The Tokyo Marathon, one of the most popular marathons in the world, was held some days ago in Tokyo, more than 30,000 runners participated in it. Some people was not happy enough only by running the 42 km, they wanted to do it with a costume! There is fabulous compilation of pictures in Un Gato Nipón, here you have some of them:
There is a new supermarket cash register in Japan that instead of making the usual “beep” every time you swipe a barcode product through the scanner it makes a cat meow. They say it is more fun for the kids. Another thing is that the clients are the ones that have to pass the products through the scanner and there is no need to employ somebody to operate the cash register; the meows make the tedious task more fun for the clients.
Source: Japanprobe.
At the beginning of last week somebody with the nickname “Mato” ( 殺す ) wrote a message in 2 Channel (the most visited forum / BBS in Japan) saying that he was going to kill people indiscriminately on the streets near Shinjuku station south exit on Friday (yesterday) at 9:00pm. The announcement quickly spread around Twitter and in just some hours everybody in Japan knew about it.
42 ：Mato：2011／02／06（日） 15：51：35
On February 11st at 9:00pm, in the south exit of Shinjuku station, near the bus stop I am going to kill three people. If you don’t want to die, don’t participate in the game. I am going to execute my plan no matter what happens. I really feel like I want to kill.
Yesterday afternoon, in Shinjuku station, there were more policemen and members of the Self-Defense Forces (Japan armed forces) than pedestrians.
Fortunately they caught the suspect that wrote the message on the Internet before he killed anybody. It turned out to be a 15 year old high school student!! No further information about the arrest has been released, only the suspect’s age.