UPDATE September 2009:
The goinglocoinyokohama.wordpress.com/ blog featured a different kind of Uchimizu in Yokohama…

—Original story Aug 14, 2005—

Flooded metro helps sizzling Tokyo cool off >
… TOKYO slogs its way through another sweltering summer, the city is desperate to cool its streets. Now the capital has turned to the neglected custom of uchimizu – sprinkling water on the ground to lower air temperature – but with a high-tech twist.
This latest attempt to bring down summer temperatures that have been hovering in the 40s Celsius involves pumping up the water that seeps into the metro system and spraying it from the kerbside onto the road surface. A water-retentive coating stops the water from draining away, and evaporation does the rest.
At the test site, directly outside Japan’s parliament building in central Tokyo, a solar and wind-powered pump forces the subway flood water into high-pressure sprinklers that spray it over a 350-metre stretch of road. Recently, the researchers managed to cool the road surface – which often reaches up to 60C during the summer – by 10C, and the air above the road by 1C… Outpacing global warming by a factor of four, average temperatures in Tokyo alone have risen 3 °C in the past 100 years.….more....

Unfortunately, traditional Uchimizu sprinkling water on the ground seems to get most attention and not greem space. Tokyo Gov: Measures Against the Heat Island (in funky machine-translated Japanese)…
Also check out the Uchimizu.jp Association (in funky machine-translated Japanese)

The political word-of-the-day is ‘Kintaro-Ame’ , a candy-cane Japanese confection than no matter how it is cut always looks the same.

Kintaro-Ame is an apt metaphor for yesterday’s landslide win of Japan’s doubtfully-Democratic Party of Japan over the not-soLiberal not-soDemocratic not-so-funParty’s de-facto dictatorship of the past 65 years.

Yukio Hatoyama wooed the Japanese electorate with an agenda for change, but the 62 year-old nicknamed the Alien is an unlikely revolutionary
12:20AM BST 31 Aug 2009 – Telegraph

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World’s largest origami dinosaur
(25/08/09 — Reuters video 02:24 min.)
Volunteers fold paper to create a replica of a Spinosaur at Tokyo’s Dinosaur Expo 2009.

Previously the 3Yen has had a bit of naughty fun with “Naked Sushi” (aka Nyotaimori) including, “Tasty Human Skin Flavors“ and Naked sushi on men, just desserts.

Absurd quote from Fox: Ancient Japanese ‘Naked Sushi’ Tradition Catches On
…The ritual known in Japanese as “Nyotaimori” (which means “female body presentation”) originated in Japan hundreds of years ago as part of the geisha scene, historians say…more…

Naked sushi is sort of a joke—it’s neither a myth nor anything to do with geisha—but it’s so rare in Japan I always suggest to try it in LA or London where it is so much easier to find than Japan.

If you remember, last March the 3Yen had photos of the Giant Torayan fire-breathing assault on the sleazy nightclubs of Tokyo’s Roppongi.

Now, Giant Torayan has a roboboner for the Osaka City Hall because according to the Washington Post it, “stimulates people to reconsider a waterfront life style in Japan’s second biggest city.”

Not-news-at-all but..
If you are so inclined you can check out this 5-part BBC series on the Way of Geisha, which is both well done and ridiculously irrelevant.*

*The Willow World of geisha is infinitely less relevant to an average Japanese than opera is to the average Western college student.

Previously, the 3Yen has uncovered beating off the Japanese heat with ladies loincloths and traditional Japanese butt festivals.

However, the fundoshi girl below is not exactly the sexy effect that she was looking for…
She looks like she has a half-full load developing in her adult diaper.

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IMPROVEMENT UPDATE:

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Here’s a wierd promotional video by the group Tamashii and Shibasaki Kou performing “Omae Low Tension Girl” (you are low-tension/laidback girl), which is the theme for the 2007 movie “Maiko Haaaan!!!”

The film “Maiko Haaaan” (IMDB) concerns the maiko (apprentice geisha) obsession of a Geisha otaku/nerd—It was amusing even without subtitles.

Visit the official MaikoHaaaan.com website (Flash-infested, only in Japanese).
Fun!

Sankei/Petty Images–TOKUSHIMA, JAPAN – AUGUST 12: Performers dance during the Awa Dance Festival on August 12, 2009 in Tokushima, Japan. The four day festival is expected to attract 1.4 million people.

The Awa Odori (Dance Festival) is held from 12 to 15 August as part of the Obon festival in Tokushima Prefecture on Shikoku in Japan. It is just damn surreal–the dancers number in ten of thousands chanting dunk…
Odoru ahou ni –The dancers are fools
Miru ahou –The watchers are fools
Onaji ahou nara –Both are fools alike so
Odorana son, son –Why not dance?
The dancers also chant call and response patterns such as “Yattosa, yattosa“, “Hayaccha yaccha” and “Erai yaccha, erai yaccha“, “Yoi, yoi, yoi, yoi“—these calls have no real meaning.

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I had a hard time figuring what a “Mastermind Japan” was and how do solid gold Bearbricks and $100 bottles of water fit into their business model.

AFP—TAIPEI, TAIWAN: The Gold Bearbrick at the Mastermind Japan 09 F/W Show at Hsinyi Eslite Bookstore on August 12, 2009….

$100 bottles of water by Mastermind Japan.

After looking around, I found out that Masturbate (sic) Japan was a Tokyo fashion house that, “specializes in punk-inspired t-shirts ranging in price from $305 to $900 USD” for the “well-heeled fashion consumer who wants to appear to be part of the punk subculture” (Wiki). Ri-i-i-ight.