Japan has a reputation as being a society that demands conformity: All college graduates seeking jobs should wear dark suits to job interviews, women are expected to cover their mouths when laughing, and many schools require students to wear the same uniforms, shoes and have haircuts that meet school regulations.
The Japanese have made the ordinary extraordinary, turning black metal manhole covers into well-rounded works of art. Colorful designs adorn the lids to the sewers in towns across Japan, inspiring flocks of fans, called "manholers," to engage in manhole tourism.
Hideto Yamada works for Hinode Suido, the largest manhole manufacturer in Japan. They produce about 200 a day. “I think we have changed the image of manholes," Yamada said. "People from around the world think Japanese manhole covers are cool."
Workers at the wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant have begun removing fuel rods from a storage pool near one of the three reactors that suffered meltdowns eight years ago. The measure marks a milestone in efforts to decommission the plant, although the more critical removal of melted fuel from inside three damaged reactors will prove far more difficult.
Right after returning from the three-day trip to China, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe welcomed the Indian leader Narendra Modi to his vacation home at the foot of Mount Fuji.
They agreed on resuming a currency swap accord to the tune of $75 billion and more than ¥300 billion in yen loans to finance India’s infrastructure projects including a high-speed railway using Japan’s Shinkansen system.
AirBnB suffered a major blow when Japan’s main tourism body sharply restricted home-sharing, forcing AirBnB to eliminate four-fifths of its 60,000 listings in Japan. The experience illustrates the country’s hesitant approach to the sharing economy, in which people rent goods and services from one another, usually through internet platforms. The sharing economy’s value in Japan is at most ¥1.2trn yen ($11bn), compared with $229bn for China.
Recently, the ancient art of origami has begun to merge with modern engineering. Origami principles have inspired novel ways of packaging airbags, fashioning heart stents, folding solar sails designed to propel spacecraft, and even collapsible bullet-proof shields.
You've probably heard that automation is becoming commonplace in more and more fields of human endeavor. You may also have heard that the last bastions of human exclusivity will probably be creativity and artistic judgment. Robots will be washing our windows long before they start creating masterpieces. Right?
I visited Rutgers University's Art and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where Ahmed Elgammal's team has created artificial-intelligence software that generates beautiful, original paintings.
With the Imperial era name change, Japan's Foreign Ministry is considering scrapping the use of the era name for calendar years in some of its official documents and switching to the Gregorian calendar, according to sources.
While the ministry will keep using the Japanese era calendar in documents that require consistency with papers of other ministries (including those that are budget-related), it plans to promote the use of the Gregorian calendar for documents without such restrictions.
India's tallest rubbish mountain is on course to rise higher than the Taj Mahal in the next year, becoming a fetid symbol for what the UN considers the world's most polluted capital.
About 2,000 tons of garbage are dumped at Ghazipur each day. Taking up the area of more than 40 football pitches, Ghazipur rises by nearly 33ft (10m) a year. At its current rate, it will be taller than the iconic Taj in Agra, some 239ft (73m) high, in 2020.
Seikatsu Club is a huge food cooperative, founded in 1965 by a group of women in Japan, which has exacting standards on everything from radioactivity levels to the number of additives in food.
In 1989, physics researcher Jim Berners-Lee began writing code for what would become the World Wide Web. Thirty years on, and Berners-Lee’s invention has more than justified the lofty goals implied by its name. But with that scale has come a host of troubles.
Much has been made over the years about how mainstream media presents unrealistic beauty standards in the form of photoshopped celebrities or stick-thin fashion models.
Using social media does appear to be correlated with body image concerns. A systematic review of 20 papers published in 2016 found that photo-based activities, like scrolling through Instagram or posting pictures of yourself, were a particular problem when it came to negative thoughts about your body.
A lot of people thought the internet would help democratize the world.
More people and groups would have access to information, and the ability to mobilize from the ground up would gradually undermine concentrations of power—that was the idea, at least.
But the reality has been quite different: Instead of democratizing the world, the internet has destabilized it, creating new cleavages and reinforcing the power structure at the same time.
The Japanese government and the bank of Japan have announced that they will renew the ¥10,000, ¥5,000 and ¥1,000 banknotes in 2024.
Sarah’s Instagram feed is pretty typical for a 21-year-old model-slash-influencer living in Florida. There’s one important difference: In all of her pictures, she’s wearing scrubs.
Being a "nursefluencer," a term that I have admittedly made up but that describes a growing population, is similar to being a regular influencer.
The key to inclusion is understanding who your employees really are, particularly those in underrepresented groups. One of the best practices for this is to segment employee engagement survey results by minority groups.
When Addy Tritt was 25 years old, she went to her local Payless shoe store in Hays, Kansas, a few years ago. She didn’t intend to walk out with the last of the store’s inventory.
The store was going out of business and had slashed its prices. When the last 204 pairs of footwear dropped to $1 each, Tritt figured she could buy some and donate them somewhere.
“My pile just kept growing bigger and bigger,” said Tritt. She finally went up to the sales associate and asked, “Can you get me a deal on all of these shoes?”
“Ultra-lightweight space blankets have been around for decades, but the key drawback is that the material is static," said Alon Gorodetsky, UCI associate professor of chemical & biomolecular engineering. "We've made a version with changeable properties so you can regulate how much heat is trapped or released."
The researchers took design cues from various species of squids, octopuses and cuttlefish that use their adaptive skin to thrive in aquatic environments.
In the early 1800s in England, football and rugby existed as different variations of the same game. Aristocratic boys came up with the shortened terms “rugger” and “soccer” to differentiate between Rugby Football (from Rugby School, in Warwickshire, England) and Association Football.
In an eye-blinkingly brief ceremony at the Imperial Palace, Naruhito, 59, officially succeeded Akihito, 85, an enormously popular monarch who brought the royal family much closer to the people as he emphasized a message of peace in a country haunted by the legacy of war.
