Twentythree

Internationally acclaimed art collective will have a new home not far from Disneyland.

Japan’s TeamLab has risen from relative obscurity to become one of the most admired digital art collectives in the world, using their technological wizardry and ethereally emotional sensibilities to craft experiences unlike those from anyone else. Their exhibits and museums regularly top lists of must-visit places for artistically inclined travelers in Japan, but now it’s time for TeamLab itself to embark on an overseas journey, as it’s announced that it will be opening its very first permanent museum in the U.S.

Sunny southern California is where TeamLab will be setting up in the States. The group’s facility will be part of the city of Anaheim’s currently in-development OCVIBE cultural, entertainment, and sports complex, which will also have green spaces, offices, hotels, and apartments.

▼ Examples of the sort of art that TeamLab creates

TeamLab Museum Anaheim is the tentative name of the facility, but it won’t be a shock if they eventually decide on something with a little more pizazz, seeing as how their museums in Japan have creative names such as TeamLab Borderless or TeamLab Planets. The Anaheim museum is planned to have a total floor space of roughly 10,000 square meters (approximately 110,000 square feet).

▼ A preview image showing TeamLab Museum Anaheim, with its shimmery sea green exterior, connected by a pedestrian bridge to the Anaheim Regional Transportation Intermodal Center rail station, with Angel Stadium behind it on the opposite side of the 57 Freeway

In announcing the Anaheim museum, TeamLab co-founder and director Toshiyuki Inoko said:

“I am filled with happiness that we will be opening TeamLab’s first large-scale museum in America at OCVIBE in Anaheim. Through art, TeamLab seeks to explore the nature of consciousness and existence. Our exhibits change through the existence of people, with visitors themselves becoming part of the piece. By becoming immersed in the artwork, visitors are connected, without boundaries, to both the installation and the world. By gathering and placing ourselves alongside others in this location where sports, music, and culture intersect, we will come to perceive the world in new ways and share those perceptions with others.”

OCVIBE is planned to open in phases, with the first coming in the spring of next year and featuring an amphitheater, restaurants, and park. TeamLab’s museum, though, is projected to open in 2030, but fans will tell you that the group’s creations are worth the wait, and that’s still two years earlier than the projected opening of its new Tokyo museum.

Source: PR Times, TeamLab
Top image: TeamLab
Insert images: PR Times (1, 2), TeamLab
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This legal discussion contains scenes of explicit violence and gore.

It’s Halloween again, and what better way to ring in the spookiest of holidays than with some thought exercises on complex constitutional law issues. Although most zombie stories focus on a ragtag group of civilians coping with civilization collapsing all around them, the beginning of the outbreak usually shows the military going all out in trying to eliminate the undead threat.

And with many of these movies and TV shows taking place in the USA, it’s no surprise to see the armed forces meeting the waves of zombies with guns blazing. In Japan, however, such a response is not so simple. While most countries’ militaries operate on a principle of “anything shy of a war crime is fair game,” Japan’s Self-Defense Forces operate in the opposite way and require very strict conditions before they can perform a certain action.

A good crash course in this can be found in our analysis on how the military can legally deal with a kaiju attack. Long story short, it is possible if Godzilla is classified as a “natural disaster” and the weapons used against him are classified as “tools” to neutralize the threat to Japan.

Zombies are much more complicated, however. Although certain aspects of the Godzilla scenario can be applied here, the fact that the threat is or was human introduces bigger legal hurdles for military and police forces. A video recently posted in the Legal Insight series by Tonari no Bengoshi Hosokyoku looks at this situation in-depth, but while their legal knowledge is spot-on, I’m concerned with some of their zombie awareness.

To start, much like with Godzilla, the SDF can be dispatched in a disaster relief capacity without issue. This means they can organize evacuations, set up barricades for shelters, and act in cases of self-defense to protect the public, just like police do. However, in this capacity, they cannot launch an assault on the zombies. One exception would be if the zombies were unleashed on Japan by a foreign government. This is the same reason that Godzilla cannot be considered an enemy combatant but King Ghidorah (sent by those jerks on Planet X) can.

So, let’s say our zombies are homegrown from some virus or mushrooms or something. Now, the question is whether they are people or not. According to Legal Insight, if they are classified as living people, then killing them can be considered murder, but even if they’re dead, filling them full of lead is also the crime of desecrating human remains.

However, Legal Insight also says that a zombie would be legally declared a corpse, and thus considered an “object” rather than a “person.” In this case, they could be treated in a way similar to wild animals that pose a threat to human life and be dealt with by the Self-Defense Forces using their  guns as “tools,” much like with Godzilla. The desecration of a corpse charges would be outweighed by the need to protect lives, much like how scuttling an abandoned ship adrift in the ocean is deemed necessary despite the destruction of property involved.

But I think that’s where they got it wrong.

Despite all of our advances, humans are still not great at determining if something is alive or not. For legal purposes, however, Japan employs the “three signs of death” (shi no sanchoko) used by medical professionals: cardiac arrest, respiratory arrest, and loss of brainstem reflexes. If all three of these conditions are present at the same time and irreversible, then that person is deemed deceased.

Legal Insight says that zombies do exhibit the three signs of death, but I beg to differ. This is a problematic claim because there have been so many different zombie stories with zombies of wildly varying abilities, but even despite that, I don’t think any of them even exhibits one of the three signs of death, let alone all three.

Starting with cardiac arrest, zombies bleed when shot and clearly have muscle function, either of which would be impossible a beating heart. 

▼ Your Honor, if it pleases the court, I’d like to submit this gnarly video of Claire doming a couple zombies in Resident Evil 2 Remake. As you can clearly see from the blood spurting from their neckholes, they demonstrate arterial pressure which can only be achieved by a functioning heart.

And while they may not require it to function, zombies clearly breathe. How else do they make those “gnnnhhhurghhhh” noises? And brainstem reflexes? Baby, zombies are all about brainstem reflex.

▼ I’d now like to call Dr. Edwin Jenner of the CDC in the USA to the stand. He’ll explain to us that zombies have functioning brainstems beyond a shadow of a doubt.

So, whether it’s the ambling Night of the Living Dead zombies or your parkour-running 28 Days Later zombies, they are legally living humans and, as such, it could be argued that zombies would have rights in Japan. This means a cop or soldier cannot open fire on a zombie simply because they gave them a dirty look or even if they start walking towards them menacingly. The violence used against them must be in direct proportion to their own unlawful attack… which I guess means all soldiers can do is bite the zombies back.

So, in conclusion, the JSDF would be prohibited from gunning down zombies wholesale, and Japanese police would be legally obliged to arrest you for assault if one falls off the hood of your car while you drive away in a panic. That being said, in most zombie outbreaks the government seems to go down pretty quickly, and all laws just go out the window anyway.

Happy Halloween!

Source: YouTube/となりの弁護士放送局, Livedoor News, My Game News Flash
Photos ©SoraNews24
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Go home and be a family man? Nah, we have to go to work.

We keep SoraNews24 HQ clean enough so that we don’t have flies on the wall, but if you were to be, for instance, a shapeshifting tanuki disguised as a fern in the corner of our office on Friday, you might have heard the following conversation take place.

Mr. Sato: “Hey, you guys bring your Guile gear?”

P.K.: “Yeah.”

Mr. Sato: “OK. So, we doing this?”

Ahiruneko: “We sure are. But, like, I really didn’t have much to bring.”

Mr. Sato: “But, like, -how- are we supposed to do this? We just, like, become Guile?”

Seiji Nakazawa: “Sure. No need to overthink it, right?”

P.K.: “We all just turn into Guile, just like that?”

See, we have a tradition here at SoraNews24, where everyone who’s in the office on the day closest to Halloween dresses up in costume. We try to have some sort of theme, like dressing up as the trendiest desert drink of the year or trying to transform into actual parts of the Tokyo cityscape. This year, we settled on the theme of developer Capcom’s hit fighting video game series, Street Fighter, and since every release since Street Fighter II: Championship Edition has allowed players to pick the same character as each other, we decided that everyone in the office would become Guile.

Mr. Sato: “I think everybody already has their outfit sorted, so we better get started on our making our Guile hair.”

Takeshi Harada: “How are we supposed to do that?”

Mr. Sato: “All you need is some yellow paper, and some imagination.”

With Hollywood’s newest live-action Street Fighter adaptation currently playing in theaters, some might be tempted to accuse us of trying to piggyback on the movie’s hype train, but our Guile-loving credentials have been an established matter of public record for some time, as we previously published a literally hard-hitting investigative piece on the real-world effectiveness of Guile’s iconically cool-looking low-guard pose from the games.

Takeshi: “Am I doing it right?”

Mr. Sato: “Hey, man, you gotta trust your own judgement when making Guile hair.”

Then, after 20 minutes of cutting, taping, and changing clothes in a wide-open office with no locker room…

Mr. Sato: “OK, everybody set? Show us your Guiles!”

So, uh, as you can see, even though everyone was dressed as the same character, there was still plenty of, let’s call them individual creative differences present in the final results.

Let’s take a closer look at what everyone came up with.

▼ Seiji Guile!

▼ Yuichiro Guile!

▼ Ahiruneko Guile!

▼ Takeshi Guile!

▼ P.K. Guile!

▼ Yoshio Guile!

▼ Sato Guile!

▼ Go Hatori Guile, who actually wasn’t in the office this day but who joined the battle via a photo taken ahead of time!

So who’s Guile was the best Guile? We left that judgement up to Seiji, since we felt like we kind of owed him one for all the physical punishment he took in that Guile blocking test.

Seiji Guile: “All right, you maggots! Line up for inspection!”

Seiji Guile: “Sato Guile! You are the sorriest display of a Guile in this whole company!”

Sato Guile: “What? But I thought I did pretty good. I even worked out extra to tone up my arms and shoulders for this.”

Seiji Guile: “I didn’t expect anything more of you than using paper for your hair, but why did you put the crease in the front? That’s inexcusable! You’re a disgrace to our proud Guile traditions!”

Seiji Guile: “Next! Yoshio Guile! You’re all right. I can tell you’re taking the mission seriously.”

Seiji Guile: “Unlike the rest of these knuckleheads who just used drawing paper, you reinforced your spikes with construction paper. That’s the kind of ingenuity that we need to be ready to display in the field.”

Yoshio Guile: “Sir! Thank you, sir!”

Seiji Guile: “Next! Ahiruneko Guile! What in the name of a redizzy combo do you call this?”

Ahiruneko Guile: “No good?”

Seiji Guile: “No good at all! That sloppy, loose tank top is totally outside uniform regulations!”

Ahiruneko Guile: “Well, I mean, I just bought it on Amazon, so it wasn’t like I could try it on and check the fit or anything…”

Seiji Guile: “You think Guile would be caught dead in something like that? You’re a disgrace to the uniform!”

Seiji Guile: “Next! P.K. Guile!”

P.K. Guile: “Look, I’ll just get it out of the way and apologize right now.”

Seiji Guile: “Well, at least you’ve got a scrap of self awareness. You know your pants are wrong, right?”

P.K. Guile: “When I went to the thrift shop, this was all they had for camo pants. I know the color is wrong.”

Seiji Guile: “No, actually Guile has alternate color versions with blue pants, so that’s not the problem. But what no one has ever seen is Guile rolling up his pants!”

Seiji Guile: “Next! Takeshi Guile!”

Seiji Guile: “You clearly didn’t understand the assignment either! A digital camouflage pattern? Seriously? You know Guile doesn’t wear that!”

Takeshi Guile: “I went to a thrift store too, and this was the only pair of camo pants I could find.”

Seiji Guile: “You’re endangering the whole mission by relying on thrift stores! Next time shop online if you need to and make sure you get the pattern right!”

Seiji Guile: “Next! Yuichiro Guile! Let’s wrap this up!”

Seiji Guile: “So tell me how you managed to forget you’re supposed to be Guile? You look like you just came from the kitchen or the beach!”

Seiji Guile: “That hairline’s crammed all the way down onto your eyebrows, like you’re wearing chef’s hat! And shorts? Shorts?!! How’re you gonna have a proper street fight without proper pants?”

Seiji Guile: “Aside from Yoshio and Go, none of you are ready to be Guile! Guess it’s up to me to whip you all into shape.”

Guiles: “Yes, sir!”

Seiji Guile: “ATTEN-TION! Company, form up and…flash kick charge pose!”

Guiles: “Yes, sir!”

Seiji Guile: “Crouching guard!”

Guiles: “Yes, sir!”

Seiji Guile: “Just you wait and see! I’ll turn you all into real Guiles yet!”

A Happy Halloween to all of you reading SoraNews24! Whether you’re out trick-or-treating or partying with friends, we hope you have a safe and fun October 31, and that no one cheeses you with invisible throws.

Photos ©SoraNews24
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Parting is such very, very sweet sorrow.

No one’s really watching their calories on October 31, right? Between trick-or-treating, Halloween parties, and all those tempting candy displays in the stores, there’s no better occasion for indulging your sweet tooth multiple times during the same day. And if you’re already leaving room for desserts, this Halloween is a very good time to make a visit to Cold Stone, because on October 31 they’re permanently closing their last remaining branch in east Japan.

Cold Stone’s time in Japan has been a rollercoaster ride. The chain first showed up in Japan in 2005 and became an immediate sensation among sweets fans, with long lines forming to try the offerings of the American “creamery” and listening to the staff’s cheerful singing voices while they waited. For a while there, Cold Stone looked poised to enter the ranks of Japan’s lovingly adopted brands from the U.S. such as McDonald’s and Starbuck’s. Unfortunately, not long after Cold Stone Japan’s expansion plans heated up, consumer enthusiasm for the chain started to cool off. In time, branches started closing down, with the even vacating Tokyo entirely for a while.

Eventually, though, Cold Stone found its way back to the capital. In 2023, it opened a new branch Tokyo’s Tama district, and then another in downtown’s trendy Harajuku neighborhood.

▼ The Harajuku branch, shortly after its opening in June of 2023

Sadly, neither of those comeback bids panned out, and by April of 2025, there were once again no Cold Stone branches anywhere in Tokyo, and the only remaining location in all of east Japan was located inside an outlet shopping mall in Tochigi Prefecture…which closed down one month later.

But then this past summer came a ray of hope for Cold Stone fans in east Japan with the opening of a Cold Stone branch in the town of Kamakura in Kanagawa Prefecture, Tokyo’s neighbor to the south. Kamakura is a major sightseeing destination, with temples, shrines, hiking trails, and beaches, and it’s only about an hour by train from Tokyo, making it an easy daytrip for Tokyoites and travelers staying at hotels in the capital.

▼ Video of the Kamakura Cold Stone’s opening day on July 30

View this post on Instagram

Being a big Cold Stone fan, our ace reporter Mr. Sato was thrilled to have the chain back in east Japan, and was looking forward to getting a scoop or two the next time he was down in Kamakura. The urgency on his plans to visit the city got rapidly cranked up, though, when on October 29 Cold Stone Japan announced through its official Instagram account that it would be permanently closing its Kamakura branch, and doing so in just two days’ time, on October 31.

So Mr. Sato dropped everything, dashed to the station, and rode the train to Kamakura.

The Kamakura Cold Stone has a pretty good location. It’s outside JR Kamakura Station’s west exit, which isn’t as busy and developed as the east side of the structure, but there’s still a decent amount of foot traffic, especially since the shop is close to the transfer gates for the Enoden rail line that runs along the shore and provides ironically picturesque views.

At this point, Mr. Sato might still have been able to delude himself into believing that there’d been some kind of mistake in Cold Stone’s Instagram announcement, and that the store wasn’t actually shutting down after just three months in business. But sure enough, there was a written notice posted at the counter that said:

Cold Stone Creamery Kamakura Station
Notice of closure

We are grateful to the support shown by so many visitors since our opening. As of October 31, Cold Stone Creamery Kamakura Station will be closing.

We wish to take this opportunity to sincerely thank all of our customers. We will continue to do our best to provide all of you with Happy Creamery experiences.

We look forward to seeing all of your smiles again someday. Thank you so much for everything.

So this was really going to be goodbye. Carefully weighing his options for this final Cold Stone session, Mr. Sato asked for Dobai chocolate ice cream in a chocolate waffle bowl, covered with chocolate sauce. “Is it OK if we sing?” asked the staff, unwaveringly cheerful, even now, and Mr. Sato said “Yes! Please!”

“I was sad to hear you’ll be closing.” Said Mr. Sato after the song was finished and they handed him his order. “Yes, we only found out about it two days ago,” said the clerk, revealing that they’d apparently been as surprised as Mr. Sato was at the turn of events.

▼ Mr. Sato’s ice cream. He does not fool around when it comes to grand finales of his favorite dessert places.

Mr. Sato couldn’t help silently wondering why it had to end like this. It’s not like Japan doesn’t like ice cream. As a matter of fact, Japan loves ice cream. Baskin-Robbins has over 1,000 branches in Japan, including one on the other side of Kamakura Station. Aside from specialty shops, fast food chains and snack stands sell ice cream all year round, as do convenience stores and super markets.

So why can’t Cold Stone seem to get a stronger foothold in the country? The company hasn’t made any official statement explaining its woes, but as we’ve discussed before, it might have something to do with the kind of ice cream that Cold Stone serves not matching up with how Japan would like it served. Ice cream fans in Japan are fine with casual settings or eating on the go for simple frozen treats, like a modest-sized scoop of Baskin-Robbins or personal-size serving of Häagen-Dazs. On the other end of the spectrum, leisurely savoring a large, decadent parfait at a cozy or fashionable cafe is considered a highlight-of-the-day-caliber experience. Cold Stone, though, doesn’t really fit into either of those two scenarios. Their desserts are big, heavy, and potentially messy, the sort of thing that Japanese sweets fans usually want to sit down and take their time with, but Cold Stone’s focus has always been primarily on take-out, and that incongruent combination is likely a limiting factor in terms of the chain’s potential appeal to a broad demographic in Japan.

This does, though, leave the limited demographic of passionate Cold Stone fans like Mr. Sato in an unfortunate position, though, since even if they do exist, there apparently just aren’t enough of them to keep Cold Stone a viable venture. It’s enough to bring a tear to your eye…but after hearing the staff bravely sing as they put together his order, Mr. Sato knew that if he was going to have to say goodbye, again, he was going to say goodbye with a smile.

The October 31 closing means that, as of November 1, there will be only one remaining Cold Stone in all of Japan, located in the Mitsui Outlet Park Jazz Dream Nagashima in Mie Prefecture. Even taking the Shinkansen, it takes about three hours to get there from Tokyo, so Mr. Sato’s first wish would be for Cold Stone to rest up and make one more comeback attempt in the Tokyo area, but if they can’t, he might just need to book some bullet train tickets the next time his cravings hit.

Location information
Cold Stone Creamery (Kamakura Station branch) / コールド・ストーン・クリーマリー（鎌倉駅前店）
Address: Kanagawa-ken, Kamakura-shi, Onari-cho 11-1
Open 10 a.m.-6 p.m.

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Get in the Hard Rock crossover, Shinji!

The Hard Rock Cafe currently has two branches in Tokyo, one in the Roppongi Neighborhood and one attached to Ueno Station, but what if the restaurant had a Tokyo-3 branch? And no, we don’t mean a third branch in Tokyo, but a branch inside Tokyo-3, the city that serves as the main setting of Evangelion.

That’s the concept behind a new collaboration between the giant robot anime series and music-themed restaurant chain, which has led to a new collection of crossover merch. Evangelion Unit-01 is the star here, featured on T-shirts with its iconic green-and-purple color scheme and AT field hexagonal pattern applied to the Hard Rock Logo.

Three different colors are on offer, with white available at the Roppongi, Ueno Kyoto, and Universal Citywalk Osaka Hard Rock Cafes. Gray shirts will be on the rack at Roppongi, Yokohama, Citywalk Osaka, and the Namba store, while those looking for black shirts will find them at Ueno, Yokohama, Kyoto, and Namba.

Also part of the lineup is a sukajan/Yokosuka jacket, which seems like a very appropriate canvas for this sort of East-meets-West endeavor.

Rounding out the fashion selection is the Eva/Hard Rock cap, and Unit-01 and the series’ core pilot roster will also be appearing on shot glasses, magnets, and pins.

The magnet and shot glass, pictures above, will include the name of the city in which they were purchased, but the pins will be specific to each Hard Rock location.

The pins are limited-quantity items, with only 500 of each design being made and carrying a price of 3,080 yen (US$19), which is also the price of the magnet. The shot glass, meanwhile, is 1,980 yen, the shirts 5,940 yen, and the Yokosuka jacket, as is often the case for the embroidered garments, is a premium piece, at 66,000 yen. While supplies last, fans purchasing the collaboration items will get them placed inside an Evangelion/Hard Rock shopping bag.

The lineup goes on sale November 3, with the exception of the pin which is scheduled to be available sometime in “early November.”

Related: Hard Rock Cafe Japan location list
Source: PR Times via Nijimen
Images: PR Times
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