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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Car looks amazing to bad the price is amazingly high as well.

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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

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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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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Everyone seems to know that the japanese population will start to decline, but not many know its actually already beginning to decline;

Japan’s estimated population decreased for the second year in a row, declining by a record 183,000, or 0.14 percent, from a year earlier to 127,510,000 as of Oct. 1, 2009, government data showed Friday.

It was the third year-on-year decline in Japan’s population since 1950 when comparable data became available, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications said in a report. Japan’s population previously declined twice — in 2005 by 19,000, or 0.01 percent, and in 2008 by 79,000, or 0.06 percent.

The number of women stood at 65,380,000, a decrease of 61,000 or 0.09 percent, marking the first natural decline with 5,000 more deaths than births.

The male population stood at 62,130,000, down 121,000 or 0.20 percent, marking the fifth straight annual decline with 54,000 more deaths than births.

Japan’s population has entered a stage of full-scale decline as both men and women recorded natural decreases, ministry officials said.

Although the population has declined this year the number of people 65 and over has increased by 789,000, making it 29,005,000 people or 22.7 percent of the population.

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A new virus gaining speed in Japan is humiliating hentai game downloaders; the virus publishes the user’s web history online and then blackmails them.

The trojan is infecting a popular file-sharing service called Winni and targets people downloading illegal copies of ‘over-18′ Hentai games.

Masquerading as an installer screen for the game, the trojan requests various bits of personal information – and also starts scanning the victim’s user account and web history, grabbing a few screen shots while it’s at it.

“All of this information is then subsequently published on a publicly available website and it’s not long before the victim receives a “helpful” email,” says senior security advisor Rik Ferguson of Trend Micro Japan.

“The email comes from a company calling themselves ‘Romancing Inc’, – who coincidentally also own the domain where the stolen information has been published – and they alert the unfortunate mark to the predicament offering to resolve the ‘copyright infringement’ and get the information removed… for a fee.”

Apparently, thousands of people have admitted to being infected with the Kenzero trojan.

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The 5 million unit sales mark for the PS3 has been reached, in Japan anyway;

As of April 11, Famitsu publisher Enterbrain has revealed that over 5 million PlayStation 3s have been sold in The Land of the Rising Sun. Domestically, the top three selling games for the system are Final Fantasy XIII (1.8 million copies), Metal Gear Solid 4 (706,461 copies) and the recently released Yakuza 4 (526,093 copies)

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The anime film “Honey Tokyo” was created by a well known anime studio, ( STUDIO 4C), to promote Tokyo and various spots, like Akihabara, Shibuya, Harajuku, Shinjuku and Roppongi. The short film was commissioned by the Tokyo metropolitan government in hopes of promoting Tokyo and certain tourists locations to the rest of Japan and the world.

The short film, “Honey Tokyo,” revolves around a girl named Honey who is sent from the future in search of “pieces of happiness.”

She steals away people’s happiness and wipes away Tokyo’s charms.

A youth named Takeru takes her out on a tour of Tokyo that is intended for her to experience joy and wonder. She eventually has a change of heart.

The short anime can be viewed here in 8 different languages, Japanese, English, Chinese, Korean, German, Italian, Spanish or French.

This isn’t the first time anime has been used to help promote Japan and it most likely won’t be the last time either.

Via Asahi.com