foreign fridays

As part of a brand new version of Foreign Fridays, we will be exploring a different country each week through its most unusual, amusing and odd facts. We will post it right here on the blog, as well as on the all new Foreign Fridays page. If you want your country to appear, then simply get in contact with us either in the comments below or through Facebook or Twitter.

As we enter in to 2012, the fact for Foreign Fridays this week had to be related to New Year's really didn't it? Well we've come up with a cracker for Japan.

At midnight on New Year's Eve in Japan, Buddhist temples strike a gong 108 times, with each ring representing one of the 108 types of human weakness that must overcome to achieve nirvana.