Japan: A Brief Cultural Survey

Here's some commentary about Japan from The Onion AV Club:

Japan: land of the rising sun. The ancient empire we nearly blew off the map in World War II. Home to high-quality electronics, bizarre game shows, and vending machines that dispense beer and used girls’ panties (not together…yet). The country teeming with room-clearing avant-garde noise experimentalists and garage-rock revisionists. The Simpsons went there in one episode, and in another, Homer’s likeness appeared on a box of Japanese detergent called Mr. Sparkle.

Until a couple weeks ago, that was basically the sum total of my knowledge of Japan, and at least one of those tenets proved to be untrue. (In a crackdown on sleaze, Tokyo’s mayor banned the vending machines that hawked used undies. Rest assured, though, that the city still has sleaze in spades.) On April 11, my wife and I undertook a fact-finding mission to Tokyo and Kyoto (hey, you can’t write it off if it’s a “vacation”) and returned with an inordinate amount of food for Taste Test, a few words of Japanese, severe Mexican-food withdrawal, and these notes on the nation’s pop culture.