The US has the Ugliest Dog competition, and ugly pets are becoming popular in Japan. We call them "Busa Kawaii," which is a combination of busaiku (ugly) and kawaii (cute). Mako is a cat with a funny face, his owner started the blog "Mako in Wonderland" and the blog got to be very popular, so he published some books and released a lot of videos.
And Wasao is a funny faced dog with small eyes and a big nose like a pig. In his case, a popular travel blogger was in Aomori pref and found him and wrote about his face on her blog. She called him Wasao (wasa wasa means hairy and "o" is a male suffix used at the end of guys' names, like Kazuo Matsui) and he got to be famous and popular on the Internet. Next spring, his movie "Wasao" will be released. Hmm, ugly pets can make much more money than cute ones.
Purikura are Japanese photo booths where you can not only take photos, but add many effects to your photos. The most popular one is the "big eye effect." A guy on Nifty Portal Z tried it out and blogged about his experience. I was amazed that these new purikura machines not only make eyes big, but add eyelashes too. Hmm, I wanna try it once.
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