A Geek in Japan

2020 Olympic Stadium Meme

Post author By ageekinjapan
Post date July 19, 2015

During the last few months one of the news that most frequently appears in Japanese media is the challenges faced by the construction of the new stadium for the Tokyo Olympics in 2020. If it is built as originally conceived it will be the most expensive stadium ever built, and its cost will surpass that of the New York Jets stadium which currently has that honor. To show that the Olympics are being taken seriously, the government has named Toshiaki Endo as the “Minister of Olympics” to oversee the preparation for the Olympics. More affordable alternative stadium designs have been proposed but it seems that no decision has still been taken, something quite usual when something concerns Japanese bureaucracy.

Fruit of that indecisiveness, the Japanese internet community has created a meme of the controversial Olympic stadium design.

olympic stadium tokyo 2020
This is the controversial design.

olympic stadium tokyo

Japanese Culture

Sunflower Day – ひまわりの日

Post author By ageekinjapan
Post date July 17, 2015

Today is Sunflower Day in Japan (Himawari no hi, ひまわりの日). This day has been celebrated since JAXA launched their first meteorological satellite on July 14th 1977. The name of that satellite was “Sunflower number 1″. Since then, during the last 40 years, Japan has launched eight “Sunflower” meteorological satellites to space. The one that is used today to predict the impact of typhoons (like the one that is approaching us this week) is Sunflower number 8.

People usually forget about the origin of the celebration, the important of this day is to have a nice day by being creative using sunflowers. These are some of the images of the day on Twitter:

Vending Machines

Flying Fish Soup Vending Machine

Post author By ageekinjapan
Post date July 17, 2015

Sergio Lorenzi sends me these photos of a vending machine he found in Nagoya with flying fishes inside a bottle. The text say that the flying fishes have been grilled and are ideal to use as a soup (dashi) to give flavour to udon, nabe, oden or any other slow cooked recipe.

Each bottle, in addition to a flying fish, also has some konbu 昆布 algae, one of the essential ingredients to be able to obtain the umami flavor when cooking.