Month: July 2017

My pick for the SoraNews24 article this week is this confusing culinary delight: Sticking cheeseburgers through soft drink straws now a thing on Japanese Instagram 【Pics】.

When I first saw this popping up on Japanese sites, I immediately knew I wanted to write about it. It’s just so bizarre, but also so simple that anyone could do it themselves. Not that I could really see why anyone would want to.

There’s so many questions here: Aren’t the burger bits stuck in the straw gross? How do you get the burger through the straw in the first place? Do you push the straw through it? Then how do you line the straw back up into the drink? Maybe you slam the burger like you’re impaling it through a spike? But doesn’t that make a mess? And, of course, what are the advantages of doing this at all?!

If you’re a brave soul willing to try this yourself, I’d love to hear some answers.

Featured image: Instagram/im_mmoe

Since W.T.F. Japan is no longer a weekly series but a whenever-I-have-an-idea-that-I-think-you’ll-like series, I’ll instead use my weekly SoraNews24 update to pick the favorite of my own articles from the past week.

This week’s favorite article is “Flight attendants help man transporting wife’s ashes, move Japanese Twitter to tears.”

As soon as I saw this article on the Japanese source site, I immediately thought of one of my most popular articles: “Japanese dad teaches daughter how to handle alcohol, has Twitter in tears.” It’s been a while since I’ve have a chance to do an “emotional story translation” article, and this one really hit me in the gut when I read it in that special kind of way that makes you want to smile and cry at the same time.

I really enjoy writing articles like these because they bring something from the Japanese side of the internet to the English-speaking side that probably would’ve never made it over without some help. As a translator, it makes me happy to give new life to a story just by changing the language the words are written in, even if it is just a Twitter photo of a short magazine editorial.

Featured/top image via GAHAG (edited by me)