Right now it’s “Golden Week” in Japan and I’m dogging it since all the big companies and factories are closed from April 26th to May 7th (see Wikipedia). And what better way to dog it during Japanese Golden Week than with these new 1/25 ounce commemorative gold coins designed to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Snoopy lost in translation in Japan. Today the Japanese commodity house, Taisei Coins Corporation, is unveiling their new, “The 40th Anniversary of Snoopy in Japan” commemorative coin featuring coins with Snoopy of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.
Actually, these Snoopys are legal tender of the Cook Islands and were made by the Perth Mint that produces all sorts of weirdo commemorative coins, gold bullion and medallions. These are almost as much fun as the Silver and gold Hello Kitty euros I previous reported about.
The obvious Japanese solution is to BAN ALL SWIMSUITS!
Swimming: Japanese coach urges swimsuit war at Olympics
Macau Daily Times - AFP-Saturday, 26 April 2008—A Japanese Olympic swimming coach on Thursday urged domestic makers to rival Speedo’s record-breaking swimsuit…”It’s swimsuit doping,” Norimasa Hirai, who coaches defending double Olympic breaststroke champion Kosuke Kitajima and others, quoted one of his charges as saying of the LZR Racer [Speedo’s swimsuit]….Japanese Olympic swimmers are obliged by the national federation to wear products supplied on contract by one of three Japanese makers — Mizuno, Asics and Descente — at the Beijing Games…more…
At $550.00 for 100 grams of swimsuit, Speedo’s LZR Racer costs more than dope.
“Unintentionally funny” ought to be the slogan of corporate Japan.
Eisai Introduces “Chocola BB® Royal 2” Vitamin B2 Drink for Extreme Fatigue
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - April 24, 2008–-Eisai Co., Ltd…will release “Chocola BB® Royal 2” (quasi-drug), a new 50 mL vitamin B2 drink, on Monday, May 12….address consumer needs and developing market for nutritional drink for women…
Case in point, I did a double-take when I saw these “Let’s Try!” self-suicide exercises on official health website of Chocola BB®.
See a larger version of above photo of old-school Chocola BB and other mega-funky Japanese patent medicines at PingMag.jp and the Retro Museum of Packaging from the Showa Era.
Today I spotted this elephantine e’pissoir cleaning robot for urinals that was demonstrated at the Kobe International Airport.
Don’t you think the little yellow hat on top of this “labor-saving” 100kg (220lb) robot is precious?
The following is my mega-funky machine translation of the Robot.Watch’s description of the demonstration of the the robot.
The “DCBA” men’s room cleaning robot
Robot.Watch, Impress.co.jp 2008 April 22 (edited translation)—On April 17, 2008,
MERTEC Company unveiled a urinal cleaning robot, the “DCBA” in Kobe Airport terminal….
…Mr. Susumu Kanai was in charge of the design of the DCBA. He said that, ” I imaged a powerful reversal of the urinal drain would be like an elephant and used this as the theme. Following that reversal theme, the robot’s brand name “DCBA”
[pronounced “DaSuBiEh“] is the reversal of the letters “ABCD.”
Mr. Mr. Kanai explained, “To express performing things in sequence in Japanese is commonly referred to as doing something “ABC” — I thought it would be a good idea for the logo to be the mirror reversal of ABCD
….
Ok, it is hard to imagine how shoving and wrestling the 100kg DCBA robot into position would be a savings in labor. In the top photo, the DCBA robot dwarfs the operator girl. However, the company claims the machine cleans one urinal in 10 seconds and saves eight liters of water in the process. The robots are intended for the cleaning operations of large institutions including highway rest areas and public restrooms of railroads. The selling price will be 1 million yen (about $9,700 USD).
UPDATE!
There are scant details available yet, but I hear there is already prototype robot–pictured below–that is designed to challenge the “reversal” concept of the DCBA robot. That is, this robot cleans the source needing cleaning rather that urinal (ha, ha).
In the past, I have reported about Japanese spa baths filled with Beaujolais, chocolate hot tubbing and curry bathing.
Today’s flavor is bathing in a hot tub of RAMEN noodles, which is really a Far-Eastern Pastafarian Baptismal Rite of Ambrosian total immersion.
For more information, refer to the English website of the Hakone Kowakien Yunessun.
ラーメン風呂 — RAMEN noodle spa
OMG! It’s the rain time and many folks here are wearing these butt-ugly Killer Alien Crocs® for better “traction”…enough sticky-icky traction to get sucked into the gaps of escalators. The biggest problem is with children wearing Croc-like shoes—not only are Japanese feet tiny but all Japanese have a odd cultural habit of dragging their feet as they walk*.
Soft resin material in sandals blamed for escalator accidents
(Mainichi Japan) April 18, 2008—An investigation into a spate of accidents in which foam resin sandals have got caught in escalators, injuring people’s feet, has found problems with the soft material used in the sandals.
….at JR Tokyo Station in August last year, a 5-year-old girl got her foot caught between one of the steps and the side of the escalator, and suffered a broken middle toe. In its survey, NITE compared resin sandals produced by U.S. company Crocs and seven similar products with sports shoes and other sandals not made from resin. It found that only the resin sandals got caught...more…
*Japanese traditionally like to drag their feet. As my judo and kendo sensai mentioned to me as part of proper form, it’s a throwback to the days of loose zori sandals and especially important as politeness indoors as to not stir up dust from the tatami mats.
It’s gr-r-reat to being living today in what used to be my science-fiction cartoon world. Case in point is Japan’s NEC copying the Futurama episode where they pass a malfunctioning “Refreshing Crack” vending machine with a junkie pounding on the machine screaming, “Come on, don’t hold out on me man!”
Biometric methadone dispensers tested on UK lags
— Cuppa tea? Cup-a-soup? Cup-o-smack? —
The Register - Wednesday 16th April 2008 06:02 GMT–NEC is supplying the Prison Service with biometric methadone dispensers in up to 100 prisons. The machines will check prisoners’ fingerprints or iris scans to access their medical record before dispensing the correct dose of methadone….The project is expected to cost £3.5m for 100 prisons…more…
One of the sadly-soon-to-be-gone-but-delightfully-tacky sights of Osaka Japan is the robot manikin “Cui-daore Taro”—a mechanical drum-playing clown on front an 8-story ramen shop [Wiki].
Offers flood in for Osaka restaurant’s popular Cui-daore Taro mascot
Mainichi Daily News
OSAKA — An Osaka restaurant that is closing down in July is being flooded with offers to buy and rent its popular mascot, it has been learned. The Cui-daore restaurant in the Dotonbori district of Osaka’s Chuo-ku has reportedly received over 100 offers from across Japan for its mascot Cui-daore Taro, a drum-beating robot doll dressed in a striped clown suit with a pointed hat…more…
Photo thanks to thaths’ flickr
You gotta wonder if Sanyo’s new Diply Talk® digital recorder is proof of growing drug abuse in corporate Japan. Yes, this model is initially only for Japanese distribution so any engrish name would be ok. However, in a few months Sanyo will be releasing on the world market where the product will have be retooled and relabeled to avoid dippy dipshit connotations of Diply Talk®.
Here’s the sad rest-of-the-story:
Sanyo Japan has dozens of employees who speak English and most likely have warned them about the problems with ‘Diply’. Yet diply product manager insisted calling it Diply Talk® and now the cost of product renaming will equal the cost of the first product update (I used to watch millions on dollars at Hitachi going down the drain in just this way). Sheesh.
UPDATE: It turns out that “Diply Talk” is Sanyo’s branding mistake for their entire product line of high-end digital recorders. Refer to the specs and full report at akihabaranews.com: ICR-PS1000M Diply Talk: The New High-End PCM Voice Recorder from Sanyo
Panasonic’s new Toughbook tablet—more like a SLABlet—was on display today at their Tokyo showroom. This SlabBook weighs only 1kg and has a 5.6-inch touch-screen LCD display on the shock/water-proof body with built-in keyboard. At the Panasonic Center in Ariake, Tokyo, I noticed that Panasonic has dropped the dog-slow Vista OS and they are now using XP lite—a wise idea since this new Toughbook runs on Intel’s low-power consumption Atom® processor that’s a lot slower than current requirements for Windows Vista.
For more info see:
—Panasonic Toughbook UMPC Gets Loaded with Atom CPU
Mobile Magazine > CEBIT
and…
—Machine-translated version of the original Japanese press release from Panasonic
- 
