In the West, beautiful, lithe women are made to be models and paraded around in all manner of revealing attire. In Japan, beautiful, lithe women are made to be models and stuffed into coffin-sized, dry-cell-battery-powered, rolling lozenges. I'd end this with a platitude like "You can't account for taste" but you know, they're really stretching it.
On the serious side, the Mainichi Daily News has collected two heartwarming photographs depicting the first Japanese deployment since the Second World War, and we can see a Japan worlds apart from the one the Allies defeated and rebuilt:
Back to Japan, land of unique tastes. Cherry blossoms, Prime Minister Junichiro as a Bronx Bomber and reckless chocolate abandon on the other side of this link.
GET 'EM WHILE THEY LAST: As I noted a couple weeks ago, the Mainichi culls independently produced photographs for its PhotoJournal series, and I could not find archives from a given week as I could with Photo Specials. Having traded correspondence with an editor, I now know for sure that the Mainichi does not keep PhotoJournal archives; so whatever is online this week will soon be relegated to either the flotsam of pool photography or obscure, cherry-picking bulletin boards. Understanding that full credit would be given, I'm contemplating archiving each week's photos myself. We'll see.