20 Weird Japanese Inventions That We Definitely Need

Japan, the land of the rising sun, is world-reknowned for its technological prowess. It’s no secret that Japanese always try to come up with some new gadgets and devices that would make our life easier (or more difficult). They have some of the most advanced robotics in the whole world, and are reknowned for their public transportation capabilities.

While these are useful and important technologies, Japanese inventors often take things in weird directions, creating things either extremely specific or extremely wacky.

Below is a collection of some of ingenious Japanese inventions from the end of the past millennium that never became quite popular.

1. Special Cost-Effective 360-Degree Panoramic Camera

Speaking of ridiculous head accoutrements, here is another one to consider. Taking panoramic shots that stitch together well was one of the perennial problems of photography. But thanks to one ingenious Japanese individual, it isn’t anymore, or so he thought.

Anything this camera purports to be able to do, like shoot panoramic photos and/or interactive 360 photos, can now be done by any mobile phone running the relevant application. But until one can stick a mobile phone to his head in the name of fashion, this 360 halo camera has a slight edge as a fashion statement.

2. Useful 10-in-1 Tool Kit for Gardening

A giant Swiss Army knife for any acolyte of Alan Titchmarsh. There’s a shovel, rake, pickaxe and trowel amongst other things. Gardeners complain about bad backs all the time – they’ll probably be rushed in to the ER with a slipped disc after this thing.

3. Ear Enhancer

Somethings should only be used for one thing. Bowls, for example. They should be used only to hold things in... not to enhance hearing in weird ways!

This Japanese invention is called the Ear Enhancer. It was made with what looks like bowls to enhance your range and accuracy of hearing. To many, it has actually worked and doesn’t seem like much at all.

4. Rain Water Collection Device

Those unfortunate enough to live in areas that have limited access to water will appreciate this one. It is an upside down umbrella; the purpose of which is to collect rain water. It is hooked up to a bag that’s designed to hold the collected water.

It’s a somewhat good idea. Except for the possibility that consuming the water collected might be less than hygienic, considering the many pollutants that might have drifted along with it. Also, bottled water would be galactically more convenient than having to lug around a bag of rain water.

5. Shoe Protectors for Rain

Some people love their shoes so much that they will do anything to protect them. This has spawned a whole market of shoe protective novelties like plastic bags that can wrap around the shoe and the like. This novelty below was designed for the same purpose.

One would be wrong in thinking, however, that those mini umbrellas can be hooked up to just any shoe; as it happens, they come with this pair, and are affixed to it. It's a fashion statement and not a solution to anything. So it doesn't really solve the problem that a good pair of boots can.

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50 Amazing Color Photographs That Capture Everyday Life in Japan From the Mid-1950s

After Japan surrendered in 1945, ending World War II, Allied forces led by the United States occupied the nation, bringing drastic changes.

Japan was disarmed, its empire dissolved, its form of government changed to a democracy, and its economy and education system reorganized and rebuilt. Years of reconstruction were required to recover from thousands of air raids, including the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

By the 1950s, a former enemy became a Western ally, parts of American culture became part of the Japanese landscape, and Japan began to find its economic footing as a manufacturer consumer devices and electronics.

These 50 amazing vintage photographs below show everyday life in Japan from the mid-1950s:   

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20 Candid Photographs of David Bowie Touring Around Kyoto, Japan in 1980

David Bowie was fascinated by Japan. But he loved Kyoto, to the point where he considered making it his permanent home. Although, as he explained in a radio interview with Andy Peebles in 1980, there was something holding him back.

“I’m not quite sure where to go next,” he said. “The East beckons me—Japan—but I’m a bit worried that I’ll get too Zen there and my writing will dry up.”

Kyoto was Bowie’s favorite city in Japan, to which he returned several times. During one such trip in 1980, photographer Masayoshi Sukita took the opportunity to photograph him on the subway — images in which Bowie looks both otherworldly and strangely at home.

Sukita explained, “Every time Bowie comes to Japan, he calls me and says, “I am here. Let’s do a photo session.” Bowie has always loved Eastern culture and he loves Kyoto, the traditional town in Japan. Since I was young, I have always been into Western culture and Bowie is so into Eastern culture, so that’s the bond or relationship we have.”

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12 Wonderful Color Photographs That Capture Scenes of Gifu, Japan in the Mid 1950s

Gifu is a city located in the south-central portion of Gifu Prefecture, Japan, and serves as the prefectural capital. The city has played an important role in Japan’s history because of its location in the middle of the country.

Located on the alluvial plain of the Nagara River, Gifu has taken advantage of the surrounding natural resources to create both traditional industries and tourism opportunities such as cormorant fishing. Mount Kinka, one of the city’s major symbols, is home to a nationally designated forest and Gifu Castle, a replica of Nobunaga’s former castle. Gifu also hosts many festivals and events throughout the year.

Below is a small collection of 12 fascinating color photographs showing scenes of Gifu in the 1950s:   

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Vintage Photos of Maikos Portraying the Three Wise Monkeys From the Early 20th Century

The three wise monkeys are a Japanese pictorial maxim, embodying the proverbial principle “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil”. The three monkeys are Mizaru, who sees no evil, covering his eyes; Kikazaru, who hears no evil, covering his ears; and Iwazaru, who speaks no evil, covering his mouth.

There are various meanings ascribed to the monkeys and the proverb including associations with being of good mind, speech and action. The phrase is often used to refer to those who deal with impropriety by turning a blind eye.

Outside Japan the monkeys' names are sometimes given as Mizaru, Mikazaru and Mazaru, as the last two names were corrupted from the Japanese originals. The monkeys are Japanese macaques, a common species in Japan.

The source that popularized this pictorial maxim is a 17th-century carving over a door of the famous Tōshō-gū shrine in Nikkō, Japan. The carvings at Tōshō-gū Shrine were carved by Hidari Jingoro, and believed to have incorporated Confucius’s Code of Conduct, using the monkey as a way to depict man’s life cycle. There are a total of eight panels, and the iconic three wise monkeys picture comes from panel 2.

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16 Wonderful Color Photographs Capture Everyday Life in Nagoya, Japan in the 1950s

Nagoya is the largest city in the Chūbu region of Japan. It is Japan’s fourth-largest incorporated city and the third most populous urban area. Located on the Pacific coast on central Honshu, it is the capital of Aichi Prefecture and is one of Japan’s major ports along with those of Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe, Yokohama, and Chiba.

In 1610, the warlord Tokugawa Ieyasu, a retainer of Oda Nobunaga, moved the capital of Owari Province from Kiyosu to Nagoya. This period saw the renovation of Nagoya Castle. Nagoya was proclaimed a city in 1889, during the Meiji Restoration; it became a major industrial hub for Japan. The traditional manufactures of timepieces, bicycles, and sewing machines were followed by the production of special steels, chemicals, oil, and petrochemicals, as the area's automobile, aviation, and shipbuilding industries flourished. Nagoya was impacted by bombing from US air raids during World War II.

After the war, Nagoya developed into a major port and transport center. The Shinkansen high-speed line connecting Tokyo and Osaka converges on Nagoya. Nagoya is served by two airports: Chubu Centrair International Airport in nearby Tokoname, and Nagoya Airfield, home to Mitsubishi Aircraft Corporation. Nagoya remains an important center for the automotive, aviation, and ceramic industries, hosting the headquarters of Brother Industries, Ibanez, Lexus, and Toyota Tsusho, among others.

Below is a small collection of wonderful color photographs that capture everyday life in Nagoya in the mid-1950s.

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Rare Photograph of a True Samurai Taken by Felice Beato, circa 1864-65

Italian–British photographer Felice Beato (1832 – 29 January 1909) was one of the first people to take photographs in East Asia and one of the first war photographers. He lived and worked in Japan from 1862 until about 1885, and dedicated himself to the comprehensive documentation of every aspect of the country, which had newly opened to the West.

This straightforward but intense study of an anonymous samurai dates from early in Beato’s period in Japan, and prior to the devastating fire that destroyed his studio and most of Yokohama in October 1866.

After 1615, when relative peace reigned in Japan and the importance of martial arts declined, most sumurai-the top of Japan’s social hierarchy during the Edo period (1603-1868)-became bureaucrats, teachers, or artists. Just a few years after Beato made this photograph, the feudal period in Japan ended with the Meiji Restoration. And after more than eight centuries of military leadership, the samurai class was officially abolished.

Felice Beato settled in Yokohama after documenting the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny with his brother-in-law James Robertson, and, on his own, the Second Opium War in China in 1860. Beato was persuaded to come to Japan by Charles Wirgman, a foreign correspondent with the British press and founder of Japan Punch, the first English-language magazine published in Japan. Beato and Wirgman were partners from 1863 to 1869, when Beato established his own firm. The studio remained active until 1877, when Beato sold it and all its contents to the Austrian photographer Baron Raimund von Stillfried-Rathenitz.

Between 1863 and 1877, Beato created the first substantial photographic record of Japan available to Europeans. His work spanned the period when Japan was emerging from the feudal, non-industrial society governed by the Shogun to the modern, industrial power ruled by the Meiji emperor. Thus Beato’s major publication, issued in 1868 in two volume entitled Native Types and Views of Japan, as well as his series Photographic Views and Costumes of Japan, document the last remnants of traditional Japan.

Fukushi Masaichi, the Man Who Created the Largest Collection of Tattooed Human Skin in the World

Fukushi Masaichi (1878–1956) was a Japanese physician, pathologist and Emeritus Professor of Nippon Medical School in Tokyo. He was the founder of the world’s only collection of tattoos taken from the dead.

Fukushi Masaichi studied at the Tokyo Imperial University Medicine. After studying in Germany, he began in 1914 at the Medical college Kanazawa University Kanazawa. He was chairman of the “Japanese Pathological Society”. The focus of his research was initially that syphilis caused aortitis and thyroid disease. He became interested in tattoos when he noticed that the tattoo ink in the skin killed the skin lesions of syphilis. Fukushi Masaichi himself was not tattooed.

His research on the subject of human skin (from 1907) brought him into contact with many people that had tattoos. He therefore became interested in 1926 in the art of Japanese tattoo (Irezumi), led autopsies on corpses, removed the skin and did research on methods to preserve the skin. In the following years he collected an archive of about 2000 “hides” and 3000 photographs which were lost in 1945, during World War II.

Masaichi put some of his unique collection of tattooed hides and groomed skin that had been outsourced in the early 1940s in an air raid shelter. Since they were protected from the effects of war they survived the bombings. These skins are all that remains of his collection. Today, the collection is kept at the Medical Pathology Museum of Tokyo University with 105 tattooed human skins, many of which are full body suits.

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Gas Mask Parade, Tokyo, 1936

An army of schoolgirls marching through Tokyo, their faces an anonymous sea of gas masks. Perhaps one of the most iconic images of the anxious modernism of 1930s Japan, Gas Mask Parade, Tokyo (Gasu Masuku Kōshin, Tōkyō) by photographer Horino Masao (1907–1998), reveals the vivid yet prosaic inculcation of fear in Japanese daily life through the increasingly pervasive visual culture of civil defense.

(Photo by Horino Masao, courtesy of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography Collection)

Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in late 1931—the beginning of its Fifteen Year War—marks the onset of a period of intense social mobilization and militarization on the home front as the warfront expanded on the continent and throughout the Pacific. Surveillance, secrecy, darkness, defensive barriers, physical security, and prophylaxis all became standard visual tropes of communal anxiety and national preparedness.

As a basic instrument of home front civil defense, the gas mask increasingly appeared in the public visual sphere, its use spreading from individuals to families, and even to animals such as dogs and horses. And media historians and sociologists such as Iwamura Masashi and Tsuchida Hiroshige have explored the instrumentality and changing importance of gas masks in the context of air defense. But the complicated and multilayered aesthetic resonance of gas mask imagery still remains uncharted territory.

Perhaps the aesthetics of the gas mask might seem like a contradiction in terms. Yet the visualization of gas masks throughout the 1930s and beyond clearly redefined the physical or “material” body, rendering the average citizen/imperial subject into an anonymous, seemingly inhuman monster of erotic curiosity.

Gas masks anonymized the civil population by obscuring individual physiognomies, and pointed to the posthuman condition of wartime, when people would be unable to survive the potentially toxic atmosphere of the metropolis. It was only the metropolitan centers that were actually threatened by poison gas bombs, but by 1930, nearly a quarter of the Japanese population lived in large cities, so the threat was immense. This alienation of the modern subject from his/her environment on the militarized home front, which necessitated the application of commodity prostheses for survival, eerily paralleled the general processes of modernity that were gradually alienating the modern consumer-subject from the natural environment and replacing this relationship with commodity fetishes that similarly denaturalized the human body.

(via Project MUSE)

Romantic Photos Capture Young Couples in Japan in the Late 1950s

In the late 1950s, LIFE photographer John Dominis came to Japan to capture the love and marriage life, which was going through significant changes as a result of the influence of westernization on courtship brought to the country during the Allied occupation from the end of the Second World War.

Exposed to the freshness of western dating, young people began to enjoy the excitement of being able to find a proper mate on their own, display their affections in public, spending time together at cafés or parks, and more importantly, the right to opt out if the relationship did not work.

Despite the undergoing modernization, the cultural roots were not entirely forgotten, as the people still held onto a good many of their traditions tightly.

Take a look at young Japanese couples back in the days through these 24 vintage photographs taken by Dominis:

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Japan's 1918 Pandemic Prevention Posters Suggested Some Rules to Avoid Spreading and Contracting the Flu

The 1918 Influenza epidemic began in Japan in late August 1918 and became a national epidemic in November. Experts believe it entered Japan through a group of Sumo wrestlers returning from Taiwan (a colony of Japan at the time). Because of this, for a while, people in Japan called it the ‘Sumo flu,’ and later the ‘Spanish cold’ (‘supein-kaze’ in Japanese).

It became evident later, when it had spread so far and wide it could no longer be ignored. On October 26, 1918, a Japan Times & Mail headline read: “Thousands Dying from Influenza Throughout the World.”

So in an attempt to educate the public and prevent further infections, a now-defunct branch of the Japanese government known as the Central Sanitary Bureau released a manual that detailed what the flu was and how to deal with it.

The majority of the 455-page manual contained factual information about the known status of the disease. There is text and charts showing the number infected and what type of symptoms were exhibited. It also included 4 steps everyone could take to avoid spreading and contracting the flu. The very first one being “stay away,” which was basically a simpler way of saying “social distancing.” Rule 2 is “cover your mouth and nose,” rule 3 is “get vaccinated” and rule 4 is “gargle.”

What also caught our attention are these posters that were produced at the time and distributed across the country as a way to spread awareness. Looking at these posters, it strikes us that things haven’t changed all that much in the last 100-years.

(via Spoon Tamago)