Dog Seatbelt
If you have a dog and worry about driving safely with your pet hiding in your car, you might want to get the seatbelt harness that is introduced on this Japanese TV show:
Similar products are being sold on Amazon.co.jp and Amazon.com. The product shown in the video might be produced by a Japanese company, but it looks like companies in other countries have had similar ideas.
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Categories: Animal Videos, Technology
Playable Electric Guitar T-Shirt
Musical t-shirts from StrapyaNext are introduced to Japanese TV viewers, and then shown off to foreigners in Japan:
There’s are electric guitar, keyboard, and drum t-shirts, all of which can make sounds. The electronic bits are removable, so the other part of the shirt can be washed.
Most of the foreigners who see the shirts are very impressed. At the end of the clip, the three t-shirt dudes have a jam session with a professional pianist.
After some searching, I found that the shirts are available on Amazon: the Electric Guitar Shirt, Keyboard Shirt, and Drum Shirt are sold for between 20 and 30 dollars, considerably less than the 3,580 yen price shown in the TV report.
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Categories: Odd / Strange, Technology
Giant Chocolate Billboards & Musical Advertisements in Japan
FTV shares some new and creative types of Japanese advertisements:
First, we have a gigantic chocolate bar billboard. The billboard is located in Takatsuki, Osaka Prefecture, alongside a Meiji chocolate factory that is visible from passing trains:
Factory operator Meiji Seika Kaisha Ltd. said it has applied with Guinness World Records for the billboard, which measures about 166 meters wide and 28 meters high, to be registered as the world’s biggest advertising board made of plastic.
The billboard consists of 42 plastic blocks that look like chocolate blocks.
It effectively covers the outer wall of the factory, which makes chocolate and other products, with the intention of catching the eye of train passengers on the nearby JR Tokaido and Hankyu Kyoto lines.
The second advertisement shown is a tea ad that uses Yamaha‘s Thin Light Flexible Speaker technology. The surface of the ad is a speaker, emitting slogans and music.
The musical advertisement shown in the report is inside Seibu Ikebukuro station. It is scheduled to stay up until February 17th, so hurry on over there if you want to see it in action!
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Categories: Odd / Strange, Technology
Dog Castle: The Most Awesome Dog House in Japan
“Nanikore” travels to Hamamatsu in Shizuoka prefecture to show us a truly awesome dog house:
The dog lives in a mini castle! It’s a 2.5-meter-high replica of Matsumoto Castle. The dog’s owner spent 6 months and 50,000 yen to build it. It contains one main room, plus a rear room in which the dog can hide during thunder storms. There is also a separate room with a sand floor, which is meant to offer a surface on which the dog can feel cool during the summer months.
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Categories: Animal Videos, Odd / Strange
Backwards Japan
Check out “Japan – Rewound!“, a fun video created by Our man in Abiko:
Our Man just paid off 20,000 passing Japanese to walk backwards. Pretty nifty huh?
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Categories: Odd / Strange
Spraying crops in Japan with an RC helicopter
YouTuber Talbrech has posted a video clip of an RC helicopter being used to spray crops in Japan:
We woke up this morning to the sound of an RC helicopter spraying what I assume is pesticide on the rice field outside our back window.
With so many farmers using small lots of land in Japan, crop dusting airplanes are out the question. Most small fields are sprayed with devices like these (knapsack sprayers), but I suppose that RC helicopters would come in handy for slightly larger fields.
[via Reddit]
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Categories: Technology