Category: News

Background and Key Points of This Discussion

Bone-lengthening surgery is an orthopedic procedure in which the shin or thigh bone is cut and then gradually stretched using an external fixator or an internal rod while the bone regenerates. It’s said to add anywhere from a few centimeters to around 10cm of height, but it also reportedly comes with intense pain, strain on the nerves and muscles, and over a year of rehabilitation. As one commenter in the thread pointed out, “bone and skin can be stretched all you want, but muscles and nerves don’t stretch” — a reminder that height isn’t the only thing that changes. The discussion’s focus has shifted away from the surgery itself and toward the more subjective question of how much height actually affects dating and marriage; it’s worth noting that claims like “half of women would pick a 175cm middle-aged guy over a handsome 165cm young guy” aren’t backed by any real data — they’re just gut-feeling opinions.

Background and Key Points

“I’m-a-woman-but” threads are a long-running staple format on anonymous boards like VIP, and since there’s no way to verify anyone’s identity, nobody can ever confirm whether the claim is true. In this case too, even after proof photos were posted, the thread failed to gain much traction, and the discussion shifted into questioning the very premise that “being a woman should mean getting preferential treatment.” The thread split between users demanding photos or a livestream and those who dismissed this kind of self-declared thread outright as an annoying bid for attention, telling posters to take it to social media instead. One thing readers might misread is that a thread getting a lot of replies isn’t proof of being “showered with attention” — mocking and appraising comments count toward that same reply total. It’s also worth keeping in mind that on an anonymous board there’s no way to verify a poster’s claimed gender, so the thread’s core premise can never actually be confirmed either way.

Background and key points of this discussion

Sayashi Riho was a member of Morning Musume。’14 from 2011 to 2015, and has focused on stage plays and dramas since leaving the group. Manety is a manager at the same talent agency who has handled several Hello!Project graduates, and this post is seen as part of that same pattern. Opinions split in the thread over whether Spotify monthly listener counts really back up the claim of a “big response,” with some pointing out that the play-counting method was recently changed, making simple comparisons difficult. It’s also worth noting — something not obvious from outside the fandom — that the show she’s currently in is a so-called GL (Girls’ Love) drama depicting romance between women, and that the market size and the bar for a sequel differ from BL dramas, making it hard to compare its buzz directly to works in other genres. Among fans, opinions also diverge on how to weigh this latest response, given the long history of the agency putting significant resources behind her dating back to her Morning Musume days.

Background and Key Points of the Discussion

Adachi Mitsuru debuted in the 1970s and has an enormous body of serialized work, headlined by “Touch” and “H2,” alongside “Miyuki,” “Hiatari Ryoukou!,” “Rough,” “Nijiiro Togarashi,” “Cross Game,” and “MIX.” As noted in reply #48, he also holds the distinction of being the first manga artist in Japan to surpass 100 million copies in combined sales of his own works, a milestone reached while Nijiiro Togarashi was still running. Riding the lineup gimmick, posters in the thread also built rosters out of the works of Urasawa Naoki and Toriyama Akira, turning the thread from a joke about one artist into something of a springboard for comparing “which manga artists have enough hits to field a full lineup.” At the same time, opinions split on individual works — over the reputations of “Rough” and “Nijiiro Togarashi,” and over the bittersweet ending of “Miyuki.” Note that part of the thread involved some back-and-forth sniping from one poster insisting that “you have no right to weigh in without mentioning Cross Game”; posts amounting to personal insults have been excluded from this writeup.

Background and Talking Points

In Japanese pro baseball pennant races, once a dominant team pulls away, the movement of its ‘magic number’ tends to become a hot topic. In the thread, opinions split — turning into a bit of a sarcastic back-and-forth — over whether Seibu’s brief push to close the gap on SoftBank to 5 games really deserved to be called a ‘furious comeback.’ Also, SoftBank’s magic number first appeared on August 6, more than a month before the September 17 championship reports, so the impression that they ‘blew through it in a flash’ isn’t quite accurate. Another topic was the large number of SoftBank fans who traveled from their home base in Fukuoka to the game venue at Kyocera Dome (Osaka) — this comes down to Fukuoka and Osaka being close by domestic-travel standards, under an hour by plane or about three hours by shinkansen. Note that exchanges about Hanshin’s interleague record against top Pacific League teams included posts making sweeping generalizations about specific teams and personal insults, so those replies have been excluded from this article.

Background and key points of this discussion

“Former Imperial universities” (kyu-teikoku daigaku) refers to the seven universities founded before World War II in Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Nagoya, Tohoku, Hokkaido, and Kyushu, and debates over their ranking are a perennial topic on 5ch’s academic-background boards. Hiroshima University and Tsukuba University (formerly Tokyo University of Education) come from a separate historical lineage as former “Universities of Literature and Science,” so they aren’t technically former Imperial universities, but their research standing sometimes earns them comparable treatment. That said, hensachi and job-placement strength don’t always line up. Schools like International University of Health and Welfare and Nihon University’s Faculty of Engineering show that universities located away from major cities can still be strong on employment thanks to licensing-focused programs and ties with local employers — a point raised repeatedly in the thread. Note that the hensachi rankings and evaluations in the thread reflect individual posters’ personal impressions, not official statistics or rankings.

Background and Key Points of This Debate

The Millennium Prize Problems, math’s most famous unsolved challenges, remain officially unsolved as of 2026. The claim floated in the thread — that an LLM solved the Navier–Stokes problem in a matter of days — was itself disputed within the same thread, with one poster countering that the AI simply repackaged a researcher’s unpublished idea. In other words, this isn’t an established fact. What AI has actually demonstrated is the ability to solve International Mathematical Olympiad–level problems and assist with parts of proofs — there’s no confirmed case of it independently producing a complete, peer-reviewed proof.

The thread’s real fault line was the distinction between “the ability to solve math itself” and “the ability to use math as a tool or language.” Even granting that the former can be handed off to AI, many pushed back that secondary school math education is exactly where the latter gets built, and that science class alone can’t teach it systematically. Because opinions on the value of the discipline itself and opinions on math’s place in the school curriculum tend to get tangled together, it’s worth keeping track of which argument is actually being made at any given point.

Background and Key Points of This Story

Starbucks Japan has been a wholly owned subsidiary since 2014, when US headquarters bought up all of its shares, so this story is essentially about whether that arrangement is now being unwound. The report is only at the “considering a sale” stage — as commenters noted when the article briefly vanished, no official announcement or follow-up has surfaced yet. Starbucks’ US business has seen ongoing declines in same-store sales, and selling off a profitable overseas subsidiary to raise cash isn’t a new move for a struggling company, but as the thread also questioned, that doesn’t guarantee it actually fixes the slump back home. The thread title’s phrase “decided to withdraw” goes further than what was actually reported, and it’s easy to misread that as more than just a report on a sale under consideration.

Background and Key Points of This Story

What matters most about this cancellation isn’t simply a rise in criticism, but the stated reason: “there were threats made against those involved, including myself.” Projects getting canceled over social media backlash isn’t unusual, but once it escalates into threats or criminal warnings, that’s a different matter entirely — one that could turn into a criminal case. While some on the thread pointed out that “criticism and threats are on completely different levels,” there’s more nuance to the story too: the collab was reportedly announced back in May yet only blew up in September, and past controversies over VTubers’ “loli”-themed expression were brought up as precedent. How much thought the brand actually gave to pairing a real children’s product with this kind of character portrayal can’t be confirmed from the original thread alone.

Background and Talking Points

This live-action Street Fighter film is the first since the 1994 movie starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, based on Capcom’s popular fighting-game series, and opens in theaters worldwide starting October 16. Marvin is a character written as an Interpol (International Criminal Police Organization) agent, and the Japanese dub for the role goes to Kuzuha, a male VTuber who has been with Nijisanji since 2018 and has built a following through gaming streams and singing broadcasts. Casting VTubers in dub roles for major releases has become more common in recent years, and this choice is seen as reflecting an affinity with the film’s game-based source material. The original thread itself followed the scattershot, anything-goes flow typical of a live-commentary board — a steady stream of cosplay photos and on-the-ground event reports — so there weren’t many replies reacting directly to this announcement.