Who really cares about the Olympics? People who go on about adrenalin rushes and the “natural” high brought on from running ten kilometres a day are invariably boring assholes. What about taking part in a competitive sport which is actually fun and doesn’t leave your legs feeling like they’ve been twatted with a pool ball in a sock for five hours? We’re talking about San Francisco’s annual Masturbate-a-thon, which is a bit like those telethons that they used to do on TV in the 80s to raise money for charity but with jerking off instead of dumb-ass celebrity dance routines and teddy bear mascots. There are prizes in different categories, from “Longest Squirt” to “Most Orgasms,” but the real sportsmen are found in the “longest time spent masturbating” event. Fuck long distance running, this is a solid-gold endurance event. Holder of the title for the last two years is Masanobu Sato, a worker at Japanese sex toy manufacturer Tenga, who this year beat his previous record, coming in (ha) at NINE HOURS AND FIFTY EIGHT MINUTES. We got in touch with Masanobu to find out exactly how he lasted so long.
It’s been a fucking weird past week. I’ve been drinking way too much (again), a family of rabid foxes have moved into my back garden, and a midget kicked me in the shins for looking at it funny. Then, mysteriously, someone posted the photo above as my desktop image, and I’ve been traumatised ever since. On top of this, I’ve had to put up with the excruciatingly tedious drivel pouring out from the Conservative party conference. Who gives a shit if they all got wrecked off expensive bottles of champagne? They’re rich toffs. That’s what they do. They drink champagne and ‘hate’ on the poor. That’s kind of why they exist. Read more »
Japanese office culture is strange. People in business together don’t talk, ever, except for a couple times a year when they spend five obligatory days getting absolutely smashed and passing out all over the city because it’s expected of them. Afterward, they revert to how things were and don’t discuss what happened. In the middle of this wave of festivities, I woke up at 4:30 in the morning headed into Shinjuku, land o’ plenty when it comes to hostess bars, love hotels, and nightclubs… and right now drunken salarymen napping in the street with homeless people. If it weren’t for the sort of clean clothes I probably couldn’t tell them apart. Let’s play a game called Holiday or Homeless!
Abashiri Prison is Japan’s most infamous Meiji-era incarceration unit. Built in the remote outer reaches of Eastern Hokkaido, political exiles and dangerous criminals were bundled off to serve lengthy, sometimes indefinite, sentences in this isolated little hell hole. The harsh Siberian climate took as many lives as the torturous living environment. But Japanese people don’t like all that gloomy, sad stuff, which is why they dismantled it, rebuilt it on a hill a couple of kilometres up the road and turned it into an animatronic dummy-filled, fun-packed detention Disneyland. After it moved, a new high-security prison was built in its place, and it is still in operation today. Though undoubtedly nowhere near as bad as the old Abashiri gulag of yore, it still ain’t no weekend in Butlins. Read more »
I’d heard stories of life on Japan’s north island of Hokkaido, a place that stretches the length of Britain and makes up 25 per cent of Japan’s land mass despite holding only 5 per cent of its population. With a history of colonisation, ethnic repression, threats from Russia, and as the bearer of Japan’s own Meiji-era gulags, it seemed to me to be Japan’s final frontier. I booked a flight to Hakodate, the port at Hokkaido’s southern tip, rented a car and set off on the long road north. Along the way I’d encounter power-tool wielding convicts, erotic wood-carving ethnic Ainu potheads, strung-out bikers and an apocalyptic scattering of abandoned buildings. Oh, and I also nearly got kidnapped by Russian sailors. Read more »
First impressions on return to Scotland after a 23-hour journey home from Japan via Paris and Amsterdam aren’t good. A mother swears loudly and aggressively at her toddler for dragging his heels slightly as one of the passengers walks through Passport Control and straight into the long arms of the law. Read more »
At some unknown point in the Nineties, a well-meaning but stupid entrepreneur decided to set up shop in Niigata. This northern Japanese port city is so listless and dull it’d have you confusing internment in North Korea with Young Jeezy’s coke and sodomy fortress. Acknowledging its sea trade routes with those along the Siberian shoreline, this industrious fellow decided the Japanese needed a Russian peasant-themed tourist spot. It was abandoned to the vandals soon after.
What does it take to make a grown man dress like this on his day off? Once upon a time you’d need a steadfast belief in a supposedly superior race of people claiming to be the descendants of Atlantis, a psychotic drive to form a pan-Germanic super-state governed by the most brutal and murderous means possible, a sickeningly evil disregard for your fellow man, and to shout so loudly from podiums that 50 years later students will still think it’s clever to talk about what a great orator you were. But, if this chap milling around Tokyo is anything to go by, times have changed. He’s dressing up as a Nazi purely for the fun of it. “Chotto asobi!”he says, literally meaning “a little play” (although more probably interpreted in English as “gross cultural insensitivity bred through untranslatable naïvety”). Read more »
The internet is responsible for a multilingual hero: the online translator. Anyone who has ever used one of these translation sites, though, will know how utterly dodgy the results can be. The Japanese, it seems, are yet to realise this elementary fact; they regularly use a computerised translator for their signs, notices and everything they want in English. Check out some of the linguistic monstrosities and unintentional sexual innuendos as a result of this after the click.
Robot makers these days are all focused on creating immortal info machines that are sleek and graceful, so God bless the Tokyo University of Science’s soft nostalgia for 1990s-style clunkers with “skin” who looked “real,” because it begot SAYA the helpful receptionist here, aka an animatronic Mike Myers. Perhaps her finished design was inevitable considering development started in 1993 and she was done only recently. Her looks and styling were created by a guy who makes a living as a love doll creator. (We got a peek at SAYA 2.0, who was made to look like her engineer’s ex-girlfriend, which is actually spookier than what she looks like now.) With a vocabulary of 300 words that can be configured into 700 phrases, she talks from speakers in her tits. But don’t say anything about it–or anything rude, for that matter–or she’ll curl up her face like a pitbull and tell you off. Our friend Maria Ahlgren discovered this when she visited SAYA at her home in Japan. Read more »
When it comes to technology the whole world is in constant awe of the Japanese. They live in houses built from lightweight emotional fabrics that fold into an average shirt pocket and their children are born with circuit boards in the back of their eyes. However, all the digital sushi on Earth won’t save them unless they start using their techy skills for something more useful than lame, boring, interactive “porn“. If I understood computers like them I’d be building a machine to stop meteors from crashing into earth, or to turn North Korea’s intergalactic death-ray into a flower pot that crapped money, not looking at girl’s pants. That’s what AA ads are for.
So let’s get this straight. Japan made a robot that’s supposed to be a runway model, only she’s short, ugly, fat, and can’t walk… and on top of that her feet are ski boots and it looks like the engineers just stuck on a pair of Mickey Mouse raver gloves as hands. She’s flat-out ugly – like Grimsby shopping centre ugly, not model ugly, too. And she costs hundreds of thousand of pounds. You’d be better off putting a dress on a Roomba. At least that can suck you off pretty easily.
I hope they’re still taking proposals for the new World Trade Center design so we can nominate this kid. More
Since when did we start listening to guys in plastic birthday hats and banana pants? Lady, I don’t know if you speak Homeless Person but the proper response to, “Did you know Britney Spears and George W. Bush are the same person?” is “Leave me alone.” More
