Curated category
Japanese inventions
- PlayStation (console)PlayStation was born from humiliation. On the first day of the 1991 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Sony stood on stage and announced a partnership…
- USBUSB, the Universal Serial Bus, sits at the back of nearly every device you own. In 1996, when the first specification launched, a typical desktop computer…
- Blu-rayBlu-ray arrived in stores on the 20th of June 2006, and the world's home entertainment shelves would never look quite the same.
- DVDDVD arrived in Japan on the 1st of November 1996, and it changed how the world kept and watched moving images. At that moment, a slim silver disc the same…
- PROCYONPROCYON, which stands for Proximate Object Close flyby with Optical Navigation, launched into space on the 3rd of December 2014 at 13:22:04 Japan Standard…
- VHSVHS, short for Video Home System, arrived in Japan on the 31st of October 1976, when JVC began selling a machine called the HR-3300 in the Akihabara district…
- DVD-VideoDVD-Video arrived in Japanese homes on the 19th of October, 1996, and within a few years it had become the dominant way people watched movies in most of the…
- ProcyonThe University of Tokyo and JAXA joined forces to build a spacecraft weighing just 70 kilograms. This small probe measured approximately 60 centimeters on…
- High-definition videoHigh-definition video begins with a number: 480. Any video image with considerably more than 480 vertical scan lines in North America, or 576 lines in…
- BunrakuBunraku is a form of traditional Japanese puppet theatre that began in Osaka at the start of the 17th century and is still performed today.
- AnimeAnime began not with a studio or a streaming service, but with a short film nobody can agree on. A claim exists for Katsudō Shashin, made around 1907 by an…
- KaraokeKaraoke earns a man an Ig Nobel Peace Prize. In 2004, Daisuke Inoue was handed the tongue-in-cheek award for inventing karaoke, praised for giving people "an…
- Video CDIn 1993, four electronics giants gathered to create a new standard for home video. Sony, Philips, Matsushita, and JVC signed off on the White Book…
- ButsudanA butsudan sits at the heart of many Japanese Buddhist homes, a cabinet that is far more than furniture. It might be an ornate lacquered platform or a modest…