Introduced at the 1964 Tokyo Games, volleyball was the first Olympic team sport for female athletes. The round-robin event was won comfortably by the Japanese team, who lost just one set in the course of the competition and beat the silver medal-winning Soviet Union in straight sets.

NEC’s (Japan) range of “Partner-type Personal Robots”, or “PaPeRos”, are designed for maximum interaction with humans. The Papero Childcare robot has been specially adapted with two (stereoscopic) camera “eyes” to recognize surroundings and faces, eight microphone “ears” to detect and recognize speech – even from multiple sources – and mobile-phone connectivity that allows PaPeRo to stay in touch with the absent parents. It can also speak with a 3,000-word vocabulary and react to touch via nine sensors. Children in the care of PaPeRo wear an Continue reading →

Playing a brass instrument requires constant changes to the embouchure (the arrangement of the mouth, lips and tongue) to reach certain notes. The first robot to achieve this is an as-yet-unnamed bipedal invention designed by Toyota (Japan). In the same “family” are robots with the dexterity to play the tuba and drums. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3501336.stm http://www.honda-robots.com/english/html/p3/frameset2.html

NEC System Technologies and Mie University, Japan, have developed a robot capable of tasting wine and recognizing the differences between a few dozen varieties. To “taste”, the “wine-bot” fires an infrared beam through the wine and analyses the various wavelengths of light that are absorbed. A built-in speaker is used to announce the variety of wine selected.

The Architeuthis dux is commonly known as the giant squid. Specimens have measured up to 18 m (59 ft) in length and 900 kg (1,980 lb) in weight. At 9:15am local time on 30 September 2004, Japanese researchers managed to photograph an 8-m (26-ft) giant squid that had become entangled on a bait that they had laid for it, in waters nearly 1 km (0.6 mile) deep, off the Ogasawara Islands, Japan. Prior to this occasion, an adult giant squid had never been observed in Continue reading →

The earliest female winner of an IndyCar race was Danica Patrick (USA), who won the Indy Japan 300 in Motegi, Japan, on 20 April 2008.

During the Second World War, a combination of Navajo – the Native American language – along with fairly simply encryptions and a number of word substitutions provided the US Marine Corps with a fast and unbreakable code that could be used to communicate within 20 seconds what would otherwise take around 30 minutes using traditional coding machines. The code substituted Navajo words for common military terms – so “tank” became the Navajo word for “turtle” – and spelled out letters using Navajo words based on Continue reading →

The heaviest apple weighed 1.849 kg (4 lb 1 oz) and was grown and picked by Chisato Iwasaki at his apple farm in Hirosaki City, Japan October 24 2005.

The heaviest pummelo (Citrus grandis osbeck) weighed 4.858 kg (10 lb 10 oz) when it was presented by Seiji Sonoda (Japan) at the Banpeiyu Competition, Yatsushiro, Kumamoto , Japan on 28 January 2005. Banpeiyu is Japanese for pumelo. Circumference measured: 83.5 cm (32.8 in).

The world’s heaviest radish was grown by Manabu Oono (Japan) and weighed 31.1 kg (68 lb 9 oz) on 9 February 2003 at the Sakurajima Radish Contest, Kagoshima, Japan. It had a circumference of 119 cm (46.8 in).