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Kitchen Forest Totoro line of kitchen goods is now here to enchant your spring cooking adventures

These adorable illustrations of Totoros with various veggies and acorns will transform your kitchen into its cutest form yet.

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Amazing Chocolate tools a perfect fit for Japanese Valentine’s Day

Tell that special guy how you feel with an exquisite rusty nut and washer.

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Plane passenger almost gets busted for unusually-shaped chocolate in carry-on luggage

At least he has the chocolate for stress eating after this ordeal.

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Love Live! goes metal, with new line of nippers

Fans of Love Live! Sunshine!! will no doubt want to get their hands on a pair of Love Live! nippers.

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Forget shuriken: 10 stealthy and dangerous ninja tools you didn’t know existed

Growing up in the 90s, I was raised with the notion that ninja were teenage turtles, silent assassins or similar to the characters in Naruto. As much as we’d like to believe these were the reality, according to an interesting article from Listverse, the ninja that actually roamed the streets and castles as spies and assassins were humans who didn’t always dress in black (apparently they wore dark blue), and they didn’t regularly use the famous weapons we know so well.

So, if they weren’t using shuriken and long swords all of the time, what did they use? Researchers have been investigating the ancient style for decades and have uncovered some pretty amazing and ingenious items that you would never even dream of. There are probably thousands of ninja tools and techniques out there, but we’ll just focus on the few that Listverse brought into the open.

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Transform a sushi mat into a stylish makeup tool organizer in just a few steps!

Sometimes, people are subconsciously bound by their cultural habits and traditions, and fail to see beyond the appearance of things. To the Japanese, a bamboo makisu (sushi mat) is used to make sushi, but in the hands of someone outside of Japan, the traditional culinary item is transformed into something completely unrelated to food. If you’re looking to add some Japanese element into your daily life, read on for the simple DIY instructions to make your own sushi mat brush organizer!

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Six (and a half) essential resources for learning Japanese

As we’ve said before, Japanese isn’t actually as hard to learn as it’s often made out to be. Unlike English, for example, Japanese follows its own grammatical rules far more rigidly, pronunciation is easy because there is only one variant of each vowel sound to choose from (none of this tomayto/tomahto business), and it’s possible to create entire, perfectly meaningful and valid sentences without uttering a single pronoun or bothering to conjugate a verb.

Nevertheless, the language will not magically seep into you through a desire to speak it alone — you still need to encounter and study it as often as possible. With that in mind, we’d like to present to you the six and a half resources that no dedicated student of the Japanese language should ever be without. Oh, and the good news is some of them are completely free.

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