As 2006 comes to a close and Pink Tentacle celebrates its first birthday, I’d like to thank all the readers for making this a rockin’ first year for the site! In 2007, Pink Tentacle will continue to probe the less explored regions of the Japanese web in search of excitement. In the meantime, here’s a […]

Kurimoto Tanshuu (1756 - 1834) sketched wildlife during the Edo period. Check out the National Diet Library links below for more of his fantastic illustrations.
- Senchuufu: 275 pages of creepy crawlies (3 volumes)
- Tako-kurage-ika rui zumaki: 16 images of octopi, jellyfish and squid
- Igyozusan: 10 images of unusual fish (folding scroll)
- Gyofu: 51 […]

On December 12, researchers from Japan’s National Agriculture and Food Research Organization (NARO) and Nippon Flour Mills announced the development of sweet wheat, a hybridized variety of wheat with twice the sugar concentration of common wheat. This first-of-its-kind sweet wheat eliminates the need to add sugar when it is used in cakes or other baked […]

Sumitomo Osaka Cement and YRP Ubiquitous Networking Laboratory have developed cyber-concrete, a smart form of concrete embedded with RFID tags that can store data. Researchers developed a durable coating for YRP’s “ucode” tags, which have a larger storage capacity than ordinary IC tags, and they developed a special reader that, when held near the concrete, […]

Ohayo gozaimasu. Heavy sleepers in Japan no longer need to fret about snoozing through alarm clocks and morning wake-up calls. Alarm Service, which appears to be a company based in Osaka, provides extreme wake-up services guaranteed to have its sleepy customers awake in time for their morning appointments. After an order is placed, an agent […]

Climbing stairs is no easy task for androids, as this video shows. Asimo takes a nasty spill down the stairs during a demonstration while describing the sensors in its feet that allow it to maintain precise balance. Without a sign of embarrassment, even after falling on its face in front of a crowd of […]

SGI Japan has unveiled an intelligent room system, called RoomRender, that can control the electronics, appliances and hardware in a room based on the spoken commands and emotions of the room’s occupants. The company installed the RoomRender system in one of its Tokyo office meeting rooms on December 5. With the cost of RoomRender’s basic […]

UPDATE Dec 21, 2006: Winners announced
GRAND PRIZE: Robotic building cleaning system (Fuji Heavy Industries and Sumitomo). The system received high marks for its efficiency and its ability to work both independently and alongside humans. The judges believe the robot has great potential to develop the market for robotic cleaning systems, as well as establish new […]