Back in 2019, it had been announced that the iconic Harajuku Station would be demolished after the 2020 Olympics. Though with the postponment due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the dismantling of the station continued as planned, and now the original façade is not there anymore. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Sugaya…

Now here’s an interesting story that has people wondering whether they should laugh or cry. The town of Noto in Japan has spent 25 million yen ($228,500), that were given to the town as relief money during the pandemic, on an enormous squid statue. The tourism and hospitality industry in Japan has been struggling, seeing…

After months of proposals and assessments to try to determine whether hosting the Olympics could be safe, the International Olympic Committee (I.O.C.) has announced that it has reached deals with Pfizer and BioNTech that will allow them to have the necessary doses to vaccinate all athletes and officials before the Tokyo Olympics in July. This…

Numbers don’t lie: there is a trend going on in Japan that is seeing the number of elderly people committing petty crimes go up. Among these crimes, the top one is shoplifting. Upon seeing these numbers, researchers and demographers became puzzled as they tried to come up with a good hypothesis that could explain the…

During an online session for the press, Yoshiharu Hoshino, the representative of Japan’s popular Hoshino Resorts, stated that, upon its resumption, the Go To Travel campaign should target only those who have received the COVID-19 vaccine. The comments about the vaccine were some among various suggestions Hoshino deemed reasonable, including lowering the benefits of the…

Governor Koike Yuriko is asking the government to ask residents not to leave the 23 special wards and the Tama area. The request comes as Tokyo registered more than 500 new COVID-19 cases on April 7, the largest number in months and just weeks after the state of emergency was lifted, increasing fears that Tokyo…

Will Japan Be the Second Country in Asia to Legalize Same-Sex Marriage? That is the question members of the LGBTQ+ community have been asking themselves since a groundbreaking in Sapporo deemed that the government was violating Article 14 of the Constitution. The Sapporo District Court reached this decision despite Article 24 stating that “Marriage shall…

Officials have continued to promise that the Tokyo Olympics will take place as planned. However, it was announced on Saturday that foreign spectators would not be allowed to come to Japan. The decision comes as the country and organizers factor the COVID-19 pandemic and make concessions in order to hold the Olympic Games as planned.…

Hiroshi Sasaki was to be in charge of the opening and closing ceremonies of the Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games, but that won’t be the case anymore. Sasaki is out of the post after one of his proposals, which he had shared on SNS, leaked. There, the Dentsu creative director, proposed having comedian Naomi Watanabe…

It’s finally here! After all the anticipation, Super Nintendo World has officially opened. At first, with the government’s Go To Travel Campaign suspension and subsequent states of emergency, it came as a surprise that Universal Studios Japan (USJ) was not moving the opening date of the Super Nintendo World. As the saying goes, the show…