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This fall, cuteness comes to your cell phone screens with customizable avatars hanging out in a virtual world of games and shopping, all available for free download. I wrote a short Japanese School Girl Watch story about it in Wired's December issue.
After many years of hard core research and first hand experience, researchers at the prestigious Waseda University have come to the conclusion that a $200,000 robot is the best kind of Japanese wife. Twenty-One is the first robot that has a touch as soft as a human's. Roboticists have never before been able to balance strength and flexibility to this degree—it cost millions of dollars and seven years to develop.
Twenty-One's creators made her slightly shorter and a lot plumper than the average Japanese woman—this girl is 5 feet tall and weighs 245 pounds. Unlike the rough-from-dishwashing fingers of human housewives, her hands are soft and smooth as silicon and have 241 pressure-sensors to gently massage you with. She talks, but only when you tell her to, and only what you program her to say. At this stage in her life, she only has 15 minutes of battery life per charge, which means you only have to deal with her for 15 minutes at a time. A chauvinistic husband's dream!
Link (Thanks, Sam!)
My latest story on Wired.com is about my experience as a neuroscience guinea pig at a lab in San Francisco:
I feel like the hoodlum Alex in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange: My head is held steady by a chin strap, while two technicians grease my scalp with conductive gel and slip on a cap bristling with electrodes.
I'm about to have my brain scrambled -- electrically -- in the name of medical science. Scientists are going to knock out regions of my brain while I perform a memory test.
This cute yellow alarm clock starts beeping like crazy and runs around the room on its giant white wheels at the time you set it to wake you up. This prevents you from rolling over on your side and pressing Snooze. The little white dot eyes and digital mouth makes it look endearing, like a little pet. It's about $65, but totally worth it—who doesn't want to wake up chasing a robot first thing in the morning?
Product page (Japanese)
Radiologists in Japan have just discovered a new automated dental radiograph matching system that improves and speeds up forensic identification. Up until now, forensic identification has been a slow and often inaccurate process that relied on the human eye. By using a technique called Phase-Only Correlation that corrects distortions caused by damage and compares images closer than ever before, the researchers were able to correctly identify dental patients within seconds—that's literally just 95% of the time it would have taken the old school way.
The researchers think they'll start using this method by next year.
In 2008, Chronicle published my book: Urawaza: Secret Everyday Tips and Tricks from Japan.
I am also the founder of The Tofu Project, a boutique program that helps Japanese entrepreneurs and creators think deeper, tell better stories, and go out into the world in a much bigger way. We work with companies like Mixi, Japan Airlines, and Salesforce.com.
Sometimes I try to explain Japanese culture on CNN, BBC, CBC, WSJ, ABC (so many acronyms!) or in person at places like the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan, ETech, and Ignite!
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Read some of my published magazine stories
Send tips to mango [at] tokyomango [dot] com
