The introduction to the book Metaverse Evolution Theory by Japanese VTuber and writer Virtual Girl Nem has now been published in English. The 5,000-word introduction is available at her official Medium page, and aimed at generating discussion about her book in the English-speaking community.

In 1860, Fukuzawa Yukichi, a young Japanese student still learning English himself, accompanied the first ever Japanese diplomatic mission to the United States as its English interpreter.

A four-square-metre box with a screen and computer. This is what Japanese cyber-cafes offer, around the clock.

Most customers just spend an hour or two here. But there are thousands who spend their lives in them.

A friend of mine flew from northern California, to North Carolina on Saturday night and was immediately surprised by what she encountered when she landed. “Why is it so hot here?” she texted before she was even out of the airport. “I haven’t been this hot since...I don’t even know.

As the country’s population ages and shrinks, there’s increasing demand for services that clean out and dispose of the property of the dead.

This article contains extensive descriptions of vaginas and might be NSFW, depending on your place of work. Growing up, Japanese artist Rokudenashiko ― who uses a pseudonym that translates to “good-for-nothing” ― never said the word manko, or vagina, out loud. No one really did.

More than five years after the devastating tsunami and the 8.9-magnitude earthquake struck north-eastern Japan, causing the explosion of the nuclear power plant in Fukushima, the Japanese town remains abandoned. Since April 22, 2011, an area within 20km (12.

A man wakes up one morning to find himself slowly transforming into a living hybrid of meat and scrap metal; he dreams of being sodomised by a woman with a snakelike, strap-on phallus.

Ayano Tsukimi (64) is living in Nagoro, a village in eastern Iya on Shikoku, one of the four main islands of Japan. Not many people are still living there. For those who die or move away, Ayano Tsukimi is making lifesized dolls in their liking and puts them in places that were important to them. The dolls are scattered around the whole valley. She is married, but her husband and daughter are living away from her in Osaka. She's living alone with her 83 year old father in the house of her family.Cast: Fritz SchumannTags:

Produced by W+K 東京LAB The film provides a glimpse of the type of creative culture that exists online behind the language barrier on the backstreets of the Internet in Japan.

Will Japanese Internet culture have an impact on global pop culture the way that Japanese street culture did? Are all Internet memes secretly manufactured in a warehouse in the Japanese countryside? No-one can say. But perhaps this video will allow you to form your own point of view.

「インターネットヤミ市」や「どうでもいいねボタン」を生み出した、100年前から続くインターネット上の秘密結社　IDPW（アイパス）。 このユニークな活動を海外に紹介すべく、インタビューを元に作られ­たドキュメンタリーフィルム「Back street of the Internet」。 「いいね」や「RT」に縛られない、インターネット本来の楽しさを追求する彼らの姿勢は、国内外を問わず現代のネット社会­に生きる人々へのメッセージになることでしょう。

Flesh Love

rrrrrrrroll

We all know it’s not cool to litter. If our hands are burdened with the weighty responsibility of an unwanted and snot-spent tissue, or an empty aluminum can that once held some Dr. Skipper, or even a gentle gum wrapper, the worst thing — the worst possible thing — would be to throw it on the ground.

These past years have seen a revival of sorts of cyberpunk, that early-80s buzzword once excitingly epitomised by such concrete-and-neon spectacles as Blade Runner and The Terminator and the literary musings of William Gibson.

The Matrix notwithstanding, the West generally regards cyberpunk as a strictly 1980s phenomenon. With Shinya Tsukamoto’s return to his epoch-making saga with Tetsuo: The Bullet Man, Mamoru Oshii’s ongoing exploration of humanity’s outer reaches in both live and animated form, the biomechanical goriness unleashed by some of the talents currently united under the Sushi Typhoon banner, and a neverending deluge of sci-fi anime, it is safe to say that in Japan the genre never went away.

This is the immediate realisation at which one arrives when flicking through Steven T. Brown’s Tokyo Cyberpunk: Posthumanism in Japanese Visual Culture, a long-overdue study of a genre that, as human interaction becomes progressively virtual and the virtual becomes progressively mundane, also seems to become increasingly relevant.

Brown cites a passage from David Cronenberg’s DVD audio commentary to one of cyberpunk’s Ur-texts, Videodrome, to not only illustrate how effortlessly cybernetic our lives have become but also to define the concept of “the limits of the human“ that underscores the author’s approach to the subject in this book: “Technology isn’t really effective, it doesn’t really expose its true meaning, I feel, until it has been incorporated into the human body. And most of it does, in some way or another. Electronics. People wear glasses. They wear hearing aides that are really little computers. They wear pacemakers. They have their intestines modified. It’s really quite incredible what we’ve been able to do to the human body and really take it some place that evolution on its own could not take it. Technology has really taken over evolution. We’ve seized control of evolution ourselves without really quite being conscious of it. It’s no longer the environment that affects change in the human body, it’s our minds, it’s our concepts, our technology that are doing that.“

Tokyo Compression

A single cell, such as a bacterium, is the simplest thing that can be alive. In addition to the materials from which it is constructed, it needs three features: a way of capturing energy (a metabolism), a way of reproducing (genes or something like genes) and a membrane that lets in what needs to come in and keeps out the rest.

revelation2220:

Pictured is the Super-Kamiokande, a giant neutrino detector, buried 1000m underground in Japan. Usually filled with 50,000 tonnes of pure water, the observatory detects neutrinos by watching for interactions with the subatomic particles in the water. These interactions are extremely rare, which is why the detector needed to be built to the scale it is.

Sushi, of course, is the ultimate in simple food: mostly just rice and a piece of raw fish, it would seem that anyone with a knife and one functioning hand can make it. But take an impossible eye for detail and apply it to fish—Where did it come from? How long should you age it before serving for best flavor? How long should you massage it to make it tender, but still have texture? Where should you cut a piece from, and at what angle, to highlight the flavors of different parts of the muscle? Since temperature affects aroma, how warm should you let the fish get in your hand before serving it? How hard do you press the fish into the rice to form a bite that has integrity, but is not dense?—and you begin to see where a simple food is not so simple. You don’t have to buy into all the minutiae a sushi master trades in to know that the pleasures of great sushi span from the animal to the emotional and the intellectual, which is a great trick for anything to pull off

Godzilla shoes

The author, who writes under a pseudonym, is a Japanese sushi chef. In 1982, at the invitation of a Japanese-North Korean trading company, he started working in a sushi restaurant in Pyongyang. In 1988 he agreed to serve as Kim Jong Il's personal chef—a job he held until 2001. In April of that year, having realized the extent of the paranoid and oppressive surveillance he was under, he escaped to Japan. In 2003, in Japanese, he published Kim Jong Il's Chef (Fuso Publishing, Inc.), from which these excerpts are drawn.