Pretty cool, huh? A recent(-ish; this started a few years back) fad in Japan has been nighttime “factory tours” in Kawasaki to view industrial buildings lit up at night. It’s heartening to know that even signifiers of the coming ecological collapse (at least as far as humans and polar bears are concerned) can produce art.

(Via CNNgo.com)

Everybody with even a casual appreciation of sushi or stir-fry is familiar with Kikkoman soy sauce. It’s not going to set the world on fire with its relatively pedestrian flavor, but it’s cost-effective and gets the job done. Strangely, they decided to beef up their rep as the world’s #1 soy sauce producer with this bizarre ad and jingle that features, among other things, a condiment battle-to-the-death and kitten lynching, all done in what appears to be MS Paint with a MIDI synthesizer backing.

This alternate version includes English subtitles that don’t really clarify anything, and “softens” the impact of the hanged kitten by instead forcing him to stare at the corner like a dunce. That will teach him to put soy sauce on an omelette! Futhermore, why is Kikko-Man enjoying a post-sex canoodle with a strange woman? The lyrics do not explain this AT ALL. Also, Kikko-Man calls out Ketchup and Worchestshire, but who’s the guy with the yellow vase-head who keeps urinating out of his mouth? He needs more character development.

Well-played, Japan.

Some web-nerd really needs to design a smirking, head-shaking emoticon, because the more I stare at the internetz, the more that that becomes my go-to expression. Also, I’m seriously considering changing the name of the Wednesday posts to “WTF, Japan?! Wednesday”, because it seems like every single week some new craziness gets transmitted to us from the land of the rising sun.

This week, it’s pee-based gaming at men’s room urinals. Go ahead, read it again. I’ll wait. Get it? Got it? Good.

So yeah, in an effort to curb poor aim at wall urinals that results in messy floors (ladies, I’m really sorry for this—also, if you think this is isolated to solely Japan, poke your head into the men’s room next time you’re out at a bar or your S.O. drags you to a sporting event), SEGA has introduced video games that men can “play” by aiming their streams at sensors in the urinals. Force of stream and accuracy help achieve high scores (I can’t believe I’m typing this).

Think of it like that age-old classic of writing your name in the snow with your pee, but much more sophisticated. At least from a technological standpoint. There is nothing culturally sophisticated about playing with your own pee. In fact, now that we’ve been incentivized to play with our own waste, I think you could make the argument that we are, in fact, devolving. This was the one thing separating us from apes.

The only way this could get worse is if SEGA secures licensing rights to the Ghostbuster franchise and develops a game wherein crossing of the streams is encouraged.

OK, guys. I don’t have anything particularly witty or clever to say about this ad. Sometimes there just are no words.

But in this case, there are. Five of them.

Japanese. Darth. Vader. Cell. Phone.

Actually, here’s a brief summation of my thoughts on this ad: It’s not as if this is the weirdest Japanese ad in the world. In fact, it’s pretty tame, apart from the the unexplained presence of Vader—is he a metaphor? What does he symbolize? Is the phone called “The Sith”, or “The Darth” or something? I can’t tell. But I just love the fact that the commercial’s director can’t just do a straight ad—he/she just can’t resist ratcheting up the Japanese-bizarreness quotient around the 40-second mark with Mr. Over-exaggerated Elvis Hair.

I don’t even know what to say about this. It’s possibly the most WTF’tastic thing I’ve ever posted here. You know how sometimes you wake up from a weird dream and can only remember fragments, and the fragments make no sense? Like one minute you were driving a car made out of Cheerios and the next you were walking through a mall that only sells sparkly zebras? Yeah, this is more bizarre than that.

Side note: I haven’t mentioned this around here yet, but I’m currently in the process of learning Japanese and planning a trip to Tokyo. I can only hope it’s actually as bizarre there as Youtube leads me to believe.

Well, it’s Wednesday, so it’s time for me to share the weirdest thing I found on the internet this week, and boy does this qualify. Japanese artist Hiromi Ozaki has designed a menstruation simulation device, so dudes can understand what periods feel like. Um, thanks?

Ozaki also believes periods will become obsolete one day and future women will want to use this device to learn about periods.