Japanese mochi [餅], glutinous white rice pounded into rice cakes, is one of the more deadlier^[1], ubiquious bland foods of Japan.

Finally the Japanese have come up with a way to make mochi more edible: Moffles!

Trend: Moffles
CScout TrendBlog, by Rebecca Milner on March 15, 2008–Japan takes fusion snack food to another level….the latest food craze! Sweet or savory, the moffle is a waffle made from traditional Japanese mochi rice cakes…more…

UPDATE:It seems that Reuters reads Japanese blogs now…

Stop waffling: Japan invents the moffle

Reuters —Tue Mar 18, 2008 11:33pm EDT
TOKYO (Reuters Life!) - Japanese pastry connoisseurs and technology fans have found a new obsession: the “moffle”, a cross-over between a waffle and Japan’s traditional “mochi” rice cake.
Made by toasting a rectangular slab of “mochi” paste in a Belgian waffle maker or a special moffle machine, the moffle is served as a dessert with ice-cream or chocolate sauce, or as a savory snack with cheese, ham or cod roe.
[…big snip…]
Mochi, mostly sold as soft, round little cakes, are among Japan’s most popular sweets, although every year there are reports of elderly people choking on the chewy, sticky mass.

Since I have my own Rice Ranch here in Japan, I am forced to find uses for mochi leftover from New Years. Not knowing this was now “trendy”, this year I tried cramming some mochi rice cakes into my electric waffle maker.
My moffles weren’t bad and somehow they seemed less bland than regular methods of mochi munching.

The Moffle [モッフル] maker available via Amazon.co.jp.

1. From Wikipedia:
Mochi is very sticky and somewhat tricky to eat. Every new year, the Japanese media reprts how many people die from choking on mochi, usually elderly. Because it is so sticky, it is difficult to dislodge via the Heimlich maneuver and lifesaving experts say that a vacuum cleaner is efficient for stuck mochi.

The Japanese word “Kimoi” creepy was invented to this CGI and Photoshop Mario.
pixeloo.blogspot.com super-real-mario-world
Click for the original full view.

Talk about morning surprises…
As the aftermath to a party, this morning I discovered this left-over
Japanese snack on my dining room table: dried ‘Personal Squid‘.

Yikes!

Your Own

Personal

.

^{1. 2.}
Listen to these MP3s.
boomp3.com
or…
boomp3.com

Japanese tabloids are so much fun. Be sure to buy…

Ain’t That a… Shamisen?
WFMU’s Beware of the Blog: February 13, 2008 (MP3s)…In not-so-ancient Japan, the inferior status of women and the disabled…you can only imagine the island nation’s treatment of its unsighted females. Cast out by a disdainful society, these doubly afflicted souls nevertheless crafted for themselves a new identity as wandering musicians, spreading news and social commentary while eking out a threadbare existence of alms……Known as goze, blind women shamisen players have been traveling and performing a circuit of remote villages dating back to the early 17th century…

With their shamisen, fretless 3-string banjos, blind female singer/story-tellers would wander old Japan in small troops of two or three with a partially sighted leader. Singing the blues was the only way they could feed themselves if their family couldn’t. Listen to and download the goze girls’ MP3s that public radio station, WFMU, has posted.

MINI MINI LOVE, MP3 (930Kb)

If cinema schlockmeister, Quentin Tarantino, needs another mega-obscure 1960s J-pop song to make a third film of the “Kill Bill” epic, here’s the perfect tacky tune: MINI MINI LOVE by Katsuko Kanai circa 1967.

Click here to get your own player.

MINI MINI LOVE
by Kanai Katsuko
1967 August / A-side of the Columbia 45 single

Go go go mini mini
Go go go mini mini
Go go go mini mini go go gi gi gi
Go go go ya mini mini go go gi gi gi
I love you mini mini

Hikkoshi/moving company –Japanesque Flash game. Enjoy.

This Japaneseque video is what YouTube was made for!

Marvel in wonder at this frolicking Japanese man wearing a horse mask and a slingshot mankini as he brews up a batch of Amanita muscaria aka Sacred Soma magic mushrooms. –2008/Jan/28

UPDATE!
It has taken more than a week for Boing Boing to discover my Horsehead Freak is, “a performance artist from Japan that goes by the name of WOTAKEN” whose website is at http://katura.is.land.to (funky machine translation).

The background music is from Final Fantasy VI complete with the Kefka laugh while he frolics around making his own special Final Fantasy Potion.

Back in 2006 I wrote about, Free Hugs - Any takers in Tokyo?
I was very dubious that the Free Hugs Campaign would amount to much in cold-fish Japan where nobody hugs in public. Right off, the Japanese huggers only use signs written in English as you see (since in Japanese it would look insane/perverted).
Well, I was proven wrong. FREE HUGS [フリーハグ] JAPAN has become an institution at Harajuku’s freakazoid bridge. Every Sunday there will be some freakazoids (wallpapers.3yen.com) with signs soliciting hugs. However, my photographer friend, MasaMania, posted these camera-phone photos of too FREE HUGS.

I think I will go to Akihabara’s open street afternoon on Sunday to get my my free hugs from now on.

UPDATE!

Thanks to suggestion from bizarrejapan.blogspot.com, I edited this short clip from the BBC’s documentary series called “Japanorama.” This clip features Japanorama’s presenter, Jonathan Ross and his wife having a Hello Kitty wedding at Sanio Puraland in western Tokyo. Enjoy?

Click to watch.

See the rest of the episode and the entire “Japanorama” series here on YouTube.

Thanks to the HELLO KITTY HELL blog, today you can watch a Hello Kitty Wedding video of some poor schmuck who had to go an arduous pilgrimage to Sanio Puraland in Japan to suffer this pink delight.