The operator of the 333-meter landmark, which will be vying with a new 610-meter competitor dubbed “New Tokyo Tower,” has drafted a plan to extend its digital broadcasting antenna by 80 to 100 meters.

When the New Tokyo Tower opens in 2011, it will be the tallest structure in the world.  

With its more advanced broadcasting equipment and far taller height, New Tokyo Tower will probably replace Tokyo Tower as Tokyo’s favored broadcasting antenna. It’s bad news for NTV, but the old tower will still probably be able to continue making a good amount of money as a  popular tourist venue in the heart of Tokyo. 

http://www.rising-east.jp/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumida_Tower 

Strawberries

Japan currently has the largest production and consumption of dessert strawberries in the world. Their color and shape are truly outstanding and they are available almost anytime throughout the year, although the best season is from January to March. You can buy them at fruit shops, greengrocers or supermarkets (a container of more than 10 costs around 500 yen). Strawberry farms throughout Japan offer strawberry picking during this season, and it is wonderful to taste them right off the vine. (For an admission fee of around 1,500 yen per adult, you can eat as many as you like within a limited time.) Recommended brands are Nyoho and Toyonaka. Both have a fine balance of sweetness and tartness, and the flavor spreading inside your mouth as you bite into the fruit is marvelous. They are sometimes eaten with sugar, milk or yogurt, but these days, most strawberries are sweet enough to just wash and eat.

Melons

In Japan, the melon has an image of being an expensive fruit and is often given as a gift when visiting someone in the hospital. Musk melons are carefully grown in well-controlled greenhouses and some sell for more than 10,000 yen each. As its name suggests, this melon has a musk-like flavor and is grown only in Japan. Musk melons sold at fruit shops have a seal attached indicating the best date to taste. If you don't want to buy a whole melon but would like to try the taste, look for cakes using musk melons for sale at pastry shops. There are more inexpensive melons such as the andesu melon (under 1,000 yen) that has a white mesh pattern on the skin just like the musk melon and the prince melon (around 500 yen) that has a pale green skin surface with no mesh pattern and orange-colored flesh. All of these melons have a very rich flavor. The melon season is from June to July, but you can find musk melons at all times of the year.

Cherries

Cherries are very popular as an early summer fruit. You can see packs at fruit shops and supermarkets from May to July from around 500 yen per pack. The purplish red American cherry produced in the US is popular in Japan, but sato-nishiki, with its bright red skin, is also very popular. This is a juicy cherry with plenty of nectar and a good balance of sweetness and tartness. Being a large, high-grade cherry however, a carton of 80 sometimes costs more than 10,000 yen. Therefore, it is also known as "red jewelry." Cherries are tastiest when eaten raw; freshness is the key, so eat them as soon as possible. Shops will try to sell their cherries by the end of the day, often reducing the price just before closing time, so if you want to enjoy a bargain, try shopping around that time.

Peaches

In Japan, canned yellow peaches in syrup are popular and are often used in cakes. However, peaches for processing are usually imported from overseas, so if you would like to taste native Japanese peaches, you must get them from fruit shops, greengrocers or supermarkets in season from June to September (around 200 yen each). Hakuto is considered the best variety of peach, and with its juicy white flesh and strong sweetness, it is meltingly delicious. Hakuho also has white flesh and is very sweet, with just a hint of tartness. It is renowned for the beautiful color of its skin. The skin of a fully ripe peach can be peeled off easily with your fingers, but if this is difficult, just place it in lukewarm water before peeling.

Watermelons

The watermelon, in season from June to August, is a typical summer fruit in Japan. Suika-wari (a watermelon splitting game) on the beach is part of the summer fun in Japan. A blindfolded person tries to split a watermelon with blows from a wooden stick while others yell out instructions about where to strike. Watermelons in Japan can be round, rugby ball-shaped, with or without stripes, and with red, yellow or orange flesh. Fruit shops and greengrocers sell whole watermelons (1,000-2,000 yen each), but in supermarkets they are usually cut into quarters (a quarter is around 500 yen), which is recommended if you just want a taste. Watermelons with really black seeds and just a small space around them are the tastiest. If you want to buy a whole one, tap it with your hand lightly, and when you hear a dry clear sound, it is a good watermelon. Sprinkling the fruit with a little salt brings out the sweetness. 

Pears

Japanese pears are known as sand pears, and as you might imagine, their flesh has a rather rough and crispy texture. Interestingly, this type of pear can be eaten immediately after harvesting without waiting for it to ripen. Look for them in season from September to October in fruit shops or greengrocers (around 100 yen each). When speaking of Japanese pears, many people probably think of nijusseiki (meaning 20th century - a new variety introduced at the end of the 19th century and named out of hope for the new century) that are exported overseas and have yellow-green skin. Their flesh is smooth and the refreshing taste with a slight hint of tartness and plenty of fruity juice makes them very popular in Japan. Along with nijusseiki, kosui and hosui with their brownish-red skin are also popular. They are sweeter than nijusseiki and have a wonderfully rich taste.

Persimmons

Persimmons, known as kaki around the world, are a seasonal autumn fruit in Japan. There are both sweet and bitter persimmons. Two typical varieties of sweet persimmons are fuyugaki, which has a meltingly soft flesh and is very sweet and juicy, and jirogaki, which has a firmer flesh with a crispy texture (around 100 yen each). More than half the persimmons that come into season from October to December are fuyugaki and they are often eaten as dessert. With sweet persimmons, you peel the skin with a knife, remove the seeds and cut them into pieces to eat. But you cannot eat bitter persimmons as they are, so you must peel and dry them, either out in the sun or near a fire, to eliminate the bitterness. Through this process, the sugar will also be condensed and the sweetness will be intensified. You can buy these dried persimmons at fruit shops, but various regions around Japan have their own hoshigaki (dried persimmons) using varieties particular to the region, so watch for them in your travels (1 pack of 20 hoshigaki ranges from 2,000 to 3,000 yen).

Apples

Apples start to appear in fruit shops, greengrocers and supermarkets around November (from 100 yen each). Yellow or green apples are popular in Europe, but red apples are preferred in Japan. Fuji, which accounts for nearly half the total apple production in Japan, has a beautiful bright red skin. It is sweet and juicy, with firm, crisp-textured flesh that sometimes contains mitsu (syrup). Apples known as sun-fuji, which do not have such brightly colored skin, are also common. Their appearance is not quite as nice as fuji apples, but they are grown in plenty of sunshine, so they are even sweeter and more flavorful. The most popular yellow-green apple among the Japanese is orin. Its robust flavor combines a slight sourness with a strong sweetness. Peel the apple, remove the core and cut it into 6-8 canoe-shaped pieces to eat. Or simply wash it and bite into it without peeling to taste the genuine deliciousness of an apple.

Mandarin oranges

You can easily peel a Japanese mandarin orange with your fingers and then eat it. Moreover, they rarely have seeds. You can eat them anywhere, so if you see them at greengrocers or supermarkets, you should definitely try one. Unshu-mikan, which come into season from fall to winter (at the beginning of fall, they have a green skin, which gradually turns orange), are sold in plastic bags of 8-10 (around 400-600 yen). Unshu-mikan is the most popular variety of mandarin in Japan and has soft, juicy flesh. Eating unshu-mikan while sitting at a kotatsu (small table with a heater underneath and covered by a quilt) and watching TV is what typifies the Japanese New Year. House-mikan produced under a controlled growing environment can be found on the market almost all year round. There are also many other kinds of Japanese mandarins including iyokan, a hybrid of orange and mandarin; ponkan, with its characteristic rough skin and strong flavor; and amanatsu, in season from March to May.

http://www.la-taperia.com/   

Ooedo Onsen Monogatari, a large Tokyo spa, has indoor and outdoor baths. In addition it offers a fish pedicure and a foot bath with a floor of smooth, round stones to stimulate the feet.

The Ooedo Onsen Monogatari, a hot-springs spa in the city's Odaiba area, has a special treatment added to its menu: Doctor Fish's "pedicure" and "manicure." In a reversal of the food chain, the fish dine on you or at least parts of you.

In a culture where food and fashion seem straight out of science fiction, Doctor Fish is hardly extraordinary. Strangely enough, the spa's fish, finned employees, which are imported from Turkey and are known scientifically as Garra rufa, have a taste for dry, flaking human skin. The little fish act like living pumice stones, nibbling off the dead epidermis and leaving behind baby-smooth skin. (Thankfully, they don't have a piranha streak.)

Those squeamish about skin-eating fish, however, don't have to stay out of the water. The onsen, one of the largest in Tokyo, is a bather's Eden, with outdoor and indoor pools of varying temperatures and landscape designs. (The ion-rich water comes from a spring more than 4,600 feet underground.) There are tubs shaped like pickle barrels and baths resembling lap pools for the lazy-armed. Some hot tubs could fit in at a Colorado ski resort, while others are decidedly Japanese, with artfully pruned trees and mindfully placed stones that look handpicked by Zen monks.

An open-air footbath flows like a creek, laid with stones sharp and smooth, large and pebbly. And since this is a public bathhouse, you can make 99 new friends in the Hyakunin, or "One Hundred People," bath.

The 20-minute Doctor Fish foot treatment is done in an indoor pool about the size of a small koi pond, whereas the 15-minute hand option takes place in an aquarium-size tank. (Dip your hand in and wait in mild horror.) Some people say it's a very nice and very natural way to remove your dead cells.

When you arrive for a pedicure, people are sitting on the edge of the pool giggling as they view the two-inch-long fish vacuuming their legs. Submerge your feet into the warm water, then watch as a dark, wiggling fish dart over your legs. Fresh dead cells, yum. They nibble at your ankles, toes and feet. You can feel the light flutter of their fins against your skin and the slight pinch of their mouths. It is calming yet a bit disturbing at the same time.

When your time is up, you gently shake off the clingier critters and wander over to the footbath. Amid radiant flowers and streaming water, you will admire your smooth legs glinting under the sun. Doctor Fish always clean their plates.

Begining on September 29, Sony will start marketing an egg-shaped stereo that dances and emits light to the tune of music. The palm-size, egg-shaped music player will "dance" and emit light to the tune of the music employing the company's electronic know-how for music analysis. The new product named "Rolly" opens its two side parts called arms rolling and moving in various ways featuring Sony's proprietary robotics technology.

The Rolly costs 40,000 yen ($395). The user-friendly equipment has just an on/off switch and users turn part of the player to adjust the sound volume or shift to another tune. It also has two light-emitting diodes that light up or turn off to suit the feel of the music.

A model shows Sony Corp's new rolling egg-shaped digital music player in Tokyo, Monday, Sept. 10, 2007. The 40,000 yen, 300 gram Rolly, set to go on sale in Japan on Sept. 29, comes with stereo speakers, 1 Gigabyte of internal flash memory and a battery good for about five hours of music. Overseas sales are still undecided. The smooth white gadget, small enough to sit on a palm, has sensors that recognize which way is up, allowing volume to be controlled by turning the player clockwise or counterclockwise, and tunes can be switched by pushing or pulling it on the floor.

http://www.sony.jp/products/Consumer/rolly/index.html?j-short=rolly

http://www.sony.jp/products/Consumer/rolly/index2.html 

But if you’re picturing a seething sea of magma you couldn’t be more wrong. Instead, the crater is a green, rolling landscape laced with roads and even rail, housing several towns. The largest of these, Aso, has a population of over 30,000. Large alpine pastures are used to graze cattle and horses, and the steep, verdant slopes of the caldera rim rise in the distance, with a large gap in the western wall where an ancient lake drained into the plain below.

Mt. Aso is a somma volcano, which occurs when an active cone (or cones) forms inside an older caldera. Aso’s caldera was formed around 90,000 years ago in a colossal volcanic event that released material roughly equivalent to the mass of Mt. Fuji. Following this collapse, five cones formed in the caldera, only one of which is presently active. That cone, called Naka-dake, is one of the area’s principal attractions. From its base, either a twenty-minute walk or a ropeway will take you to the crater’s rim, where you gaze down into a roiling mass of steam and twisted stone, with a grim lake appearing through breaks in the vapor.

Tohoku

A superb antidote to the frenzy of Tokyo and Osaka or the acute self-consciousness of Kyoto, the Tohoku region welcomes visitors with some of Japan’s finest scenery and overlooked treasures. In the west, Tohoku is probably most famous as the setting for the haiku poet Basho’s most famous work, “The Narrow Road to the Deep North.”

Tohoku simply means “northeast,” and the region includes the six prefectures at the northeast end of the main island of Honshu. After Hokkaido, this is the least developed part of Japan, with less than one tenth of the country’s population scattered across more than a fifth of the its total landmass. Three mountain ranges run roughly parallel north to south, with the lowlands between given over to rice farming.

There’s a lot to do and see in Tohoku, especially for visitors interested in Japanese history or the outdoors. Hiraizumi was once the seat of the northern branch of the powerful Fujiwara family, and at its height rivaled Kyoto in splendor and cultural attainments. Much of the city was razed in the late 12th century, but what remains is still worth seeing. Hiraizumi’s Konjiki-do, a small, exquisitely crafted temple covered in gold leaf, is one of the region’s best-known sights.

The town of Kakunodate is famous for its stunning samurai quarter and gardens, as well as the wonderful flower-viewing festival held below the draping blossoms of its weeping cherry trees. On the northern coast, Aomori’s Nebuta festival is well known for its colorful paper floats, illuminated from within and spun through the streets of the city after sundown during the first week of August.

In Yamagata prefecture, the Three Mountains of Dewa are three sacred peaks with a number of interesting shrines and temples, including one that you’ll need to clamber down steel ladders set into the rocks and ford a mountain stream to visit. The area has long been associated with the Yamabushi, the ascetic mountain priests of a uniquely Japanese sect of esoteric Buddhism, and even today lucky visitors may spot a group of the priests preparing for a local fire festival or entering the mountains for their religious training.

For those with a more macabre turn of mind, Yamagata is also home to almost all of Japan’s sokushinbutsu, the remains of monks who deliberately mummified themselves through an elaborate and years-long regimen that was outlawed in the 19th century. The mummies can be seen at two temples in the Three Mountains of Dewa area, as well as at other less well-known temples in the prefecture.

Tohoku winters are famously bitter. In fact, one common explanation for the peculiar local dialect is that people are unwilling to open their mouths and speak “normally” for much of the year. While the snow and cold can make for a wonderful experience at the regions many superb hot springs, it may also complicate some of your travel plans.

Any good guidebook can help you plan a trip to Tohoku, and if you’re interested in seeing a side of Japan many travelers miss it’s definitely a destination you should keep in mind.

Outdoor Activities in Japan

Japan doesn’t strike many people as an obvious choice for an outdoor-oriented vacation, which is a shame. More than 70 percent of the country is forested mountainside, with trails ancient and new winding through passes and lowlands between mountain ranges.

For most of the country’s history, the mountains were left to ascetic priests and other eccentric types, but in the 1880’s British mountaineer Walter Weston traveled the length of the country climbing peaks across Kyushu and Honshu and giving the Japan Alps their name. Nominally a Christian missionary, Weston was ultimately far less successful at propagating the gospel than at showing the Japanese an entirely new way of relating to their country’s landscape. Mountaineering and camping groups sprang up, and people began to appreciate nature for its beauty and recreational opportunities. With the outdoor boom of the last twenty years, there are more resources than ever before in Japan’s history for those wishing to enjoy its natural attractions.

Video: http://www.japan-in-motion.com/jl/jl_008.html