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This time of year in Japan is traditionally marked by a national obsession with the blossom of sakura cherry trees and also the start of a new school year. The trees are currently in bloom as usual but this week sees the country’s only online university open its doors to students for the first time.

Anyone living outside the sub-continent or the curry hotspots of the UK will know that it can be hard at times to find a good spot of spice unless you’re in the Midlands Balti Belt, but what are the curry-loving Japanese astronauts aboard the International Space Station to do?

We’ve already seen screens based on various polymers that look set to alter the future of displays, so perhaps the latest polymer battery will be a perfect match for those devices.

A survey published this week shows the surprising result that almost three quarters of Japanese internet users read blogs at least once a week – a significantly higher rate than in other nations, including the UK, the US and France.

Gender equality in Japan took an expected blow yesterday when the female head of Sanyo, Tomoyo Nonaka, resigned from the company citing the now-ubiquitous ‘personal reasons.’

Japan’s Matsushita Electric Industrial, better known for its Panasonic brand, is reportedly in the final stages of selling its controlling stake in the well-known JVC, according to local media reports.

We’ve seen some pretty odd things in our trawls through Japan’s dark, gadgety secrets, but few are as downright bizarre as TakaraTomy’s digital camera for our furry friends in the canine world – yes, a camera for dogs.

A survey in Japan has confirmed what we all suspected – the mobile phone is rapidly eating into how most people use their free time, as well as destroying more traditional forms of communication.

The security of personal data is a huge issue in most of the developed world, particularly so in Japan where regular high-profile data leaks combine with an innate conservativeness to create a climate of suspicion when computers are involved in anything sensitive.

The latest development from Japan in the field of data storage is a technique so far beyond current-generation hard drives and optical disks it has the potential for storing limitless amounts of data for infinite periods of time.

As if they didn’t already have enough customers between them, those two 800-pound gorillas, NTT DoCoMo and McDonald’s, are teaming up to bring burgers and bytes to each other’s patrons across Japan.

Visit Japan during springtime and one of the first terms you’re likely to hear is ‘hay fever’ – that’s because it’s a major health hazard here that seriously affects tens of millions of people, many of whom have to take time off work.

The progress of the anti-whaling activists from the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society as they risk everything in Antarctic waters to stop a Japanese whaling fleet has been well documented, but this piece says it all.

For such a large city (35 million people in the metropolitan area) Tokyo is surprisingly not as polluted as it might be. Still, it’s far from perfect…

Japanese glasses superstore Vision Megane (‘Vision Glasses’) sure has some unusual ideas about what people want in a pair of spectacles. Prospective customers at their outlets now have the option of having vibrating alerts installed in their new frames.

Next month in Japan sees the beginning of the endgame in an ambitious scheme to entirely do away with paper tickets across Tokyo’s complex public transport network.

You know those little supermarket price tags that are designed to fall off the end of the shelf just as you reach for that loaf of bread? Well, Sharp in Japan has come up with a far more expensive version that is destined to be trampled underfoot too.

The excellent Paul McGuigan movie Lucky Number Slevin opened in Japan last weekend but it came with a bit of a surprise in the shape of an odd name change.

Japanese is a fun language to learn and isn’t really all that hard — it just looks that way sometimes. However, one of the most difficult aspects for beginners is how to look up kanji (Chinese characters) in a dictionary.

This story of the Japanese guy who went to the UK to study for an advanced degree even though he speaks no English and is totally deaf is both encouraging and bizarre.

If you’re already weary of all the CES hype, with its rampant consumerism and one-upmanship and in need of a little divine help, then how about a cellphone strap featuring seven lucky, dangling gods from Japan?

What better way to get back in the swing of things than to start a new year with a clip of some saucy Japanese TV?

Well, it’s Christmas Day here in Tokyo already, so I’m taking a break from spreading the gospel of the tacky novelty gadget and am off for spot of sake and onsen action.

Poor old Brian over at Gizmodo seems to be getting a bit of stick about posting this clip of a stupid Japanese TV show that features — and don’t dare read on if you’re offended by the human body — gasp, big, beautiful, bouncing breasts.

It’s hard to know what to make of this story — apparently, each year a handful of Japanese women in their 30s are so disappointed when their illusions of Paris as some sort of romantic paradise are shattered by the reality of France’s capital.

Hypothetical question — If you’re a cheating dog who lives with his wife, yet spends most evenings fielding cellphone text message and emails from your little bit on the side, do you…

Mitsubishi seems rightly proud of its latest take on the problem of how to deal with all the nasty brown sludge that flows beneath our city streets.

Japan’s legions of smelly old men in bad suits are tilting at windmills again, as the country’s copyright-protection groups and various entertainment-related bodies band together to attack YouTube yet again.

Next time you need to blast sweet messages of love into the heart of our planet’s only moon, get someone else to do the dirty work please.

Chin Music Press produces some of the most entertaining books around and does it with style aplenty, so when they have a Christmas sale you’d better get moving PDQ.

Learning Japanese is actually pretty easy at the beginning — it’s when you get into talking in endless Moebius Strips of politeness that the trouble really starts — so we hope urbanjapanese.com’s online language school knows a way to help wannabe otaku get started on the right foot.

You’ve probably experienced at least some of the sprawling movie franchise, the theme-park ride and the series of video games, so why not go the whole hog and check out the new Pirates of the Caribbean café in Tokyo’s bay area?

When Sony met Tokyo reporters last month to finally explain the battery debacle that kept the company in the headlines for more than two months it raised eyebrows not for what it said but for what it did, or rather didn’t do.

Thanko, that master of all things ridiculous, has finally opened an online store bringing the likes of the FMP3 watch and USB-powered heated gloves to the world outside Japan.

Japan’s NTT DoCoMo has attracted more than 860,000 people to its DCMX service that allows a cellphone with an IC chip to be used to make credit purchases in stores, it said Thursday.

Since we’re on the subject of virtual human playthings, how about this for a dose of weird?

Since we’re on a cultural/freaky tip, it’s probably a good time to mention Tokyo’s other hot-ticket fall show — an exhibition of fake, yet really really important, monsters running at the National Science Museum in Ueno from October 17 to November 12.

The tail end of last month saw the opening of Japan’s biggest-ever exhibition of old-time robots here in Tokyo. Automata, as ‘bots used to be known in the 19th century, are basically wind-up figures that perform the same task repeatedly, usually to the accompaniment of cheesy music.

Japan’s one of those places where conventional wisdom is generally turned on its head — no, you really don’t need to cook that fish before eating it; yes, you are supposed to bathe butt naked with those 80-year-old crones — so, it’s no surprise to see Jaxa, the national space agency, deliberately staring into our solar system’s fiery life-giver just for kicks.

Today is a national holiday called “Keiro no hi” (Respect for the aged day) here in Japan, which means that everyone gets a day off to contemplate the meaning of life, the universe and raw fish.