Robot evolution

This page summarizes the evolution over the years of Asimo, Honda's robot.





—Mellow Monk

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Japan at night

Here's a page of fantastic photographs of Japan at night.





—Mellow Monk

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The eight-hour myth

Here's an Economist article about the "eight-hour myth"—the widespread belief that we all need eight hours of sleep every night.

The bottom line is: Don't stress if you're getting less than eight hours of sleep each night. A big part of insomnia is psychological: If you think you're getting enough sleep, then you probably are. But if you start stressing about how much sleep you're getting, then that stress can not only create a self-fulfilling viscious-circle prophesy (worrying about sleep keeps us awake, which makes us worry even more about sleep, and so on), but can actually be more damaging than the lack of sleep itself.

To view previous posts about insomnia and other sleep-related issues, click
here.

—Mellow Monk

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The art of Hashiguchi Goyo

Today, works by Hashiguchi Goyo "are among the most highly prized of all shin hanga [modern woodblock] prints."





—Mellow Monk

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We have a winner

Mary B is the winner of the contest I announced in a May 25 posting. She was the first to properly identify the source of the snippet of movie dialog I quoted. (The film was "Circle of Iron," a cheesy late-'70s kung fu flick.)

She claims to have "cheated" and used Google to track down the title of the film, but how do I know she's not a closet fan—embarrassed, as so many of us are, to publicly admit having watched it muliple times? Just teasing, Mary!

As the winner, she'll be receiving a free packet of Top Leaf Green Tea.

Congratulations, Mary!

—Mellow Monk

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How to sharpen a samurai sword

Did you always want to know how to sharpen a samurai sword? If so, you're in luck! This page explains the process in English.

—Mellow Monk

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Sounds effects from Japanese manga

Here is a list of sound effects used in Japanese manga and what each means.

The Japanese language is rich not only in onomatopoeia (called giongo), which represent sounds and actions (such as "buzz" in English) but also in what are called gitaigo—mimetic words that primarily represent emotional states. For instance, shun represents a feeling of being lonely or forlorn, whereas niya niya suggests a sly grin. In fact, I've always considered gitaigo to be one of the last hurdles to complete fluency in Japanese.

—Mellow Monk

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Never let me go to Coma Island

One of the books by British-Japanese author Kazuo Ishiguro, who moved to England with his parents at age 5, is Never Let Me Go. The story is similar to the Ewan McGregor film The Island. Both, in turn, are similar to the 1978 thriller Coma, starring Geneviève Bujold and based on the novel by Robin Cook.

Now that the whole "harvest organs from the healthy against their will" theme has been played out, someone needs to add an interesting twist before churning out another version. The idea of harvesting from clones (who don't know they're clones) instead of people intentionally put into a coma was the latest twist. What will be the next?

—Mellow Monk

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"American geeks in Japan" -- this time subtitled

In a previous posting I linked to a video of American geeks pilgrimaging to Japan for animation-related stuff.

That video clip was sans subtitles, but now some kind soul has, out of the goodness of his or her heart, put in subtitles. So, here you are again for your viewing pleasure, but this time with subtitles, and in two parts:








—Mellow Monk

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Play "Frogger" online!

Finally, the news all you old fogies (like me) have been waiting for: You can play the classic arcade game "Frogger" online!

What the heck. It's Friday.

—Mellow Monk

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T-shirts with accupressure points

The New York College of Health Professions has announced it is released a line of clothing called MyChi—clothing with accupressure points marked on them. At each each accupressure point (called a tsubo in Japanese), a pinch of seeds will be sewn into the clothing, for maximum benefit.

You can download a PDF of the press release here.

—Mellow Monk

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Non-drug treatment for asthma

Doctors are testing a new, non-drug treatment for asthma: "snaking wires inside the lungs of asthma patients to essentially burn off some of the tissue that blocks their ability to breathe."





—Mellow Monk

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Meditation at school for kids with ADHD

Schools are beginning to experiment with meditation as a non-drug way for students to deal with attention deficity hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).





—Mellow Monk

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How a pot of tea could save your life

Drinking tea is good for you in many ways, but here's one way that you may not have heard of: as a means of self-defense.

An 81-year-old lady fought off a knife-weilding attacker with a tea kettle full of boiling water.

This story reminds me of a line from a movie:

A: A fish saved my life once.
B: How?
A: I ate it.

I'll send a free packet of Top Leaf Green Tea to the first person who emails me (contest at mellowmonk dot com) the title of the movie from which the above dialog was taken.

—Mellow Monk

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Grow your own square watermelons

Want to grow your own square watermelon? Essentially all you need is the right sized box, as shown in this photo.

Here is a previous post about square watermelons, a novelty that apparently started in Japan.





—Mellow Monk

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Thousand-year-old tea, anyone?

In Korea recently, green tea from a tea bush believed to be a thousand years old was sold at auction. The winning bid? Thirteen million won, or roughly $13,000.

—Mellow Monk

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Your tea, madam

Butler cafes, where a predominantly female clientele is served by waiters dressed like 19th-century English butlers, are a new trend in Japan.





—Mellow Monk

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Simple, convenient filter for loose-leaf green tea

Kitchenware maker BonJour previously marketed its BonJour Smart Coffee Maker as a solution for loose-leaf tea but later renamed it, probably because demand was greater among coffee drinkers.

However, the only change was to the name, and this filter is still an excellent choice for brewing loose-leaf green tea. I've seen it in action at a friend's house, and it's simple, clean, and convenient: You put the tea leaves into the filter and pour in hot water. Once the tea's steeped for 3 to 5 minutes, you simply place the filter onto your mug or cup. The spring-loaded bottom of the filter is pushed up, allowing the tea to drain into the cup by gravity. Once your cup is full, you simply pick the filter up off the cup, stopping the flow instantly, without any dripping. (The only catch is that your tea cup or mug can't be too wide for the base of the filter.)

I highly recommend this to anyone for brewing green tea at home or at the office.





—Mellow Monk

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Float the pain away

Floating therapy is exactly what the name implies: floating in a big tank of water to relieve chronic pain.

The research study shows that individuals suffering from stress-related health problems such as chronic pain, depression, or anxiety are often helped a great deal by floating. The effect remains four months after the treatment period.

Here's why the researchers think that floating therapy has the positive effects that it does:

Stress is largely about how we worry about things that have happened and are going to happen. When an individual, instead, manages to reach a sort of ‘here-and-now’ state, the brain can rest. These researchers believe that floating is a way of achieving just such a state. In a dark and silent floating tank, the patient is cut off from many sense impressions. Besides the rest the brain gets, the muscles also become relaxed.

—Mellow Monk

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Retiring from Toyota U.S.A.

This is an interesting article about the differences between American automakers and the American operations of Japanese car manufacturers when it comes to their retirees.

All three Japanese companies are anticipating that the ranks of retirees will swell over the next several years. Toyota's American arm, for example, has just 258 retired production workers (G.M., by contrast, has more than 400,000 retirees).

But things will change over the next five years. In 2011 and 2012, a combined 1,700 workers will be eligible for retirement at Toyota — about 6 percent of its current labor force.

—Mellow Monk

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Benzene in soft drinks

A while back an alarm was raised about the possibility of unsafe levels of benzene in "sodas" (the original reports were a little vague). Now it turns out it's not as bad as thought in terms of the number of at-risk products.

—Mellow Monk

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Rethinking therapy dogs

Previously I wrote a post about studies showing that visits by dogs increased heart attack victims' chances of survival.

Now, another study warns that 80 percent of these "therapy dogs" may carry diseases that are infectious to humans.





—Mellow Monk

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Hookworm infection cures asthma and hayfever

This is an account of one man who traveled to Camaroon to deliberately become infected with hookworm because of one of the disease's documented side effects: it cures severe asthma and hayfever.

Hookworm will never take off as an extreme asthma treatment. Instead, the promise lies in isolating the chemical compounds released by the worm that stop asthma and other auto-immune diseases.

—Mellow Monk

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Hard-to-find 800 numbers

Here's a real time saver and stress reducer: a website listing hard-to-find customer-support phone numbers.

The top 5 numbers are for Amazon.com, Ebay.com, PayPal.com, Yahoo.com, and Microsoft.com.

—Mellow Monk

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Space-age tabi sneakers

Asics has created space sneakers for astronauts to wear in the International Space Station.

The sneakers, with a tabi-style split toe for improved balance, are for wearing during the physical training that astronauts perform to keep their muscles from atrophying in the microgravity of Earth's orbit.





—Mellow Monk

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Vitamins: overrated

The National Institutes of Health recently announced they could find little evidence that vitamin supplements work.

—Mellow Monk

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Sumo bout!

Asashoryu beats Chiyotaikai in this 43-second clip from Day 13 of the spring basho (tournament). The commentary is in English.





—Mellow Monk

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60 years of postwar progress

The Japanese government PR magazine Asia-Pacific Perspectives: Japan+ has an article titled "60 Years of Postwar Progress".

The article's a nice summary of how Japanese has changed in the 60 years that have passed since the end of WWII. There are plenty of pics, such as the one below showing the living room of a typical middle-class family in the late 1950s.

—Mellow Monk

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Brain training, redux

More on the brain training trend in Japanese video games:

And what does Brain Training do? Well, you hold your Nintendo DS like a book (with left and right screens), and you basically use the touchscreen to undergo a wide variety of simple, cleanly-designed, interesting exercises intended to make you smarter. Or, at least, keep your brain sharp and fresh and delicious. At the end of your "fun", the game eventually calculates and reports your "mental age" — often with painful/comedic effect — and tracks your progress over the weeks and months of self-education. And that's about it.

Of course, no video game can take the place of actually going out and doing something.

See previous posts on the topic of brain training here.

—Mellow Monk

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Make your own Japanese flute

For the handy and musically inclined, here are directions on how to make your own yokobue (transverse flute).

—Mellow Monk

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Green tea in a plastic bottle—say it ain't so!

Here's a Korean TV commercial for a bottled ready-to-drink green tea. The commercial is obviously aimed at young people, and it reminds me of what Mr. Nagata said about the sad trend among young people in Japan today to see green tea as something that you buy in a bottle, not something you brew yourself.

Notice that the plastic bottle in commercial is colored to make the tea look ultra-green. Another thing that the commercial doesn't tell you is that a lot of the polyphenols in green tea start to break down within a few hours of brewing, so that by the time that bottle of tea reaches you, it's lost of lot of its health-promoting "punch".

So don't succumb to the temptation of bottled tea—it's healthier to brew your own. The whole tea-brewing process is also an excellent opportunity to take a step back and relax. Green tea isn't just a drink; it's an experience.





—Mellow Monk

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Animal onomatopoeia

A cat says "Meow" in English but "Nyan" in Japanese. A list of these and other animal sounds in various languages can be found here.

—Mellow Monk

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Kissing cures hayfever?

According to one study, kissing may alleviate hayfever:

Scientists based at the Satou hospital in Japan found that kissing worked by relaxing the body and reducing the production of histamine – a chemical that the body produces in response to pollen, causing the sneezing, runny noses and streaming eyes that characterise hay fever attacks.

—Mellow Monk

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