X-Nico

21 unusual facts about Japan


Ayameko

Ayameko is the English spelling of the given name ( あやめこ ) - (A あ, Ya や, me め, ko こ) of Japanese origin.

Cambodia–Japan relations

Cambodia–Japan relations are foreign relations between Cambodia and Japan.

Chirography

The intricate system of characters defined by their radicals (214 in the Chinese system, with an alternative 79 radical system in the later developed Japanese interpretation known as Kanji (漢字)) is believed to have come to use around 2000 BCE.

Flesh-Colored Horror

The table of contents lists all the stories as originally appearing in Halloween (magazine) a monthly manga magazine produced by Asahi Sonorama (朝日ソノラマ, Asahi Sonorama?), a Japanese manga, book, and magazine publishing company.

Fusajiro Yamauchi

Fusajiro Yamauchi (山内 房治郎 Yamauchi, Fusajirō, November 22, 1859 – January 1940) was a Japanese entrepreneur who founded the company that is now known as Nintendo Company Limited.

Game Sauce

Game Sauce had wacky Japanese-style announcers and styles to go with the show's premise.

Global Day of Action

Industrialized, G8 nations like Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, UK, and USA had multiple rallies - 36 in Canada alone - being planned in cities nationwide.

Japan, Our Homeland

At the end of the film, there is a public announcement about Japan finally being able to become a member of the United Nations, the announcer mentioning the word for their homeland in the international language of English – Japan.

Karl Lentzner

Lentzner seems to have spent some years in New South Wales in the 1870s (he taught languages at Sydney Grammar and Kings School and mentions coming across "Yokahama-Pidgin" as spoken by Japanese naval officers in Sydney in 1877) which gives the Australian portions some claim to originality and importance; for the rest he relies heavily on other authorities.

Kendo Nagasaki

Kendo Nagasaki is a professional wrestling stage name, used as a gimmick of that of a Japanese Samurai warrior with a mysterious past and even supernatural powers of hypnosis.

Kitayama Station

Kitayama Station is the name of multiple train stations in Japan.

Matsuo Yokoyama

Matsuo Yokoyama (March 31, 1927) was president of Walt Disney Enterprises of Japan from 1989 to 1994.

Mixed martial arts weight classes

With no state or government laws regarding weight class restrictions, Japanese organizations are free to schedule bouts with little regard for weight differential.

National Public Safety Commission

The National Public Safety Commission is the policy making and oversight body of the national police forces in Japan and South Korea.

Nintendo Network Service Database

Broadcast began in Japan on May 1, 2009, and an international expansion is being considered.

Onoe Shoroku II

Onoe Shoroku II (March 28, 1913 – June 25, 1989) is the stage name for Yutaka Fujima a Japanese kabuki actor who specialized in female roles.

SD14

Sigma SD14 digital single-lens reflex camera produced by the Sigma Corporation of Japan

Senkaku

Senkaku Islands, disputed territory named "Diaoyu" or "Diaoyutai Islands" in Chinese, also known as "Pinnacle Islands", occupied by Japan.

Sumitomo Masatomo

Sumitomo Masatomo (住友政友, Sumitomo Masatomo) (1585 - 1652) was a Japanese copper mining businessman.

Susanne Charlotte Engelmann

With the death of her mother in June 1940, Engelmann, at 54 years of age, moved through Russia, Siberia, Mandchuria and Japan to finally reach the USA in 1941.

World Victory Road

World Victory Road (WVR) is a defunct Japanese Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) organization which promoted the Sengoku Raiden Championship in Japan.


2007 World Championships in Athletics – Women's 20 kilometres walk

The Women's 20 km Race Walk event at the 2007 World Championships in Athletics took place on August 31, 2007 in the streets of Osaka, Japan.

318th Fighter Group

At the completion of the Gilbert and Marshall Islands campaign the 72nd FS was transferred to the newly activated 21st Fighter Group to prepare for the job of escorting the Boeing B-29 Superfortresses over Japan.

Akira Tohei

For the next eight years Tohei, in addition to his teaching at the headquarters, was also an instructor at Asia University, Akita Economics University (now North Asia University), Keio University, Nihon Women's University, the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force, and the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force.

Alfred M. Gray, Jr.

After his Vietnam War tour, Gray served as Commanding Officer of the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines, Battalion Landing Team 1/2; the 2nd Marine Regiment; the 4th Marine Regiment; and Camp Commander of Camp Hansen, Okinawa, Japan.

Ashikaga Gakko

The pioneering Roman Catholic missionary, Saint Francis Xavier, noted in 1549 that the Ashikaga School was the largest and most famous university of eastern Japan.

Asuka, Yamato

Recent discoveries in the area include Wado coins, believed to be some of the oldest coins in Japan, and paintings in the Kitora and Takamatsuzuka Kofun, or tombs.

Banded houndshark

The first scientific description of the banded houndshark was authored by German biologists Johannes Peter Müller and Friedrich Gustav Jakob Henle, based on a dried specimen from Japan, in their 1838–41 Systematische Beschreibung der Plagiostomen.

Barbara Schlick

She has since appeared at major concert halls, performance venues, and music festivals throughout Europe, Israel, Japan, Canada, the United States and Russia, singing under the batons of people like Frans Brüggen, William Christie, Michel Corboz, Reinhard Goebel, Philippe Herreweghe, René Jacobs, Sigiswald Kuijken, and Karl-Friedrich Beringer.

Beauty

Bishōnen refers to males with distinctly feminine features, physical characteristics establishing the standard of beauty in Japan and typically exhibited in their pop culture idols.

Brett Leboff

Within months of signing Big Strides they were booked to play in front of 000’ of people at Summer Sonic Festival, Japan signed licensing deal with Reservoir Records - EMI Japan for Strides first record “Small Town, Big Strides” then subsequent records “Cry It All Out” and “Super Custom Limited”.

Calvin Kingsley

While abroad, Bishop Kingsley wrote home, describing Japan, Shaghi, Pekin, Foo Chow, Calcutta, Singapore, Madras, Benares, Lucknow, and Bareilly.

DSPACE GmbH

The company has Project Centers in Pfaffenhofen (near Munich) and Böblingen (near Stuttgart) and subsidiaries in the USA, UK, France, Japan and China.

Flying syringe

In 2008 the Gates Foundation awarded $100,000 to Hiroyuki Matsuoka of Jichi Medical University in Japan to do research on them, with a condition that any discoveries that were funded by the grant must be made available at affordable prices in the developing world.

Geography of Guam

: Commercial fishing (mostly servicing and unloading of longline fleets and commercial vessels), recreational fishing of Indo-Pacific Blue Marlin (Makaira mazara), Wahoo (Acanthocybium solandri), Mahi-mahi (Coryphaena hippurus), Yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares), and deepwater reef fish, tourism (especially from Japan but increasingly from China and South Korea).

George W. Hunter III

Hunter concentrated his research effort on that endemic problem, and by 1951 his team had eliminated it in the Nagatoishi district of Kurume City, Japan, using a landmark program of molluscicides to control the snail host.

Guandong

Kwantung Leased Territory, a small section of the above region controlled by Russia and, then, Japan from 1898 to 1945

Guyver: Out of Control

It was produced in 1986 in Japan and released in the U.S. and Canada in 1993 by L.A. Hero under the Dark Image Entertainment label.

Hill Top, Cumbria

In 2007 a replica of Hill Top was built in a children's zoo near the grounds of Daito Bunka University in Tokyo, Japan.

IEEE Jun-ichi Nishizawa Medal

Nishizawa was professor, director of two research institutes and the 17th president at Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan, and contributed important innovations in the fields of optical communications and semiconductor devices, such as laser and PIN diodes and static induction thyristors for electric power applications.

Japanese minelayer Yaeyama

Yaeyama covered the landing of Japanese Special Naval Landing Forces (SNLF) reinforcements in the Battle of Shanghai, and participated in the evacuation of 20,000 Japanese civilians and non-combatants from the city back to Japan.

Japanese War Crimes: Murder Under The Sun

According to Hulu, "Over 14 dreadful years between 1932 and 1945, Japan went on a rampage of war and atrocity beyond comprehension."

Kate Gulbrandsen

Her version of Jørn Hansen's "Med gullet for øyet" was the official song of the 1998 Winter Paralympics in Nagano, Japan.

Kazuhiro Maeda

He compete twice at world level for Japan in 2007: he finished seventeenth in the 10,000 metres at the 2007 World Championships and then came 30th at the 2007 IAAF World Road Running Championships in Udine.

Kotoka

Kotooka, Akita (also transliterated as Kotoka), a town in Yamamoto District, Akita, Japan

Lou Gramm

In April 1997, two months after providing vocals for Christian rock band Petra's Petra Praise 2: We Need Jesus, and on the eve the band was to leave for a Japan tour, Gramm was diagnosed with a type of brain tumor called a craniopharyngioma.

Marcus Tulio Tanaka

Born in Palmeira d'Oeste, Brazil to a second generation Japanese-Brazilian father and Italian-Brazilian mother, Tulio moved to Japan at age 15 to complete his high school studies.

María Luisa Reid

Her work has appeared in collective exhibitions in France, Spain, Japan and Cuba with the most important of these being 300 Latino-americans dans l’espace in Paris, the IV Encuentro Iberoamericano de Mujeres en el Arte in Alcalá de Henares, Spain and the Viva la vida Frida in Havana.

Muon spin spectroscopy

This is presently achieved at few large scale facilities in the world: the CMMS continuous source at TRIUMF in Vancouver, Canada; the SµS continuous source at the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI) in Villigen, Switzerland; the ISIS and RIKEN-RAL pulsed sources at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Chilton, United Kingdom; and the J-PARC facility in Tokai, Japan, where a new pulsed source is being built to replace that at KEK in Tsukuba, Japan.

No More Rhyme

"No More Rhyme" (Atlantic 88885; Atlantic Japan 09P3-6165) is the eighth single from American singer-songwriter-actress Debbie Gibson, and the third from her second album Electric Youth (LP 81932).

Origin: Spirits of the Past

Three hundred years later, Japan is a dystopia covered by the Forest, a huge expanse of sapient trees, and ruled by the tree-like Zruids, which inhabit the planet and control the water supply of both trees and humans.

Osadia

Tollwood Festival, Munich / Sydney Mardi Gras, Australia / Trafalgar Square Festival, London, UK / Juste pour rire/Just for laughs, Montreal, Canada / The Esplanade Festival, Singapore / NZ International Festival, Wellington, New Zealand / Kleines Fest im Grossen Garten, Hanover / Daidogei World Cup, Shizuoka, Japan / Hogmanay, Edinburgh, Scotland / Festes de la Mercè, Barcelona

Osuwa Daiko

Formed in Okaya, Japan in 1951 and founded by Daihachi Oguchi, Osuwa Daiko created a style of performance independent from performance during festivals, theatrical performance, and religious ceremonies, and transformed them into an ensemble performance.

Phosphofructokinase deficiency

It was named after the Japanese Physician, Seiichiro Tarui (1927- ), who was a native of Hyōgo Prefecture in Japan.

Shōtarō Yasuoka

Yasuoka was born in pre-war Japan in Kōchi, Kōchi, but as the son of a veterinary corpsman in the Imperial Army, he spent most of his youth moving from one military post to another.

Stand Up for Your Rice!

Stand Up For Your Rice! is a 2007 album by Money Mark released in Japan only.

Stratos Boats

Stratos began building boats in 1984, and sells throughout a network of dealers throughout the United States, Australia, France, Japan, Mexico, Portugal, Romania, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Italy and Venezuela.

Super Ranger Kids

Originally released in 1997, the film is a pastiche of the American television series Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, the first Power Rangers series, and, by extension, the Japanese Super Sentai series Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger, which formed the basis for Mighty Morphin.

Takao Kitabata

Kitabata announced on August 7 that Japan was again requesting information from the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC), asking whether CNOOC had begun developing the disputed Chunxiao gas field in the East China Sea.

Tamawashi Ichirō

On a visit to see his sister in Japan, they went to Ryōgoku where Tokyo's official tournaments are held.

Technodelic

For "Seoul Music", the kanji "京城" are used, referring to Gyeongseong (경성; known as Keijou in Japan), the name of Seoul when Korea was under Japanese rule.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Hyperstone Heist

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Hyperstone Heist, released in Europe as Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles: The Hyperstone Heist and in Japan as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Return of the Shredder is a side-scrolling beat 'em up based on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT) franchise, and was also the first TMNT game released for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis.

Teishin Shudan

The paratroop brigades were organized into the Teishin Shudan as the first division-level raiding unit, at the main Japanese airborne base, Karasehara Airfield, Kyūshū, Japan.

The Big Green Egg

The mushikamado first came to the attention of the Americans after World War II when US Air Force servicemen would bring them back from Japan in empty transport planes.

The Shadow over Innsmouth

Innsmouth no Yakata was a 1995 3D first-person shooter video game for the Virtual Boy, released in Japan based on Chiaki J. Konaka's 1992 television series Insmus wo Oou Kage.

Theretra silhetensis

Larvae have been recorded feeding on Colocasia antiquorum and Ludwigia species in southern China, Colocasia esculenta in Japan, Ludwigia repens and Boerhavia species in India and numerous other hostplants from elsewhere, including Arum, Caladium, Pistia, Kochia, Ipomoea, Boerhavia, Ludwigia, Rosa and Trapa species.

Tōyako

Lake Tōya, known as "Tōyako" in Japanese, a volcanic caldera lake in Shikotsu-Toya National Park, Abuta District, Iburi Subprefecture, Hokkaidō, Japan

Uesugi Akisada

His loss of the Izu Province to Hōjō Sōun in 1492–1498 marked a significant development of Japan's Sengoku period.

Ultra Seven

Ultra Seven is sometimes incorrectly called "Ultraman Seven" by many sources outside Japan (or in the case of KHON/Honolulu, Hawaii, Ultra7, as listed in TV Guide when it ran in 1975).

Woody Pop

It would be the last game released in Japan with the Mark III branding and on a My Card.

Yoko Narahashi

Born in Ichikawa, Chiba, Japan, Narahashi moved to Montreal, Canada in 1952 at the age of five when her father got a job at the International Civil Aviation Organization.