Well, we’ve had a fun run here at Tokyo Bounce, but our company has decided to head in a different direction with our social media efforts. Unfortunately, this means that we won’t be posting any more updates to this blog. We’re going to miss sharing our take our Tokyo life and our favorite new Japanese products, that’s for sure!

Thanks so much for reading,

Andrea, Fernando, “Yamada” and the rest of the Tokyo Bounce team

A temple in Nikko, shot by guest photographer Kei.

If you’re a Cup Noodle fan, mark your calendar for September 18th. Starting from then, you’ll have the opportunity to win something utterly fabulous from your favorite snack maker.

Ok, right now it doesn’t look so cool. But press a button and…

Robot noodle timer!

Cup Noodles need to soak in hot water for 3 minutes, so that’s the length of time this little guy will mark out for you. In the meantime, he’ll entertain with little movements as well as quips about eating and factoids about Cup Noodles.

You can’t buy the robot noodle timer unfortunately. You’ll need to collect stickers off of specially marked noodle packs and then mail them in for your chance to win. With only 10,000 units available, competition may be tight so buy early and buy often.

Source: Digital Gadgets Freak

A glimpse of a brighter future for the prefecture, I hope. This video was shot in Koriyama.

Today is Vegetable Day, or Yasai no Hi in Japanese. Like so many other promotional events, the date was chosen for phonetic reasons. In Japanese, 8/31 could potentially be read as 8 (ya), 3 (sa), 1 (i). Et voila!

I’m assuming you already know about all the delicious Japanese vegetables out there – tasty pumpkins, slimy mountain yams, bitter melon, etc etc. So let’s skip the introductions and go straight to the fun part. Break out your knives, it’s time to learn some cutting techniques.

Japanese cooking uses many of the same knife cuts as Western cuisine, but there are some that don’t cross over. Like my favorite, the rangiri (literally, “chaos cut”). This would be used for simmered dishes mainly, but I also use it for raw cucumbers.

Another cutting technique that’s not often seen outside Japan (at least that I know of) – the katsuramuki. I’ve read that practicing this cut – which involves turning a chunk of giant radish into one long, paper thin sheet – is something novice chefs do repeatedly to build their knife skills.

And  if the careful finesse required for the katsuramuki is not your thing, you can always try this.

If you want to learn more Japanese cutting techniques, check out Ajinomoto’s YouTube channel.

It occurred to me in spite of all the fuss over the hunt for a yukata in the lead-up to the Sumidagawa Fireworks, I haven’t yet featured the famous display itself. Here are some of the best sequences from the show, set to music, from YouTuber calvin4787.

Now, finally a product for Tokyo Sky Tree fanatics who happen to have a thousand or so 500-yen coins lying about -  a 1/500 scale piggy bank. Just in case you’ve forgotten just how massive Sky Tree is, a 1/500 scale model is still 1.26 meters tall. That’s pretty large for a coin box.

Oh yeah, it glows in the dark too.

In keeping with those prodigious dimensions, this bank can hold a ton of money. If you were to fill it completely with 500-yen coins, you’d have 634,000 yen ($8242), an accomplishment only slightly less impressive than constructing the 634 meter tower itself, I’m sure.

Source: Kaden Watch

Want more wacky coin boxes? Read a roundup of our favorite Japanese piggy banks

Yesterday we saw a seriously industrial-strength Lego creation. Today let’s look at something on a smaller, more manageable scale – Japanese nanoblocks.

A few weeks ago, SuperHappyAwesome devoted two posts to some pretty, well, awesome Nyan-Cat tattoos. I shared the link around the office and that got us all talking about other Japanese geek or pop culture icons that would make for silly tattoos. Here are some of the favorites we imagined, then found in real life…

Domo-kun

This was the favorite idea I heard tossed around and I’m happy to report that at least one person had the same happy thought. Source

Tarepanda

Not every cute Japanese marketing creation has caught on with the tattoo-having public the way Hello Kitty has. Tarepanda is a noteable exception. Source

Hello Kitty

It should come as no surprise that there are a lot of people out there with Hello Kitty tats. Hello Kitty Hell, repository of all inappropriate Sanrio craziness, has 77 different tattoo photos in its archive at the moment. Of course, Hello Kitty Spock is my favorite.

Anime characters galore

And last, but certainly not least, we found a whole assortment of anime character tattoos. There are some Mario Bros. ones thrown in there too for good measure.

Who or what would you like to see in a tattoo? Leave us your thoughts in the comments section…

If this is how they play with Legos, it’s no wonder Japan became a car-making superpower…

See more details on the creator’s blog (Japanese only, sorry!)