New food trend in Japan is "Strong taste". Morinaga released five new sweets that featured "more" or "stronger taste" like Koi Tsuya Pudding or "Koi rich pudding", they added " stronger version" to even old standard products like Mommy. Kirin has released stronger taste tea with double tea leaves or double milk and also "stronger taste "happoshu"(i don't know how it is strong though). SB has stronger stew rou and they said they are making very good sales. Moreover we have "more cheese" snack, "more miso ramen", stronger green tea, etc,.etc,. Analysts said people would feel good deal or reasonable in stronger taste in this bad economy.
Aikido; Japanese bujutsu to avoid fight. The foreign guys is Nicolas Pettas is Greek-Danish. He has been doing Kyokushin Karate in Japan for long time and fighted at K1 before. You can see another series from youtube link.
To support the recovery of Tourism in Japan through, we thought we needed a volunteer traveler’s objective impressions to show the world. Then Japanese government asked for travel volunteer in last year. We had out of 1897 applications from 85 countries and finally a couple from UK was chosed. They traveled around Japan's 47 prefectures during a fully sponsored 100+1 days' trip. Here is their blog. The blog will be made into photo book.
TANITA is a Japanese health care campany, they made health check machine like hemomanometer, heart rate monitor, weight scale etc,. As health care company, their company cafeteria has great manu that take care about employee's health. All menu are less than 500 calories and check an amount of salt and oil. The restaurant's recepi was publised as "TANITA company cafeteria" and it became a bestselling book last year.
Today TANITA has opened "TANITA restaurant" in Marunouchi building, they serve "health care menu" like TANITA company cafeteria menu and also they serve health check by proffetional advisor. I read there were long long line and people seemed to love to eat such healthy lunch.