Succulent shrimp coated with Panko breadcrumbs and fried till golden brown. Yum! Ebi-Fry, or Japanese fried shrimp, is one of our favorite foods. And with the approaching rainy season in Japan, we can’t think of a better way to pay homage to this yoshiku dish than with a fried shrimp umbrella.
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The global pandemic has forced many workers to adapt to a new working environment. Namely, WFH, short for Work From Home. With many of us now conducting practically all of our meetings and interactions through video conferencing, which exposes less than half of our body, the old joke of dressing up on the top and dressing down on the bottom is becoming an acceptable reality. In fact, there’s no reason why half business, half relaxation can’t be the new uniform for remote workers.
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On May 6, Gifu City in central Japan recorded their 4th consecutive day of no newly reported cases of coronavirus. On that same day, local newspaper Gifu Shimbun ran a full page editorial encouraging their readers to stay home. Artfully executed, the graphic ad is only legible from a distance.
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Generally speaking, Japan has always been slow in adapting to online technology. But with the country’s state of emergency now extended until the end of May, we’ve been seeing more and more venues and companies putting their content online so that users can enjoy them safely, from home. So we’ve decided to put together a curated list of resources we think many of our readers will enjoy. The list is by no-means exhaustive and we’ll continue to update it, but if you have any ideas feel free to add them in the comments section!
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Last month, Todai-ji temple, a Buddhist temple in Nara, Japan, unveiled a powerful initiative. They called on religious leaders and believers of all faiths across Japan to come together — not physically, but spiritually — for a daily prayer to end the global pandemic.
The powerful photo above is from one of those sessions, taking place at exactly high noon, in which religious leaders from many different faiths across Japan have gathered in front of Todai-ji Temple (maintaining social-distancing rules, we might add) to offer a prayer. The daily prayer will occur at 12 noon through May 31, 2020.
The photo strikes us as having all the elements of that iconic anime or movie scene when the truly powerful ones have finally taken the stage and things are about to get crazy. If COVID-19 were a movie, this is when the the tables turn.
With most of us staying home right now, we’re finding more time on our hands. And one area of the day where that leftover time is being spent is on meals. Japanese designer Manami Sasaki has embarked on a series of creative stay-at-home breakfasts using toast as her canvas.
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Roughly 100 years ago the 1918 pandemic, also known as the Spanish Flu, ravaged the world, infecting one-third of the planet’s population. Despite a significant lack of travel compared to today, even as an island nation Japan was not immune. So in an attempt to educate the public and prevent further infections, a now-defunct branch of the Japanese government known as the Central Sanitary Bureau released a manual that detailed what the flu was and how to deal with it.
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SafeHandFish is a joint-initiative from two Japanese companies: Cleanse EX, a maker of a natural antibacterial agent, and Ohishiya, who manufactures and refills the ubiquitous fish-shaped portable soy sauce containers. Due to the global pandemic, the later experienced a collapse in demand for their soy sauce containers after almost every event was cancelled. Meanwhile, the former saw an exponential rise in demand for hand sanitizer but lacked the means of distributing it. The partnership, which sees soy sauce replaced with hand sanitizer, is nothing short of genius.
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The power of design has been on full display recently as designers and artists respond to the global pandemic with creative means of coping. One of those is designer Eisuke Tachikawa, who has developed a super-easy way to create a face shield from a clear plastic folder.
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Studio Ghibi was faced with a tough decision but in the end, they decided to postpone their large-scale exhibition planned for this summer due to the ongoing public health crisis. But they also offered up some good news for all the workers who are now confined to their homes. They made available a series of stills from their films that can be used as video conferencing backgrounds.
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