Imagine having your marriage conducted by a robot. One lucky Japanese couple got their chance to experience this. Satoko Inouye and groom Tomohiro Shibata were married by the robot called “I-Fairy” a robot created by Kokoro Co.

The robot wed the couple at a restaurant in Tokyo. The wedding was surprisingly small, am sure more people would have attending knowing this involved a robot priest.

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The FBI seems to have begun targeting scan sites. The site which has been was shut down by the FBI is HTMLcomics.com which is a comic scan site .The site offered comics to download and view, the comics were things like; Incredible Hulk, Wolverine, Dilbert, Peanuts, Catwoman, Flash, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Hellboy, Star Wars, 300, Predator, The Mask, Iron Man and Buffy and Vampire Slayer. The site has been shut down after the FBI served a warrant to the owner.

According to a press release from the law firm Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP, the FBI conducted the investigation with a consortium of comic book publishers and their legal counsels, including Marvel Comics, DC Comics, Dark Horse Comics, Bongo Comics, Archie Comics, Conan Properties Int’l LLC, Mirage Studios Inc., and United Media.

The press release also stated that the website had posted more than 5,700 comic series for viewing without authorization. According to the law firm, the site received an average of 1.6 million visits each day before it was shut down.

I wonder how much longer until this begins to affect anime and manga sites.

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Think your universities dormitory is bad? Well it can’t be as bad as Kyoto Universities Yoshida-ryo dormitory;

A peek inside the Kyoto University dormitory first built in 1913 that still houses student squatters for the ultra low price of ¥2,500 a month. No wonder it looks like this

It’s looking pretty bad, but thats assumed considering it’s been neglected for nearly 100 years. The students have been doing minor repairs to the structure and have added Ethernet cables. The univeristy has been planning to demolish this dormintory for quiet a while now so it might be comeing to an end soon;

The university has recently been fairly insistent on their plan to replace it with a new, safer structure, which fits in with their aggressive earthquake-proofing campaign. But the current administration seems unlikely to take extreme action along the lines of Tokyo University’s demolition of Komaba-ryo in 2001, when its residents were literally dragged out of the building by over 570 private security guards and university staff in the midst of a raging typhoon.

Originally only housing male undergraduates, Yoshida-ryo went coed in 1985, started accepting foreign students in 1990, and since 1991 has accepted any sort of Kyoto University affiliated student, including graduate students, with some current residents living there from their freshman year all the way through the end of graduate school.

Via CNNGo

I thought it was pretty cool that they even went as far as wearing plug-suits,  now thats accurate cosplay;

The official website of the Evangelion anime franchise has posted images from the first day of racing for Run’a Entertainment’s “Evangelion RT-01 apr Corolla” team in the Super GT300-class grand touring championship series on Saturday.

Not only was the team’s Toyota Corolla Axio painted in homage to the anime’s Evangelion EVA-01 unit, but the uniforms of drivers Koki Saga and Kosuke Matsuura were patterned after the plug suit of the anime’s main character Shinji Ikari. (Similarly, the “race queen” models Noa Mizutani and Yuuna Chiba wore outfits loosely inspired by the characters Rei and Asuka.)

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A very interesting read I had on mainichi, an 18 year boy was arrested for running a prostitution ring.

The boy, who is originally from Yamaguchi Prefecture and is enrolled in a correspondence high school course there, took a leave of absence from school in 2009 and traveled to Tokyo. He began a prostitution brokering business based on information he gained from sex industry magazines, and is believed to have made some 10 million yen in sales in about a year, police say.

The 18-year-old was arrested on charges of brokering a sex-for-money exchange between a 14-year-old junior high school girl and a 38-year-old male client at a hotel in Tokyo’s Taito Ward. The man has been fined 500,000 yen for violating the child prostitution law.

According to police, the boy, who had transferred from a private prep school to a correspondence course, explained, “I wanted to make a lot of money and get even with my former classmates.”

The boy found prostitution jobs for about 25 women in the past year, most of whom were 14 to 17 years old. He invited women to contact him via mobile phone networking sites, saying he would provide them with lucrative work.

How he promoted his business is pretty cool;

he attracted male customers by posting messages on dating sites posing as girls, with messages such as “I’m young. I wear a school uniform.”

I guess saying “I’m young. I wear a school uniform” does the trick.

Well it was only a matter of time before someone thought of doing something like this. Lawson a big convenience story chain in Japan has themed one of its shops in Hakone, Kanagawa into a Evangelion themed store. The store is filled with many Evangelion themed goods and a lot of Evangelion items are placed around the store;

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A while back I found out that the Nintendo DS was about to start getting used to train McDonald’s staff in Japan, well its finally begun:

Gundam will be celebrating it’s 30th birthday this July, marking 30 years of epic robot fighting animes and Gundam plastic model kits, which of numerous shapes and sizes have been created.

As of March, Bandai has sold 400 million Gundam plastic model kits — all made in Japan. (Japan has a population of about 127 million.) The first kit, a 1/144-scale Gundam, sold for 300 yen (about US$3.20) in 1980. On July 24, 2010, Bandai will release a new 1/144-scale “Real Grade” Gundam kit for 2,625 yen (US$28.20).

More Gundam kits have been made then the entire Japanese population and even U.S population, thats pretty amazing when you think about it.

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Want to eat some of the most expensive ramen ever? For the small sum of 120$ US or ¥10,000 per bowl you can eat some really good ramen;

What makes this dish expensive isn’t the noodle’s its the soup;

So what is in the ¥10,000 “Emperor Ramen”? The browth is mixed from a soup made of Thai prawn, Japanese blue crab, Manila clams, common orient clams (hamaguri), Batissa clams (shijimi) and a deluxe Cantonese soup made from dried clams, dried shrimp, pork tendons, beef tendons, ham and mature chicken. This is then finally added to a purée of whipping cream and prawns. Basically it’s a Thai tom yum soup, rather than a classic “Japanese” ramen.

If you’re interested in trying this ramen and the high cost doesn’t put you off, you can buy some at Fujimaki Gekijo the restaurant which sells the ¥10,000 ramen and is notorious for it’s high priced ramens.

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Stealing jewelry or items of worth is common for thief’s, even stealing animals is pretty normal compared to these hardcore thief’s;

Criminals have made repeated bee thefts around Japan, taking tens of thousands of the insects and making the lives of strawberry farmers difficult.

Thefts of the insects, which are necessary for the propagation of the fruit, have been recorded in the central prefecture of Shizuoka and other areas.

“I have been a farmer for 58 years, but I have never known of anyone stealing bees,” an 83-year-old woman told the Jiji news agency.

“Without them, nothing will come of my crop,” another farmer was quoted as saying.

In the city of Kuniichi alone, 10 cases with about 60,000 bees were taken in one night, the report said.

The lack of bees have driven up their prices, and experts have surmised that the perpetrators are taking the bees so they could sell them on for more money.

Prices also increased after Japan banned the import of the pollinators three years ago to prevent infections. Although the import ban was lifted last year, the bees did not breed as quickly as hoped because of a cold summer in Japan.

Well there you go, why steal jewelry when you can be creative and find your own unique niche, bee stealing profitable and fun!

Also something interesting I learned when I read this;

Japan is also home to rising numbers of people who raise bees as a hobby, further increasing demand for the insects.

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