Japanese prefecture that already has a Hello Kitty airport is getting ready for even more Sanrio cuteness.
In April, Japan’s Oita Airport renamed itself to Oita Hello Kitty Airport. This wasn’t just a silly tongue-in-cheek gesture, like when Kagawa Prefecture named a Pokémon as its new governor. The facility now really is officially called Oita Hello Kitty Airport, and it’s decked out in all sorts of Sanrio character decorations.
The original plan was for this arrangement to last for half a year, but that was obviously too short a time for an arrangement so awesomely adorable, and it’s now been extended until the end of 2025. There’s been no word yet as to whether or not another extension is going to happen, but it wouldn’t be a shock if one does since Harmonyland, the Sanrio theme park located not far from the airport, is going to be renovated and expanded into something developers are saying will be grand enough to be considered a resort.
The announcement was made on Monday in a ceremony at the Oita prefectural capital building (pictured at the top of this article) attended by Hello Kitty, Oita Governor Kiichiro Sato, and other government and Sanrio representatives.
Harmonyland, in the Oita town of Hayami, is one of two Sanrio theme parks in Japan, the other being Puroland, located in the Tama district of northern Tokyo. With Harmonyland sitting on a hillside, the renovation plan is to create the atmosphere of an amusement park in the sky. While concrete details are still being hashed out, a ropeway to ferry visitors around the vertically varied topography and an outdoor canopy to make the park more usable on days with rain or intensely strong sunshine have already been mentioned, as has a new amphitheater for stage shows and musical performances.
▼ Concept art/images for the reimagined Harmonyland
Also part of the plan is a brand-new hotel, currently under construction on a plot of land adjacent to Harmonyland, providing guests with accommodations both classy and cute, in addition to views of the park, nearby mountains, and Beppu Bay.
Speaking of Beppu, you might recall that the town of that name is one of Japan’s top onsen (hot spring) travel destinations, and Oita as a whole takes great pride in the quality of its hot springs. At the announcement ceremony for the resort, the developers said they want to create a destination where visitors can enjoy Oita’s beautiful natural scenery, food culture, hot springs, and hospitality along with Sanrio’s style of cute fun, suggesting that hot spring baths might be among the hotel’s amenities.
No timetable for the completion of the project has been set, but the overall goal for the new Puroland, the developers say, is for it to be “the kindest place in the world,” where “all visitors, regardless of age, gender, or physical characteristics can enjoy themselves.” That’s definitely a lofty goal, but a sweet one too, and if there’s anyone who knows a thing or two about being able to make friends with just about anyone, it’s Hello Kitty.
Source, images: PR Times
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These Spirited Away characters may not be able to talk, but they’ve still got seven ways to help you make a fashion statement.
When Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away received the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2003, you could say it marked a turning point for anime. While the medium had long been popular in Japan and enjoyed support from pockets of enthusiasts outside its home country, Spirited Away’s Oscar win made a tremendous difference in legitimizing Japanese animation as a cinematic art among mainstream critics and audiences, ushering a new age of global respect for, and interest in, anime.
However, what we’re taking a look at today is Spirited Away and the similar capitalized New Age, as the American headwear maker has enough Spirited Away hats that you could wear a different one every day of the week.
When looking for muses to draw inspiration from within the Spirited Away cast, you can’t leave out No Face, and even if you tried to, the guy would probably just let himself into the party anyway. Embroidered at the front of the 59Fifty structured cap, No Face also looks to be helping himself to the New Era logo, having seemingly tossed it towards his mouth like yet another morsel plucked from the dinner spread laid out by the attendants in the bathhouse of the gods.
▼ Spirited Away’s Japanese-language title, Sen to Chihiro to Kamikakushi, is written in Japanese on the side of the closed back cap.
This is far from the last we’ll see of No Face in this collection, though. He takes on a bit of a sporty persona with this 9Twnety-style cap, with a patch making him look a little like a baseball team mascot.
Once again, the design features Japanese text, with abura, the first kanji in the name of the of the Aburaya bathhouse where written at the back right of the cap and “Studio Ghibli” above its opening.
If you prefer your Ghibli heroes to be a bit more dashing than an amorphous blob with a mouth in his stomach, this 9Thirty cap has Haku, in his dragon form.
The asymmetrical artwork includes a flock of with Yubaba’s sentient shikigami paper talismans giving chase.
A pair of 9Fifty caps, with structured crowns and flat brims, have No Face at the front and a collection of symbols that appear in the anime rendered in a neon sign-like motif.
No Face is looking quite a bit less docile at the back, though, where he’s seen rampaging and giving Boh and Yu-Bird a fright.
Rounding out the baseball cap collection is a 9Forty A-Frame with a structured crown, curved brim, and, most importantly, a whole bunch of Soot Sprites, or susuwatari, as the version of the creatures seen in Spirited Away are also called.
▼ The industrious little guys can be seen enjoying some konpeito candy after a hard day’s work.
And last, the final piece of headwear mixes things up with a bucket hat design that makes it look like No Face it circling around your noggin.
Prices start at 4,400 yen (US$29) for the Soot Sprite cap, with the round-emblem No Face and Haku designs 4,620 yen, the bucket hat 5,500, the black and white rampaging No Face versions 6,050, and the 59Fifty with No Face posing with his arms thrown out wide 6,600 yen.
The entire lineup is available through Studio Ghibli specialty store Donguri Kyowakoku after a recent restock, and can be ordered through the chain’s online shop here.
Source: Donguri Kyowakoku
Top image: Donguri Kyowakoku
Insert images: Donguri Kyowakoku (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)
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Collaboration with American art museum puts the works of Hokusai and Hiroshige in the Prussian blue spotlight.
Uniqlo’s UT line of graphic T-shirts are essentially wearable works of art, mobile, short-sleeved display spaces for showing off artistic styles and design aesthetics that speak to you. With Uniqlo being a Japanese fashion brand, a lot of their creative partners are anime or video game franchises, but for their latest collection Uniqlo is going with traditional culture over the pop variety, creating five new T-shirts for what it’s calling the Ukiyo-e Blue line.
Ukiyo-e refers to the woodblock print paintings that reached the height of their popularity during the Edo period (1603-1868). Ukiyo-e masters such as Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige devoted themselves to capturing and conveying both everyday activities and the beauty of Japan’s most famous landmarks in their works, and in the process created both visual records of what life was like for the common people and an illustrated travelogue of old Japan.
But the “blue” part of the Ukiyo-e Blue collection’s name is important too, and if you’re familiar with Hokusai’s 1831 masterpiece The Great Wave off Kanagawa, seen on the front and back of the shirt pictured above and below, you’ll probably notice that it is indeed looking more blue than it does in its original form. Hokusai was one of the first Japanese painters to use Prussian blue in his works, as the pigment was unavailable in Japan prior to contact with foreign traders in he 1800s, and Hiroshige helped further popularize it for artistic purposes.
Because of that, the shirts in series have been shifted more heavily towards blue hues, and the East-meets-West theming is especially appropriate since Ukiyo-e Blue is a collaboration between Uniqlo and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which has one of the most impressive overseas collections of Japanese artwork.
Aside from Hokusai’s contribution, the other four shirts are all styled after paintings from Hiroshige, starting with Rough Sea at Naruto in Awa Province, part of his Famous Views of the Sixty-odd Provinces series, which was painted in 1855 and depicts the whirlpools off the eastern coast of present-day Tokushima Prefecture, which still captivate travelers here in our time.
The seas are still dramatically wild in Hiroshige’s View of Mt. Fuji form Satta Point in Suruga Bay (1855), equating to modern-day Aichi Prefecture and taken from his Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.
▼ There’s even a splash of sea foam on the chest.
Before Tokyo was called Tokyo, it was known as Edo, but even then it was such a vibrant city that Hiroshige found sufficient inspiration for One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, one of which is Nihonbashi: Clearing After Snow (1856) showing the arched bridge which served as a major thoroughfare for residents of the capital-to-be.
And last, we have Hiroshige’s The End of the Tokaido, Arriving at Kyoto, the final painting in his Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido which chronicles his journey along the highway that connected Edo and Kyoto.
▼ The painting shows how Kyoto’s Sanjo Ohashi bridge appeared circa 1834.
Though it won’t be short-sleeved T-shirt weather in Japan for a while, the entire lineup is available now, priced at 1,990 yen (US$13) each, and can be ordered through the Uniqlo online store here.
Source: Uniqlo
Top image: Uniqlo
Insert images: Uniqlo (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
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Public worker by day, private dick by night.
Cases of government employees abusing their positions are certainly not unheard of, but it’s usually for lame reasons like spoiling a manga series or going to the gym. Very rarely do we see people who leverage their access as a civil servant to lead a daring second life as a private investigator.
But whatever the reasons, a crime is always a crime, and things ended badly for former Toyota City employee Takashi Takeuchi. Once the head of the Health and Food Services Division for the city’s board of education, overseeing school lunches and other health matters, he is believed to have started a second job as a detective around 2021.
Actually, according to investigations, he was more or less the head of the Love & Free Detective Agency in the city of Tokoname. His company specialized in uncovering cases of infidelity.
▼ They may also hold the record for least liked, retweeted, and commented-on Twitter feed ever, with straight zeros for as far as I could scroll, despite posting nearly every day. It makes sense since who’s going to go on record as checking out an infidelity detective service?
土日こそチャンス――相手が動く日こそ、証拠が取れる日です。浮気相手との密会、ホテル、ドライブ。土日調査の実績、豊富にあります。#週末の調査 #浮気 #不倫 #証拠写真 #常滑本部 #探偵事務所 pic.twitter.com/RMTaxIbemq— Love&Free探偵事務所 (@LoveFree88888) August 23, 2025
In terms of becoming a private detective, the environment in Japan is such that it’s very easy to become one, but difficult to work as one. By that I mean no special licensing examination is required, but because of that, Japanese private detectives have virtually none of the access to public records that their counterparts in other countries do, greatly hindering their ability to get information.
Takeuchi’s position in the government, however, helped him to illegally get around this setback and allowed him to access people’s addresses at least dozens of times. In November 2022, he took a leave of absence and was set to retire in March 2025. Since he’s only 43 years old, the reason for the early retirement isn’t clear but may have been because his moonlighting was uncovered.
Nevertheless, he was known to go back to the office from time to time during his leave, and it was during one of those visits that he was caught accessing a terminal without authorization. After his arrest, Takeuchi admitted to the crimes and is still under investigation to see if any other crimes were committed by him. The revenue from his detective work since 2022 is estimated at about 30 million yen (US$194,000).
Readers of the news were amazed that someone would make the jump from one of the most secure jobs in Japan to one often seen as a particularly insecure line of work, if TV shows are anything to go by.
“His other side is like something out of a manga.”
“A public servant spy.”
“Wild stuff is going on in Aichi.”
“I always wonder how information like that gets leaked, but I guess it’s that simple.”
“The MyNumber system must have made his second job a lot easier.”
“So, he’s like a public detective then?”
“Who goes into work while on leave? That was a dead giveaway.”
“People say it’s too strict to not let public workers have second jobs, but this is why.”
“Getting paid with public money while working as a hardboiled detective is surreal.”
The concept of escaping your job to help find the Maltese Falcon or save Toontown may sound romantic, but the reality is this guy probably spent most of his time parked outside a hotel waiting for some businessman to get his rocks off. It’s as good as any job if you’re up for it, but hardly one worth risking jail time for and betraying an entire city’s trust with the public.
Time will tell how deep his transgressions really were, but in the meantime, I’m going to place a call with Guinness about this company’s Twitter feed. It’s just like looking at a field of freshly fallen snow.
Source: The Sankei Shimbun, Jiji.com, Aichi News, Itai News, Japan PI
Top image: Pakutaso
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