Shizo Kanakuri disappeared while running the marathon in the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm. He was listed as a missing person in Sweden for 50 years — until a journalist found him living quietly in southern Japan.

Overcome with heat during the race, he had stopped at a garden party to drink orange juice, stayed for an hour, then took a train to a hotel and sailed home the next day, too ashamed to tell anyone he was leaving.

There’s a happy ending: In 1966 Kanakuri accepted an invitation to return to Stockholm and complete his run. His final time was 54 years, 8 months, 6 days, 8 hours, 32 minutes and 20.3 seconds — surely a record that will last forever.
futilitycloset.com

This book started as a personal project in summer 2007, and was soon published from a Japanese bookstore “Utrecht”. It’s a flipbook, but rather than seeing animation, it creates a 3D rainbow in your hand. Since being published it has been featured on Japanese TV, Newspapers, major news & blogsites like yahoo news, coolhunting and fffffound. This book won this years NY ADC silver cube.




masa-ka.com

Recently, Weird Asia News reported on the imminent invasion of Japan by legions of humongous jellyfish. The 6-foot-wide, 440-pound monsters known as echizen kurage threaten to devastate fisheries and even damage nuclear powerplants.

The pressure to find a practical use for these troublesome creatures has triggered the usual creative reaction from the Japanese. Unfortunately, “creative” and “appetizing” are not necessarily synonymous. Um, jellyfish caramels, anyone?



That’s right: In what is surely a first for the confectionery world, students at Obama Fisheries High School have developed a type of caramel candy flavored with a powder made of jellyfish. The students harvested the critters themselves, as well as devising the process for producing the powder.

Word hasn’t reached us yet on the taste of these scary-sounding sweets, but it probably bears some similarity to that of the team’s previous product, the not-quite-an-international-sensation-just-yet Ekura-chan saku-saku cookies, also jellyfish based.



Where to from here? The possibilities seem endless. It can’t be long before we’re introduced to the peanut butter and jellyfish sandwich, the jellyfish jellyroll, the jellyfish-flavored jellybean. And for God’s sake, someone get in touch with the folks who make Jell-O!

(link) and weirdasiannews.com