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Any Tokyo residents looking for a place to catch the matches in the soccer World Cup, which kicked off yesterday, might want to check out this fine establishment in the west of the metropolis.

Seems like some long-lost videos have surfaced showing how Akira Kurosawa, the master Japanese movie director responsible for Seven Samurai among other classics, earned a little extra pocket money in the early ‘80s. Yep, he roped in Francis Ford Coppola and filmed commercials for Suntory whisky on the side.

Conbinibento has a link to a YouTube clip of a moment of classic television when Michael Jackson puts in an appearance on a typical puerile Japanese TV show hosted by a local boy band called Smap.

Squid, octopus, shark fin, whale, cactus, viper and seaweed — just a few of the thousands of flavors of ice cream available here in Japan

From the only-in-Japan department comes the tale of a robbery in reverse, wherein some strange fellow this week apparently returned the cash he stole from a Tokyo post office in March this year. Plus interest.

Although the PSP ain’t doing too badly here in Japan, Nintendo is laughing all the way to the bank when it comes to portable gaming supremacy. So for its latest stunt, Sony has turned its back on fake graffiti and created PLAYSTATION Signature, a line of PSP-branded knickknacks that includes a watch with most of the numbers missing.

A research team at the Building Research Institute in Tsukuba, outside Tokyo, has created a barnstorming computer model of the heat islands in central Tokyo that is so precise it can distinguish between the temperatures of individual trees.

Conbinibento has a very reasoned look at the rash of Japanese TV commercials spreading across the nation’s screens this year that feature blatant sexual imagery in an effort to whip up sales.

Scientists at NTT Basic Labs have invented an ultraviolet LED that could lead to optical storage capacities that would make Blu-ray/HD DVD as redundant as floppies. It could also be used to zap bacteria and decompose really nasty, difficult-to-get-rid-of stuff like dioxins and PCBs.

Sony, according to Sony, is offering strict protection for acts of terrorism. You don’t believe us? Check this out.

A computer problem at the Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi UFJ, the world’s largest bank in terms of assets, left customers unable to withdraw money from ATMs early Saturday.

Yes, here is a real woman dressed as a manga fantasy maid giving it her all in Tokyo during the Golden Week holiday.

In February 2007, two Japanese government planes will get hooked up with the vaguely broadband Internet service Connexion by Boeing.

Hot on the heels of the Winny debacle, Japan has been hit by another scandal involving a leaky file-sharing program. The major daily newspaper Mainichi Shimbun revealed on Thursday that personal info on some 66,000 of its customers hit the Net due to a virus that targeted an application called Share.

Takafumi Horie, the one-time high-flying head of Japanese Internet portal Livedoor, was released from the Tokyo Detention House on Thursday after three months of confinement following his arrest on January 23 on suspicion of securities fraud.

Don’t go getting any ideas about standing out from the crowd, particularly if you’re here in Tokyo and have something to hide, because the Japanese authorities are turning folk into bar codes through some clever biometric security systems.

BBC News has an ostensibly interesting report on the notion that local governments in Japan have taken to subsidizing speed dating events in an effort to do something about the shrinking population.

If you’ve never experienced the classic “fear of the other,” then lucky you. You’ve obviously never lived in the wonderful fantasy land that is Japan.

Japanese media is repackaging an old story about JAXA, Japan’s space agency, wanting to set up a moon base colonized by robots.

If you want an intelligent, fun, graphic and ultra-hip insight into all things Tokyo, why not try Kissui, run by Yuki, a student at Waseda University.

You got the game, you killed the creature. But that was a decade ago, right? Now you can celebrate the 10th anniversary of the original Tamagotchi craze with a knock-down T-shirt from Uniqlo, Japan’s bargain-basement clothes retailer.

Japanese communications giant NTT is promising to produce aromas that waft out of the bottom of your movie theater seat.

Tokyo taxi passengers will soon be able to start paying for their rides using electronic money, three taxi fleet operators said this week.

The above-posited question is doubtless true when it comes to such fine, upstanding organs as the popular manga known as Young Champion. Matt at No-sword is clearly willing to delve into the public display of maid fetish cleavage far further than we dare, so start seeing your drinks off please, ladies and gentlemen, and head on over there.

Everyone’s favorite neutrino detection facility, the Super-Kamiokande in Gifu, looks like it’s almost ready to go back online and resume supernova-monitoring duty by summer.

The hippies in charge of Japan’s environment ministry are sticking it to The Man by shutting off their office lights at 8pm sharp.

Japan’s space agency reports that the sleepy Tokyo suburb of Kogane has been hit by a laser from an orbiting spacecraft.

Seeing as we’ve had fuel-cell trains on our minds of late, here’s some more transportation news to get our juices flowing.

JR East, the major railway operator on the Tokyo side of Japan, has revealed plans to power its trains with fuel cells and is currently preparing a prototype locomotive with two 65-kilowatt fuel cells and just one carriage, which it hopes will reach about 100kph.

Funny little fur-ski Cheburashka is big in Japan and even has his own fan site.

The news is out that J-popstress Hikaru Utada has given up flogging the Nintendo DS.

The latest report to link illegal activities to new-fangled technology has found that, “72% of people think the internet and mobile phones have made illegal drugs such as amphetamines and Ecstasy more accessible than before.”

Kimidori Kenchiku is a construction firm that likes to make spherical houses from polygons, particularly houses for dogs. You can see more of the pet homes here but the intriguing photo above represents an attempt to hang onto the shirttails of the 2006 soccer World Cup to sell human dwellings.

More news on a story we’ve been following since last year: the cancer-stick merchants are going ahead with a plan to stop killing underage Japanese. The Tobacco Institute of Japan will start switching over to cigarette vending machines that have an IC chip-based age-verification system in March 2008.

If adult content in your English conversation classes just makes you hot and flustered, how about getting your fix with an SD card?

With a post titled “Let Me Count the Ways,” Japundit recounts how a 52-year-old Japanese high school teacher sent a 16-year-old student more than 900 emails over a six-month period, expressing his “affection” for her. Luckily, this story doesn’t (yet?) have a sick or tragic ending.

Upon seeing this story we were gonna make some crack along the lines of “Why can’t all language classes be like this?” Watching the video of the English for grown-ups lesson, however, soon put paid to that pipe dream.

Attendance figures are out for last weekend’s Tokyo International Anime Fair. According to the event’s website, the bash was a huge success, attracting 99,000 people, up almost 18% compared to 2005.

The curious tale of how Japanese legislators almost strangled an entire sector of the economy is finally at an end with a loophole found in the PSE law that will allow the sale of secondhand electronics to continue.

One of Japan’s biggest retail groups is throwing its weight behind NTT DoCoMo’s plans to enable touch-and-go credit card payments through cellphone handsets.