren’t expecting to visit a drugstore and come home with a crab, but that’s what we did as there was no way we could let this little guy get away. Not only did it look cute, but at 1,078 yen (US$6.86) it was a great deal, especially as the crab does much more than just keep time.

To get things started, simply flip the crab upside down to operate the buttons for the countdown.

You can set the alarm for up to 99 minutes and 59 sec0nds, so the timer can easily be used for more than just ramen. Plus, the crab doubles as a chopstick rest, and has enough strength to hold a rice paddle or ladle aloft as well.

▼ A handy kitchen assistant.

The crab really comes into its own when you pop it on top of your instant noodles though, as the helpful multitasker keeps track of the time while also ensuring the lid stays closed for maximum steaming power.

▼ It does all that while holding your chopsticks ready for your meal.

When the time is up, the crab’s stomach is said to growl, but that turned out to be a bit of an oversell, as it simply made the same beeping sound as a regular timer.

While a bit of work is required to re-imagine the beeps as the growls of a crab’s stomach, there’s less work involved in gobbling down your noodles when they’re ready, as the crab’s cuteness adds a sense of lighthearted joy to the proceedings.

▼ You have to provide the ramen, but the crab provides all the fun.

Best of all, this little assistant remains long after your meal is over, claws raised as if cheering you on with whatever task you undertake.

▼ Handy for holding a pen or stylus when you’re not eating noodles.

After selling out due to popular demand when it was released, we were happy to come across this unique product at Welcia, so keep an eye out for it there next time you’re shopping for super cheap rice balls.

In our humble opinion, this crab timer is worth the hype, so we’ll be giving it pride of place next to our Cup Noodle humidifier.

Related: Crab-shaped cup ramen timer
Photos©SoraNews24
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Enjoy a special experience at one of the best cherry blossom viewing spots in Tokyo.

If you’re looking for a place where you can sip on Starbucks while admiring the cherry blossoms in Japan, the Reserve Roastery Tokyo is an ideal destination. Set beside the Meguro River, one of Tokyo’s most popular hanami flower-viewing sites, this multi-storey building has expansive views from which to view the rows of cherry blossom trees that line the waterway, and this year it’ll be holding some special events that give you a front row seat to the beautiful blooms.

Up on the third floor, customers can pull up a chair at the Roastery Tokyo Sakura Terrace, with either the “Daytime Picnic Plan” or “Evening Bread and Drink Plan” available.

▼ For the daytime plan, customers will be able to enjoy picnic-style sandwich-based food made by the onsite Princi Italian bakery.

Some of the delicious treats in the picnic box include the Cornetti Sandwich with Prosciutto Cotto and Pecorino and Calzone with Seafood Genovese.

▼ Each set comes with either coffee or tea.

At night, the atmosphere on the terrace changes as the light of the illuminated cherry blossoms begin to glow at dusk, making for a magical evening.

This is when customers will enjoy a “bread and drink” style food menu, focusing on antipasti and bakery snacks.

In addition to coffee, the beverage lineup includes wine, beer, and alcoholic and non-alcoholic cocktails. You can also choose a set that includes one drink or a free-flow, all-you-can-drink option.

As an added bonus, customers who choose the picnic plan will be provided with an “original picnic cushion” specially made for this event. Designed with comfort and ease of use in mind, the cushion packs away neatly in its own bag, and there’s also the option to receive a blanket for an extra fee.

The small roads beside the Meguro River are lined with stores that become a hive of activity during sakura season, and Starbucks is joining them this year with a special “Sakura Pop-Up Store“, located a short walk down the street from the Roastery. Open from 20 March to 10 April, this store will sell some exclusive beverages for takeout so you can enjoy them while casually strolling along the river and soaking up the festival-style atmosphere.

The drinks here are inspired by the Panache, a refreshing Italian beer cocktail, with two varieties available: one that combines beer with cold brew coffee and mixed berries, and one that combines beer with tea and mixed berries.

▼ Alcohol-free versions of each are also available

▼ You’ll also find Roastery-exclusive goods to tempt you in the store.

While the pop-up is free to enter during business hours from 12-7 p.m., the terrace seating up on the third floor of the Roastery is a paid event that requires advance reservations via TableCheck. The Picnic Plan costs 8,800 yen (US$55.88), or 10,800 yen for the blanket option, and is available at 9 a.m., 11:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. while the Bread and Drink Plan costs 9,700 yen (11,700 yen with a blanket), and is available at 4:30 p.m., 5 p.m., 6:30 p.m. and 7 p.m. Adding on an all-you-can drink option in the evening will bring the total price to 11,500 yen (13,500 yen with a blanket).

Like the pop-up store, the terrace plans are only available for a limited time, from 23 March to 10 April, which is perfectly timed for this year’s cherry blossom season.

Cafe information
Starbucks Reserve Roastery Tokyo / スターバックス リザーブ ロースタリー東京
Address: Tokyo-to, Meguro-ku, Aobadai 2-19-23
東京都目黒区青葉台2丁目19-23
Open 7 a.m.-11 p.m.
Website

Source, images: Press release
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