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Rona Moon

Writer / Translator

As a Kiwi kid growing up in the green hills of New Zealand, Rona Moon never dreamed she would end up packed in like sushi on the Yamanote line every morning, wearing a suit with discreet underarm sweat pads. Moving to Japan in 2005, she survived a tough initiation of hazing as a Japanese company employee in the pumping heart of Tokyo, did her best to become as Japanese as possible and succeeded in acquiring a great love for karaoke and a cute way of hiding her smile with her hands. Rona now works as a freelance writer and translator, with a special interest in literary translation and the erotic side of Japan (no tentacles barred).

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Posted by Rona Moon (Page 2)

From polar bears and penguins to coelacanths, Japan’s magical ice trays create sea creatures

Fancy a shark, a squid or a manta ray floating in your highball?

Now you can, without all the bother of hauling them out of the ocean. Cute miniature versions perfectly formed from ice that will swim on the surface of your beverage.

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How deep is Japan’s love of Coke in a glass bottle?

Mmmm, a frosty cold glass bottle of Coca Cola on a summer’s day. The cool, solid feeling of the glass as you raise it to your lips, the satisfying heft of the bottle in your hand. What could be better? A plastic bottle? I don’t think so.

A special limited edition glass bottle is now available in Japan in select supermarkets. The announcement was posted up on Coca-Cola Japan’s Facebook page on 24 July, along with the above picture. Other than on Facebook, the glass bottles weren’t especially publicized or promoted. However, they soon gained more than 10,000 likes. Why do people in Japan seem to crave Coke in a glass bottle so much?

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Birds know how to read Japanese, put language learners to shame

Can you read kanji? It certainly looks like these birds can!

Wait, do these birds know more kanji than some foreigners who’ve lived in Japan for years and never learned to read??

Well, after all the birds were born in Japan and grew up seeing it all around them. It’s only natural for them to pick it up, so perhaps they have an unfair advantage. Anyway, no bird has passed any level of the tough Kanji Kentei tests. Yet…

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17 pics of early 20th century women torturing themselves for beauty

In the name of beauty and fashion, women will jump through some extreme hoops, and always have. Throughout history, the quest for beauty and status has taken on many different forms, ranging from corsets, teeth blackening (ohaguro), foot binding and rubbing arsenic on the face to achieve the kind of aristocratic pale complexion which meant you had never seen a day’s work outside in the sun. These days, it’s Brazilian waxes, eyebrow threading, ridiculous high heels and either fake tan or whitening. Let’s not even get started on the surgical procedures you can now undergo to become an idealized identikit Barbie! At the dentist recently, I was offered Botox or collagen lip filler. Well, if you’re getting stuff injected into your face already, why not?

Here we have 17 photos of early twentieth-century women being beautified by some terrifying machines, many of which look strikingly similar to what we might undergo today. Huh, they must be working then! The next time I’m having hot wax poured onto my crotch and ripped off, I will remember the brave sacrifices made by those who have gone before us…

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Scaremongers strike again: “mutant” vegetables wrongly attributed to Fukushima

“Attack of the mutant vegetables!! Are these our new tomato overlords?? Let’s all boycott the struggling Fukushima farmers for, oh, say 100 years or so.”

Actually, despite the attention they’re receiving and hits they’re no doubt generating online, the following photos don’t seem to originate from Fukushima at all…

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Pay it forward and experience the kindness of strangers at Tokyo’s Karma Kitchen

Have you seen the movie Pay It Forward? The one where 11-year-old Trevor has an idea to change the world for the better by, rather than repaying a favour like a debt to the person who did you that favour (pay back), the idea is that you “pay it forward” by doing something for someone else just for the sake of it. In the movie, the result of paying it forward was a miraculous chain of giving.

As great as it seemed in the movie, in practical terms it’s difficult to pay it forward and know that the kindness is passed on. But a small restaurant in Tokyo has embraced the idea and allows customers to literally pay their kindness forward to the next guest. Our Japanese reporter headed over to Karma Kitchen to gave it a try!

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Losing your Japanese host club virginity: a guide for the ladies

Every woman deserves to be treated like a princess sometimes. Plied with champagne, pampered, flattered and adored. What if you could go to a luxurious bar and receive this kind of attention, from the man (or men) of your choice, selected at whim from a “menu” of attractive males?

This is one extracurricular activity you can get up to in Tokyo. It helps if you speak Japanese, but you might even find a host who’s fluent in English. This actually happened to my mother when we visited Shinjuku together. A good-looking, very well-groomed young man in a suit approached us and propositioned us in a strong Australian accent. I tried to explain to her what a visit would entail—it’s not a brothel, women go there to enjoy male company and attention. We didn’t end up going to a host club that night, but recently one intrepid RocketNews24 reporter took one for the team and visited one of these fine establishments, along with three friends. She spills the beans on her first time!

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Tourists in China pose with dying dolphin, anger netizens

On June 16, locals spotted a stranded dolphin at popular tourist destination, Sanya, in Hainan Province, China. The relevant authorities were contacted, but while waiting for help to arrive, people swimming nearby seized the photo op, lifting the dying dolphin out of the water to strike their most flattering poses.

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“Stop laughing! Shut up!!” Japan’s human rights envoy loses his temper at the UN

On 20-21 May in Geneva, Switzerland, a report by the Japanese government was presented for the UN Committee Against Torture.

At the end of the two-day session, Mr Hideaki Ueda, Ambassador in charge of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, suddenly lost his temper, shouting at committee members and demanding that they “Shut up!!!” What on earth could have caused the ambassador to raise his voice?

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How to easily get cigarette smoke out of clothes… but does it really work?? 【Experiment】

Whoohoo, party’s on tonight! Happy, happy, joy, party rock is in the house tonight!! Drinking parties (nomikai) in Japan go off. Can’t wait!!!

But hold on… there’s a catch. It’s still common for smoking to be permitted in bars in Japan. You might not notice it, but as soon as you get home it hits you like a karate chop to the nose—the stink of cigarette smoke. Even if you weren’t smoking yourself, the second-hand smoke will make your clothes reek, right down to your stinky underwear. Yes, even if you didn’t expose your underwear. Yuck.

Could this simple trick be the solution?

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$70 to climb Mount Fuji?! Is nothing sacred?

Mount Fuji, Japan’s highest and much-climbed mountain, has lately been acknowledged as a priceless part of the world’s cultural heritage. But a climb to appreciate this heritage may now come with the hefty price tag of 7,000 yen (about US$70) per person.

If you only make it half way up, how about a half price discount?

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Bird’s got talent! Cockatiel belts out karaoke favourite ‘My Neighbor Totoro’ 【Video】

Many a foreigner living in Japan has attempted and mangled this classic karaoke favourite, the theme song from popular Japanese animated film My Neighbor Totoro, just so they can let their vocal cords rip in the chorus. Even with limited language skills, you can probably belt out “Totoro, totoro” one million times and manage to mumble through the rest of the words.

But this cockatiel Poko-chan’s sense of pitch and inner pizzazz puts humans to shame. Accompanied by her owner on piano, she warbles through a song that few have fully mastered. What would Simon Cowell say? You be the judge.

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Kyaaah! The Anime Power Moves Everyone Tried (And Failed) To Master

Desperate to master the power moves we’d seen so many times in our favourite anime (Japanese animated cartoon), we practiced them day and night. Nothing impresses friends and destroys enemies like a well-timed “Turtle Destruction Wave”. Sure of our eventual success and rise to glory, we eagerly followed in the footsteps of heroes, mimicking their warrior cries and poses. Our best efforts were doomed to fail, but we kept on trying. You did too, right? Probably. Hadouken!

MyNavi News asked 286 men and women in Japan which moves they practiced as children. Here are the most common (and surprising) responses.

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For Butter Lovers: Easy, Greasy Japanese!

Toast in Japan is taken seriously. If you order the “breakfast set” at a restaurant in Japan, you will probably be confronted with one of the thickest slices of toasted bread you’ve ever seen. If you manage to peer over it, you might spot a boiled egg and a small, sad amount of salad cowering there.

At the supermarket, some popular toast spreads which come in a squeezy tube are chocolate, cinnamon, melon and “french toast” flavour, but for many people, toast means butter, and the more butter, the better. For butter-lovers, the new Easy Butter Butter-Former will transform hard butter straight from the fridge into soft and cotton-like butter threads, ready and easy to be used. Sound too greasy to be true? It probably is.

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Thanks for the Nampa- A Western Girl Picked Up in Japan

What is this so-called nampa? Nampa is the ancient Japanese art of pick-up. The seductive skill of girl-hunting. The discreet loitering around the train station, the thrill of the chase, the crushing rejection or ecstatic exchange of phone numbers. A much-maligned art which is becoming more and more illegal.

Awww, I remember my first nampa experience. I’d been in Japan less than a year and I was walking down a main street not far from Nagoya Station when a tall, skinny Japanese boy with a bleached anime-style shock of hair, a dapper suit and startlingly protuberant teeth smilingly approached me and struck up a conversation out of the blue. In Japanese! Living in conservative Nagoya and starved for human affection and contact, I and my fledgling language skills almost fell into his arms. I was so happy he was treating me just as if I was Japanese, making no distinction between me and the girls walking past in super short skirts (or maybe those were belts…).

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Tsunami Survivors Share Their Stories: Resurrecting Otsuchi, Japan

Following the most powerful earthquake ever to hit Japan, the sheer scale of the tsunami which smashed into northeastern Japan on March 11, 2011 was unprecedented. Coastal communities were devastated by waves which at their highest reached 40.5 meters above sea level, travelled up to 10km inland, and swept everything along with them. Mud, debris, cars, boats, houses, and fire.

The small town of Otsuchi in Iwate Prefecture was one of the hardest hit. About 10 percent of the population perished or went missing, including the mayor and many town officials. Iwate’s leading local newspaper, the Iwate Tokai Shimbun, was unable to continue operating as their printing press was washed out to sea, and two of their reporters were killed.

In 2012, a group of journalists banded together to once again start reporting the news from Otsuchi to support the town’s recovery, using the Internet to connect with people. Tsunami survivors have shared their stories of terror, panic, suffering and hope for the future through this new newspaper, known as the Otsuchi Mirai Shimbun (“Otsuchi Future Times”). These stories have been translated from the original Japanese into English by a team of 28 hard-working volunteers from Japan, Australia, New Zealand and the U.S., and published on the second anniversary of the disaster as a Kindle ebook.

Here are some excerpts from these true stories of survival:

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What’s Your National Stereotype? Japanese Sinking Ship Joke Has Got You Pegged

You’ve all heard the joke about the sinking ship, right? This joke explicitly reveals the deep inner motivations of the men of many different nations. It’s famous for hitting the nail on the head when it comes to cultural stereotypes. Really, this joke knows you better than you know yourself. Popular in Japan, it also goes down a treat at drinking parties worldwide.

So, what is this joke that so accurately pinpoints cultural stereotypes? Here it is…

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Lazy Slobs Rejoice: Upside-down “Desk” To Use While You Snooze

Now all you need is an intravenous drip, catheter and bed pan…

On 7 February, a new day of sloth dawned with the issue of Thanko’s new upside-down laptop desk, aptly named Aomuke Gorone Desk (“Napping Face Up Desk”) for 7,980 yen (US$86).

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