I’ve realized that being Yoyogi my favorite park I haven’t written too much about it. Yoyogi park is not the most beautiful park in Tokyo; however it is the most lively and fun, mostly on weekends. At the entrance, every Sunday you can find the rockabillies, in the central part you can find all kinds of jugglers and “ninjas”; in fact practically all over the park you can find people with good vibes doing whatever the hell they want. If you are lucky, maybe you can spot some “pee geyser” or some weirdo trying to fly a robotic dragonfly. Even if you are only staying a few days in Tokyo, don’t miss walking around Yoyogi during the weekend. To get there, the best way is to stop at Harajuku station or at Meiji-jingu Mae station.
Now I leave you with quite a few pictures I have been taking during the last five years; notice how different the seasons look and the great atmosphere around the park:
In Japan there are zillions of different energy drinks. The other day in a mysterious pharmacy in a Shinjuku alley I found this magic potion called “Dynamite Sex Gold” that costs 3,150 yen (around 25.5 euros/34.5 dollars). Next to the “Dynamite Sex Gold” there was two other drinks of the same kind but “less powerful”. Would you try “Dynamite Sex Gold”? Have you seen it somewhere else?
This Science magazine article explains us a very interesting new discovery by a team of researchers at Hokkaido University.
The researchers put some oat flakes as if they were places in the Tokyo metropolitan area where most of the people are accumulated. Then they put a slime mold cell in the middle of the oat flakes and let it grow. As slime mold loves oat flakes, it soon started to spread and in some hours it had reached all of the flakes. As the time went by the slime mold erased “connections” between some small oat flakes and strengthen the connections between bigger and central flakes. The most impressive thing is that it was “intelligent” (slime mold doesn’t have a brain) enough to maintain redundant connections between the most “important” flakes, something that allows the slime mold to keep the connection to an important flake even if an “accident” happens. The slime mold really created a really good communication network between the oat flakes, in fact the network is very similar to Tokyo’s rail network designed by engineers. For example, in Tokyo there are many redundant lines to make sure that if something unexpected happens in some part of the city, like an earthquake, it will not affect the rest of the network.
After analyzing the slime mold growth pattern, the researchers created a mathematical model that describes the expansion of the network and when simulating it on a computer the algorithm ends up finding a quite optimum solution in which the most robust connections are established between the most important/central nodes and the redundant connections slowly disappear. Moreover, the slime mold tries to find the shortest path to each location (a classical problem of computing science). We can simulate this using software, in fact there are many algorithms to design networks, but… how did slime molds learn how to grow optimally to reach the maximum amount of food/energy? how does the slime mold “know” how to solve the problem? where is that behavior programmed if the slime mold doesn’t have a brain? in the genes? small rules that create a complex behavior? cellular automatons?
Why would we want to make very complex calculations and build algorithms to design networks if we can “ask” a slime mold to do it for us? Why spend millions hiring engineers if slime mold can design transport networks? In fact, why spend time solving problems that nature has solved during millions of years of evolution? This is one of the perspectives that Biomimicry / Biomimesis uses to solve problems; if you are interested in this topic and want to learn more, I recommend you to watch these talks by Janine Benyus and Robert Full.
Tadao Casio founded Casio in 1946, soon after World War II ended. At the beginning the business of the company centered around machines that emitted plane tickets. During the early years they also had to repair some of the first mechanical calculators with electronic components that allied forces installed in the airports of Tokyo and Yokohama. With the first reaped benefits and the experience gained, Mr. Casio decided that he and his brothers could produce better calculators.
Entrance to the main headquarters of Casio in Shibuya.
After several years of hard work, in 1954, Casio launched to the market the first Japanese electromechanical calculator competing directly with the American company Burroughs. The interesting thing is that the new Casio calculator introduced the numeric keypad layout of 10 keys, something that now is evident but at that time was a great innovation. Three years after, Casio commercialized the first compact electronic calculator in history.
The first compact 100% electronic calculator in history.
Casio shop in Akihabara
Casio didn’t stop growing during the 60’s, improving its calculators making them smaller and cheaper. Casio lead the pocket calculator revolution and along the way they erased several computing giants like Monroe, Victor, Burroughs, Remington Rand, Olivetti and Facit. Sharp and Texas Instruments rose to be the biggest competitors in the calculator sector; then Casio decided to innovate and create new markets once again as they had done previously with calculators. In 1969 they created the first quartz watch with LCD screen, they called it Casiotron. During the following two decades Casio watches became the symbol of the technological power of Japan around the world. More than 1,500 clock and watch companies in Switzerland went bankrupt from 1970 until 1988.
During the 80’s and beginning of the 90’s, Casio went through hard times because they didn’t find their place in the Personal Computer revolution. However, in 1995 they brought another big innovation once again, they released to the market the first digital camera with TFT LCD screen that allowed users to view photos before transferring them to their computers. Although it might seem rare nowadays, the first digital cameras didn’t have screens to browse the photos taken! In fact, the technology behind all the TFT LCD screens of every digital camera in the world is patented by Casio.
At the beginning they had it quite easy, because the photography giants like Fujifilm, Canon or Nikon were resting on laurels. Casio was the first company to launch a 3 megapixel camera to the market and during many years they were on the front line of the digital photography industry, making its cameras smaller and thinner, making them accessible to everyone and breaking megapixel barriers.
A Casio cellphone from the beginning of last decade. Casio is one of the most important cellphone makers in Japan.
Casio is one of the companies in the world that contributed the most to the digital photography revolution of the last decade. At the beginning they didn’t have any experience creating cameras but after many years they are still one of the survivors in such a competitive industry.
During the last couple of years Canon, Olympus, Nikon and Pentax SLR camera prices have dropped spectacularly and now they are only a little bit more expensive than compact cameras. This movement of traditional camera companies has severely harmed companies producing compact digital cameras; having more megapixels is not important anymore. What users demand now is better optics that only SLR cameras can offer. One of the biggest victims has been Casio, that is once again in a delicate moment, the digital compact camera market is saturated and there is little margin for innovation; Casio will have to reinvent itself once again if they don’t want to disappear. What new surprises will Casio bring us in the coming years? Let’s hope they can adapt themselves to changing conditions so that we can wear G-Shock watches for a long time.
G-Shock building in Shibuya
Article originally published in the Spanish newspaper El País.
Back in 2006 I was walking around Yoyogi park with my friends Pedro and Ciro when we found a peculiar guy with a crystal ball. We took some photos with him and recorded a video of his skills. Somehow since then, the crystal ball video is the most viewed video in my YouTube channel with almost 170,000 views.
It still amazes me the amount of different weird drinks that are sold in vending machines on the streets in Japan. It’s also astounding the rate at what new drinks appear and disappear on the market; it seems like the competition is really stiff. For example, Pepsi, in a desperate movement released the Cucumber Pepsi to the market, a truly legendary drink.
Inago means grasshopper in Japanese. It is a Japanese “delicacy” that is usually served in some restaurants in certain prefectures, most of all in rural areas where I suppose they can be captured and cooked while they are fresh. The other day I found a stall specialized in inago, いなご, in downtown Tokyo. The man selling grasshoppers was very proud of his grasshopers and was recommending different kinds to the passers-by. Besides grasshoppers, he was also selling dry fish, shrimps and clams, a quite curious mix of groceries.
Yamagata grasshoppers just below the stallkeeper.
Grasshoppers on the left, the rest is dry frish and shrimps.
Some months ago I found out about Doctor Nakamatsu, also known as Dr. NakaMats. He is extremely popular in Japan but somehow I had never heard of him before. Yoshiro Nakamatsu is a 81 year old Japanese inventor who holds the world record for number of inventions with over 3,000 patents, more than 3 times the amount that Thomas Edison achieved in his life. Most of his first patents were licensed by IBM and were key to the development of the floppy disk. He also holds patents related to the first digital watches and music synthesizers; as a matter of fact, Casio recognizes him as the inventor of the digital watch. Moreover, he has written more than 80 books and says he intends to have created more than 7000 patents-inventions by the time he dies.
Among his three thousand inventions he has some curious ones. For example these flying shoes called PyonPyon that can make you jump higher and run faster:
He has also invented a sofa to take naps that helps to energize the brain; it is called the “Cerebrex” and he says that he uses it every day and helps him to be able to invent even more things:
Another curious thing about Nakamatsu is that he has been taking pictures of everything he eats for the last 35 years and writes down everyday how he feels so he can see the effects of what he eats on his mood and state of mind. This study about the food he has eaten for more than three decades enabled him to win the Ig Nobel prize in 2007. Moreover, he has declared himself eligible to be the Governor of Tokyo four times; he has never won but the last time he got more than 100,000 votes.
Roy sent me this picture of Doctor Nakamatsu van in the last electoral campaign.
His most popular invention in Japan is the “Love Jet”, some kind of spray to heighten sexual stimulation and combat male impotency. Nakamatsu says that he has put a lot of effort in this invention because he wants to help Japan’s economy, he wants to help Japanese couples to have more children and restore the population pyramid that now is totally upside down. The interesting thing about the Love Jet is that Dr. Nakamatsu sells the product cheaper than it costs to produce; he says he does it to help the country, that he didn’t invent the Love Jet to make money. If you are interested you can buy it here.
Dr. Nakamatsu advertising his solution for Japan’s birth rate problem, the “Love Jet”.
A hair growth product, another invention by Nakamatsu.
In this vídeo Nakamatsu explains some of his methods to maintain a creative mind. He follows a strict diet, most of the vitamin complexes he uses have been invented by him, he sleeps four hours a day, he uses the Cerebrex to sleep, he does sport regularly, and the most funny thing is that to “create new ideas” he submerges himself in a swimming pool with a notepad:
He says that he comes up with more ideas underwater, most of them when he has almost no air in his lungs.
Nakamatsu showing off his inventions in the British television.
Would you try the PyonPyon flying shoes, the Love Jet or the Cerebrex sofa? Would you write your ideas underwater? By the way, the pen and notepad to write underwater are also an invention by Doctor Nakamatsu!
And here we are again with the 7th edition of Japanese Sleeping! In this new batch of pictures I have been able to capture another Japanese person sleeping in a motorbike; maybe in some years I will have enough pictures to start a series named “Sleeping on a motorbike”
We caught him sleeping during working hours! He was supposed to be guarding a construction site. At the beginning we were worried because maybe he was sick or something but when we approached him to ask he woke up with a smile and told us he was in perfect condition… and he kept sleeping peacefully.
The second time I catch someone sleeping on a motorbike
Imagine you are walking around downtown Los Angeles and a Japanese girl approaches you and asks: “I am trying to find the Staples Center but I am completely lost, could you tell me what is the name of this block?” A little bit confused you answer that she is right now in South Main Street and West 8th Street. And the girls says “No, I don’t want to know the name of the streets, I want to know the name of the block”. In that moment, you start getting desperate and thinking what the hell is going on with this lost Japanese girl. A possible answer would be: “In what world are you living? Blocks have no name!”
Now imagine that after some months you are walking around Tokyo and you are lost trying to find a Shintoist temple near Akihabara. You approach a Japanese man and ask him: “What is the name of this street?”. The Japanese man looks at you puzzled and tells you: “Street have no name, but in that corner you can read the name of the block”. In that moment you realize the culture shock, you remember the poor Japanese girl that was lost in downtown Los Angeles and you understand how she felt back then”.
In Japan, street are simply an empty space in between blocks, they don’t have an identity. However you can identify buildings following a 3 digit system: the first one indicates the district, the second one the block and the third one the building or house inside the block. It is a completely different, but perfectly valid, system of structuring and organizing cities. You have to change your whole mindset.
Which one is easier, our system or the Japanese system? For humans it depends on what are you used to but for machines and computers it’s better to use the Japanese notations. Not having street names makes writing directions much shorter; for example the directions to find a restaurant could be “Sushi Tanaka, Tokio, Yoyogi 4-3-1”. If you are in Tokyo it could even be shortened more, like “Yoyogi 4-3-1 (If you click the link you can see how Google Maps finds the exact desired spot)”, and still contains the precise information to find the exact location of the restaurant. Using directions in a cellphone or a car navigating system using the Japanese street name system is much easier than introducing the whole street name.
In the direction “Yoyogi, 4-3-1″, the first word is the name of the neighborhood, the first number is the chome (丁目), the second number is the block ban (番) and the last number is the building number inside the block go (号). Depending on the city and the region the system varies slightly but the fundamental concept of not using streets names is commonplace (only some important avenues and highways have names). The organization of maps follows a top down perspective, first the more general area is named and then smaller areas are named: chome (丁目) is the unit in which neighborhoods are divided, then every chome is divided into several ban and finally each ban is divided into numbered buildings.
In this Google Maps capture you can see the neighborhood name, the chomes and the different bans, but the different go are not specified. If you are very interested in this topic, you can find a very good explanation on Wikipedia about the addressing systems used in different Japanese cities.
This easiness to write directions and to use them in computers helped a lot to the number of geolocalized places by Internet users, even before cellphones were equipped with GPS systems. If at the same time we take into account that cellphones with GPS arrived to the Japanese market in 2003, the geolocalized information in Japan has been growing exponentially in the last years. Nowadays, Japan is the country in the world with the most geolocalized information available; the second one is South Korea, but it doesn’t even have half of the information that Japan has.
To have a lot of geolocalized information available on the net helps to easily create new services without having to introduce the information manually. For example, one of the most innovative start-ups in Tokyo is Sekai Camera, one of the first commercial applications that uses augmented reality. The more geolocalized information available on the area you live, the more useful Sekai Camera is. Since the beginning of the year, an American service that bases its business model on geolocalization called Foursquare, is having more success in Tokyo than in any other city in United States because its usefulness is much higher if users have geolocalized a lot of information beforehand.
Thanks in part to how easy it is to type Japanese directions and most of all thanks to the huge amount of mobile devices with GPS in hands of Japanese people has made the expansion of applications and businesses based in geolocalization much faster in Japan than anywhere else in the world; however with or without street names, during the next few years the boom of applications using geolocalized information is going to be huge everywhere in the world.
It’s been a while that I wanted to write about this topic, but I have been procrastinating it for a while. But finally, thanks to this talk by Derek Shivers I decided to write this article. In fact, at the beginning of my post, I write exactly the same as what Derek says in his talk.
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