AI Suitcase is a smart suitcase developed by a blind computer scientist to aid the visually impaired in navigating their surrounding more efficiently without the aid of white canes or guide dogs.

65-year-old Chieko Asakawa has been completely blind since she was only 14, following a tragic accident. A computer scientist and also the director of the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation, also known as Miraikan, in Tokyo she is living proof that the visually impaired can overcome their disability to achieve great things. But as someone who has long struggled with navigating unfamiliar and crowded places, Asakawa came up with an idea to help the visually impaired get around easier. In 2017, her own experiences inspired her to come up with the idea of a smart suitcase that could guide its user with the help of built-in sensors and cameras. Six years later, the AI Suitcase is almost ready for its commercial debut.

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The Tokay Stakes 2023 horse race at the Chukyo Racecourse in Nagoya, Japan was technically won by a racehorse that ran the entire race without a jockey.

While it’s true that a jockey can’t really help a slow horse win a race, their role in professional horse racing is undeniable. The jockey plays many roles during a race. They control the pace of the animal, either pushing it from the beginning in a race where setting the pace for the rest of the pack is important or conserving its energy for a final push. They are also responsible for how fast the horse comes out of the gates at the start and tactical movement during the race. At least that’s what most horseracing enthusiasts will tell you, but one animal recently proved that they are just dead weight…

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A restaurant in Osaka, Japan has built a reputation for serving traditional miso ramen with an unusual twist, like a slice of strawberry shortcake.

Franken, a Japanese restaurant specializing in miso ramen, first made international news headlines last January, when it started selling a unique variant of sweet-and-sour red miso ramen with a cone of soft-serve vanilla ice cream melting in the middle of the bowl. The combination sounds offputting, but the restaurant was so confident that people would love it that it only served its red miso ramen with the ice cream cone. Well, until this month, when Franken started selling another weird dish, a miso ramen with a slice of strawberry shortcake soaking in the hearty soup.

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Chu-hi-cha is the name of a new type of tea discovered by a Japanese researcher at Kyoto University. It involves brewing the droppings of caterpillars that have feasted on various plants.

Tsuyoshi Maruoka came up with the idea of caterpillar tea during graduate studies at Kyoto University’s Faculty of Agriculture, while researching the mysterious relationship between insects and plants. One day, a senior brought 50 gypsy moth larvae into the lab and told Maruoka that they were a souvenir. He didn’t really know what to do with them at first, but he eventually decided to at least keep them alive until he could decide, so he picked some leaves from a nearby cherry tree and fed them to the caterpillars. When cleaning the droppings left by the critters, he noticed that they had a pleasantly fragrant smell and was almost instantly inspired to brew them into tea.

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A Nagano-based company recently announced that it had created the world’s first noodle taste analyzer, a machine that can scientifically estimate the tastiness of soba noodles within seconds.

Japan’s Nagano Prefecture is well-known for its soba noodles, a popular variety made with buckwheat flour. To honor the prefecture’s soba noodle production, local tool-maker Yatsurugigiken Inc. teamed up with Shinshu University’s Faculty of Agriculture to create the world’s first noodle deliciousness analyzer. The high-tech device applies ultraviolet LED-induced fluorescence to around 2 grams of buckwheat flour and measures the levels of phospholipids, proteins, and other taste-related substances. Within seconds, flavor ratings in four different categories (taste, aroma, greenness, freshness) are displayed on an LED display.

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Daisuke Samejima is a talented Japanese artist whose amazing spherical paintings look like the view through a fish-eye lens, regardless of the angle you see them from.

Painting a hyper-realistic rendition of an object, animal or human is difficult enough, but imagine doing it on a spherical canvas instead of a flat one. Apart from making sure that everything looks real to the untrained eye, the artist needs to consider the warping necessary to make everything look perfect regardless of what angle the sphere is viewed from. To be honest, photos just don’t do Daisuke’s art justice, so it’s a good thing we also have videos of them…

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The Radar S-10000 measures 276 x 141 x 43 mm and weighs over 2.2 kilograms (5 pounds), making it one of the largest, if not the largest, commercially available erasers.

Japanese eraser maker Seed was founded in 1915, making it one of the oldest companies in the business. Its most popular product line, Radar, was launched in 1968 and quickly became a favorite in the Japanese market. The smooth texture and flawless erasing performance made the Radar a commercial success despite its premium price range of 20 – 50 yen, at a time when 10 yen erasers were the norm. The Radar line has been going strong ever since, with erasers of various shapes and sizes, including a gigantic 2,285-gram slab priced at an eye-watering 13,200 yen ($100).

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Lifte is a Japanese clothing brand that specializes in hospital patient gowns that are not only comfortable to wear but also look stylish.

Fashion is probably the last thing on most people’s minds when they need to spend time in a hospital, but Japanese clothing brand Lifte claims that dressing well is one important way to relieve stress as a hospital patient. You may not have your health, but that’s no reason not to dress nice. Lifte actually specializes in stylish, high-quality hospital gowns that not only look good on the wearer but are also considerably more comfortable to wear for long periods of time.

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Smartwatch manufacturers are constantly trying to one-up each other with feature-rich devices, but one Japanese company prides itself on making the world’s dumbest smartwatch.

The Stone Watch is not a smartwatch, it’s just designed to look like one. Created by Japanese capsule toy maker Tama-Kyu, the low-tech accessory doesn’t even tell time, let alone feature advanced tech like heart rate measurement, or smartphone connectivity. It doesn’t even have a display, it’s just a glossy, black piece of plastic with a silicone band that does nothing but look nice on your wrist.

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A Japanese man reportedly spent a whopping 3 million yen ($23,000) on a handmade wolf costume to fulfill his dream of becoming a wolf.

Zeppet, a Japanese company specializing in special effects and special modeling, made international news headlines last year, when it revealed that it had created a special dog suit for a client who had always wanted to live like a dog. The high-quality rough collie dog costume, which Zeppet claims was designed to adapt human anatomy to that of a canine, got a lot of attention after going viral on Twitter. Recently, that same company announced that they had received an even more challenging order from a person who wanted to live out their fantasy of becoming a wolf.

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Momotsuki, a 20-year-old artist from Japan, blends her love of gardening and fantasy into a unique art form she calls named “Fairy Dress“.

If you think about it, flowers make perfect dresses for fairies, but you need the skill and imagination to turn them into functional garments, and Momotsuki, the talented artist behind the ‘Fairy Dress’ brand, has plenty of both. A passionate gardener with over 14 years of experience, the 20-year-old woman had the brilliant idea to combine her passion for plants with her love of fantasy, fairies in particular. She uses flowers like pansies, morning glories, roses and carnations to create beautiful dresses that any fairy would call herself lucky to wear.

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Todoroki, a 30-year-old Japanese woman known as Japan’s plastic surgery idol, has spent over 13 million yen on plastic surgery over the last decade.

Posting as 整形アイドル轟ちゃん (Plastic Surgery Idol Todoroki-chan) on YouTube, Todoroki is one of the few vloggers who not only focuses on a topic that is still considered taboo in her home country but also shows the dark side of going under the knife. She has had dozens of plastic surgery procedures since she turned 18, and has always been upfront about the results. For example, even though she claims that she has no regrets about her plastic surgery journey so far, Todoroki doesn’t hide the fact that one procedure left her with a numb upper lip.

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A Japanese semiprecious stone processing company is selling a $450,000 yen ($3,400) office chair made out of a giant L-shaped piece of amethyst.

Factory-M, a Saitama-based store specializing in semiprecious natural stones, got a lot of attention after posting photos of its most recent offering on social media. The Japanese company shared three pics of what many mistook for a photoshopped meme or some sort of instrument of torture and needed to put out a statement clarifying that it was indeed a real product. Looking at the photos it’s easy to see why so many people thought it was some sort of meme, rather than an actual office chair, but factory-M insists that you can actually sit on it if you can afford to buy it.

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The AcryPhone is a rudimentary device designed to mimic the look and feel of a smartphone in order to help users conquer their handheld addiction.

As much as we try to deny it, most of us are addicted to smartphones. We try to limit the time we spend looking at them, but we constantly find ourselves instinctively reaching for them in search of that little dose of dopamine our brains crave. That’s just one of the many signs of an addiction that’s much more serious and difficult to overcome than we like to admit. Luckily, we will soon have an alternative that looks and feels just like a smartphone but has none of the features that got us hooked to it in the first place.

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An elderly Japanese man was recently arrested after calling a police precinct 2,060 times in nine days to yell at the staff there and call them “tax thieves” and “big stupid a-holes”.

Between September 30th and October 8th, the 67-year-old man from Saitama Prefecture called the Prefectural Police Headquarters a total of 2060 times to yell at the staff there and tell them that they should all be fired. That’s an average of one call for every six minutes and a total talk time of around 27 hours over the nine-day interval. Eventually, police raided the man’s house and arrested him on the ground of obstructing police business. He admitted to the charges and said: “I knew the police would come for me someday”.

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