News from Japan
Lawson convenience stores are offering a sushi roll that they say will bring good luck if eaten on February 4, the traditional end of winter, while facing west-southwest, this year’s lucky direction.
The sale of lucky charms sky-rocketed as high school students prepared to sit their university entrance exams, with Kit Kat chocolate bars (kitto katsu meaning something like “it’s a sure thing I’m going to beat this game”) proving particularly popular, including a chocolate bar designed to recall the calm of matcha tea.
Toshiba put on sale a washer-dryer that will make a verbal announcement when it goes from one cycle to another, just so you’ll know.
The Tokyo Metropolitan Government advised people to stop feeding pigeons, as Tokyo has just too many. The advice will first be periodically given out in Ueno Park, which 2,000 pigeons now call home.
More on http://metropolis.japantoday.com
JapanTV
Sarudie
Thanks to the superior size of human brains, we are able to think more abstractly than monkeys. However, we might have lost flexible ways of thinking. Sarudie (literally, “monkey wisdom,” but also “an asinine idea”), hosted by two mysterious monkeys, tests our intellectual abilities with tricky riddles like, “When yokozuna Asashouryu takes the shinkansen, does he sit in a smoking or non-smoking seat?” If the panelists don’t give the correct answer, they get treated in a humiliating way by the monkeys. (The answer to the riddle is “Smoking,” because Asashoryu is a “S[u]mo King.”) Don’t get mad at the answers; instead, stay cool and make your brain flexible.
Sarudie airs on Monday at 11:40pm on channel 4