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World’s first Snoopy Museum opens in Tokyo’s Roppongi Hills

Get your dancing paws ready for a Snoopy-tastic experience!

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Heads up—Japan’s Ghibli Museum will be closed for two months as of this May

If you’re planning to visit Tokyo’s world-famous Ghibli Museum later this year, you may want to reschedule.

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These figures for an upcoming ukiyo-e exhibit are perfect for cat-lovers and art-lovers alike!

Especially if you have an appreciation for the macabre!

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“Buddhists’ Disneyland” the Pure Land Cave is the trippiest place on earth

In Kaohsiung, Taiwan, there stands a massive Buddhist complex set up by the half-century-old sect Fo Guang Shan. It is a sprawling 30 hectares (74 acres) and contains the nation’s largest monastery, a 36-meter (132 foot) tall Buddha statue, as well as an enormous Buddha Memorial Center in the shape of a pyramid.

However, for our correspondent Kowloon Kurosawa the real action could be found in the Pure Land Cave. It’s an attraction rumored to have been patterned after Disney’s It’s a Small World ride. However, as we’ll soon see, Buddhism is not so much a “small” world as it is a creepy and psychedelic one.

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Admission is $30 and all the paintings are fakes – so why is the Otsuka Museum of Art so popular?

The Otsuka Museum of Art is a place of extremes. It’s the biggest exhibition space in Japan, housing masterpieces of Western art from antiquity to the modern day. The route around its 1,000 artworks is 4km long (2.5 miles), and it takes a full, tiring day to see it all. And with a 3,150 yen (US $29.22) adult admission fee, it’s also Japan’s most expensive gallery.

The works on show are, quite literally, too good to be true. The Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, Guernica, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, Rembrandt’s self-portraits: everything is here. And every single one of them is a replica. But why are so many people prepared to pay through the nose to see prints of masterpieces?

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Return to the golden age of arcade gaming at the Japan Game Museum

Located in the countryside of Japan’s Aichi Prefecture is a one-of-a-kind museum that houses an enormous collection of old-school video game cabinets and mechanical arcade games, not to mention what is purported to be the world’s leading pinball machine collection.

But the best thing about this museum is that you don’t have to just look at the arcade exhibits; you can also actually play them! And what’s more, the only price you’ll pay is the entry ticket, meaning you can enjoy all the machines to your heart’s content without having to carry a giant bag of change.

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Travel back in time to the Sengoku Era at Sekigahara War Land

On October 21, 1600, Tokugawa Ieyasu won the famous Battle of Sekigahara which secured his way to rule the shogunate of Japan.

Today, the battlefield where more than 200,000 people perished is but a remnant of ancient history. It is an ordinary town, and only the most maniacal of history buffs would show up to trace the roots of Sekigahara. However, in the center of that town, there is actually a ‘theme park’ where you can learn about history and the famous battle right where it took place, known as the somewhat awkwardly named “Learn! Play! The Immersive War Museum – Sekigahara War Land”.

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(Self) Attack on Censorship! Gruesome titans skip humans and eat fast food in Tokyo station ads

If you’re a fan of the wildly popular manga and anime series Attack on Titan, then you’ll be more than familiar with the violent and jarring scenes of gigantic monsters biting off and chewing human heads, arms and various other body parts. But while you might expect such gruesome images in your comic books, commuters riding the Tokyo subway might not appreciate seeing such gory poster images on their way to work every morning.

So when advertising a new Attack on Titan exhibit opening next month at a Tokyo museum, the poster designers decided to creatively self-censor their own work with some very cleverly placed food items.

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Tokyo museum offers beautiful exhibit showcasing the architecture of Studio Ghibli

Though there are obviously numerous anime studios in Japan, there is no doubt that Studio Ghibli is among–if not the most–legendary of them all. With tons of famed, beloved, and critically acclaimed films, there’s no doubt that the influence Ghibli has had on the world is massive. Even if you’re not a particularly big fan of their stories, who could deny that the worlds they create are simply stunning? Wouldn’t it be amazing to see those buildings brought to life and given physical form? We certainly wish we could at least get a ride inside the cat bus.

Though this new exhibition at the Edo-Tokyo Tatemono-en, or called the Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum in English, does not quite provide full-size replicas of Ghibli architecture, it does give us an excellent concept of what some of our favorite buildings would like in the real world.

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“Yankee Anthropology” exhibit in Hiroshima now open to the public

To most people around the world, the word ‘Yankee’ is used as a (sometimes derogatory) slang term for Americans in general. To most Americans, ‘Yankee’ refers to a person living in one of the six northeastern states of New England. To die-hard Red Sox fans, just hearing the phrase ‘New York Yankees’ is enough to make their blood boil. But that’s a different story…

Curiously enough, the word ‘yankee’ (ヤンキー) has also established itself within the Japanese lexicon, albeit with extremely different connotations. In Japan, a ‘yankee’ conjures up images of juvenile delinquents and biker gangs (more on that later). While this Japanese subculture may have died down considerably since its heyday in the 1980s, one museum in Hiroshima Prefecture has just opened a special exhibit titled ‘Yankee Anthropology’. This exhibit explores Yankee culture from a serious, academic perspective and includes various related realia. If you’ve always been fascinated by this aspect of Japanese subculture, now’s the perfect excuse to head over to Hiroshima!

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From protozoa to tapeworms: Visiting the Meguro Parasitological Museum

We’ve told you before that Japan is practically overflowing with museums. Everything from ukiyo-e to prisons to Edo period buildings have been preserved for the benefit of public knowledge, and we’d say that almost every museum has something unique or fun to offer. But here’s a museum that is literally one-of-a-kind: The Meguro Parasitological Museum!

They claim to be the only museum in the world dedicated solely to parasites–and we’ve got to say that we believe them! We recently headed down to Meguro to check out their collection and learn a little bit about the critters that might living inside of you right now.

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