Category: Culture

Kelly Osborne Turning Japanese Episode 1

Kelly Michelle Lee Osbourne, (born October 27, 1984 in London) is an English television personality, sometime singer, actress and fashion designer. Osbourne first rose to fame in The Osbournes, a reality TV series about her famous father and his family.

The current state of the art for Western-style toilets is the bidet toilet, which, as of 2004, are installed in more than half of Japanese households. In Japan, these bidets are commonly called Washlets (ウォシュレット, Woshuretto), a brand name of TOTO Ltd., and include many advanced features rarely seen outside of Asia. Depending on the exact model, these bidets are designed to open the lid when they sense a user nearby, wash the anus or vulva of the user (including a number of pulsating and massaging functions), dry afterwards with warm air, flush automatically and close the lid after use. These toilets may be the most advanced toilets in the world.

The Tokyo Metro Ginza Line (東京地下鉄銀座線, Tōkyō Chikatetsu Ginza-sen) is a metro line in Tokyo, Japan, administered by the Tokyo Metro. It is 14.3 km long, and serves the wards of Shibuya, Minato, Chūō, Chiyoda and Taito.

On maps, its color is orange and its stations are denoted by the letter G followed by a number. Its planning line number is Line 3.

Cosplay restaurants (コスプレ系飲食店), are theme restaurants and pubs that originated in Akihabara, Tokyo, Japan around the year 2000. They include maid cafés (メイドカフェ) and butler cafés, where the service staff dresses in cosplay, as elegant maids, or as butlers. Such restaurants and cafés have quickly become a staple of Japanese otaku culture. Compared to the service at normal café, the service at maid cafés invoke a slightly different atmosphere. The maids treat the customers as their master his or her home, rather than merely a customer at a café. The popularity of the cosplay restaurants and maid cafes has spread to other regions in Japan such as Osaka’s Den Den Town as well as other Asian countries, such as South Korea, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and recently, Singapore.

A love hotel (ラブホテル, rabu hoteru) is an originally Japanese type of hotel offering privacy for a couple to have sex. Alternative names include romance hotel, fashion hotel, leisure hotel and boutique hotel. Love hotels are often used by young couples, since many young Japanese people live with their parents. They are also commonly used for prostitution. The areas around love hotels are often littered with posters advertising “delivery health” (a euphemism for call girls).

The Yamanote Line (山手線, Yamanote-sen) is one of Tokyo’s busiest and most important commuter lines. Running as a circle, it connects most of Tokyo’s major stations and urban centres including the Ginza area, Shibuya, Shinjuku and Ikebukuro with all but six of its 29 stations connecting with other railway or underground (subway) lines. It is operated by JR East.

Samurai (侍, Samurai) was a term for the military nobility in pre-industrial Japan. The word “samurai” is derived from the archaic Japanese verb “samorau”, changed to “saburau”, meaning “to serve”; a samurai is the servant of a lord.

Katana (刀:かたな, Katana) is a type of Japanese backsword or longsword (大刀:だいとう, daitō); the term is also frequently mis-used as general name for Japanese swords. In use after the 1400s, the Katana is a curved, single-edged sword traditionally used by the samurai. Pronounced [kah-tah-nah] in the kun’yomi (Japanese reading) of the kanji 刀, the word has been adopted as a loan word by the English language; as Japanese does not have separate plural and singular forms, both “katanas” and “katana” are considered acceptable plural forms in English.

Streetside Shoe Sniffers

Loose socks (Japanese: ルーズソックス, rūzu sokkusu) are a type of sock that is popular among Japanese and Korean girls. They originated from boot socks for mountain climbing, manufactured in and exported from the United States.

In Japan, they were adopted as a fashion that deviated from school uniforms and firmly took root after a long period of popularity.

Foot odor often results from wearing shoes and/or socks, especially shoes or socks with inadequate air ventilation, for many hours. Since human feet are densely covered with sweat glands, excessive perspiration of the feet is the result. This perspiration and warmth provide ideal conditions for bacteria and/or fungi to thrive. The presence of the bacteria and/or fungi does not in and of itself cause odor; instead, as the bacteria consume dead skin cells and moisture, they in turn produce waste material. This waste material is the cause of foot odor. As physical activity increases, foot perspiration, bacterial growth, and bacterial waste production all increase, causing odor to intensify.

Sushi The Japanese Tradition

Sushi as an English word has come to refer to the complete dish (rice together with toppings); this is the sense used in this article. The original term Japanese: 寿司 sushi (-zushi in some compounds such as makizushi), written with kanji (Chinese characters) refers to the rice, not the fish or other toppings.

In contemporary usage, a parody is a work that imitates another work in order to ridicule, ironically comment on, or poke some affectionate fun at the work itself, the subject of the work, the author or fictional voice of the parody, or another subject. As literary theorist Linda Hutcheon puts it, “parody…is imitation with a critical difference, not always at the expense of the parodied text.” Another critic, Simon Dentith, defines parody as “any cultural practice which provides a relatively polemical allusive imitation of another cultural production or practice.”