Masahiko Kajita is not exactly a household name, but this Doctor Dolittle of Japan's No.2 toymaker, Takara Co is the brains behind the smash-hit dog-language electronic interpreter Bowlingual.
Kajita, 41, took charge of Takara's "Dr Dolittle Project" in August 2001 and developed Bowlingual, after establishing a long pedigree of wacky gizmos ranging from the "romantic bus stop" to a time bomb alarm clock for the company.
PHOTO: AFP
One of Takara's top salesmen for 18 years, Kajita switched to the creative side in 1999 after criticizing his wares once too often.
At the time Takara was suffering from weak sales despite its high brand recognition as the manufacturer of Licca-chan dolls, a Japanese version of Barbie.
"I was such a brash salesman and always complaining about products that I was told to make them myself," he said.
Takara's road to recovery came after Keita Sato, second son of the founder Yasuta Sato, took control and embarked on a shake-up of the 45-year old company in 2000.
Kajita said he hung up on a call from a head-hunter and decided to stay on after Sato gave him a freer hand at work.
The result was the "Nanchatte" (just kidding) series of tricky toys, starting from January 2000 with Kajita's banana-shaped handset for use with cellphones, which proved to be a hit and helped revive the fortunes of the near-bankrupt company.
The series later included lurid pink paper tissue holder that sets off a female voice panting in erotic delight whenever it is used. The product has since been taken off market.
More popular items still on sale include his "Let's Beer Great," syphon and beer tap for a single can of beer that allows the home drinker to play barman for ¥3,480 (US$29.50).
For those who want to taste a life of luxury on the cheap, "Cleopatra's Bath" -- at ¥3,480 a golden lion-head fountainhead made of plastic which sticks to the wall with a sucker -- takes in water from the bathtub and returns it out of its mouth.
Before Bowlingual, Kajita also came up with the cheap and cheeful "Romantic Bus Stop" to get round one of the stickier areas of human communication.
The toy is a replica of a request-stop button from a bus that can be stuck on the dashboard of a car. When a passenger pushes it, it says "The next stop is the final one -- my room."
Kajita also dreamed up a way to start one's day with a bang with his "Dynamite" time bomb alarm that drops from the ceiling with a boom when the time comes.
A whimsical offer for the executive with a tight budget is the "Oh! Note" stylish black laptop computer, which turns out to be just a white board and a pen when opened.
Married with two teenage sons and a two-year-old daughter, Kajita said he ignores common sense and develops whatever he feels like, but does not try his ideas out on his own children.
"I never talk about my job at home. I don't bring work home ... I'm developing what I want. I can enjoy myself by making funny goods," he said.
But his instincts are not unerring: "I dropped the idea of a high-heeled shoe phone as the heel sticks in your ear," Kajita recalled, and he is aware that his sense of fun must be grounded in the hard-nosed realities of business.
When company president Sato launched a real single-seat electric car modelled on Takara's long-selling toy vehicles last year Kajita said his immediate thought was "the next thing should be a jet."
"I later found it would cost ¥80 billion with no optional devices and not many people have a pilot's licence," he said.
The idea was spiked. The success of Bowlingual speaks for itself in any language, however.
It has sold 300,000 units in the six months to March and could have sold more if supply could have kept pace with demand. The US$120 gadget is set to advance into South Korea in June and the US in August.
Bowlingual has an 8cm microphone attached to a dog collar, and transmits the dog's barks and whines to a palm-sized console held by the animal's master.
The console, equipped with a small display, immediately classifies the sounds into emotional categories such as frustration, menace and joy and shows 200 varieties of matching human phrases.
Time magazine has dubbed the device one of the best inventions of last year, while the US-based science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research awarded Bowlingual its 2002 Ig Nobel Peace Prize for promoting harmony between the species.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
WHAT WAS ALL THAT FOR? Jaw Shaw-kong said that Cheng Li-wen had pushed for more drastic cuts and attacked him, just for the outcome to be nearly identical to his bill The legislature yesterday passed a supplementary budget bill to fund the purchase of separate packages of US military equipment, with the combined amount of spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.8 billion). The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their legislative majority to pass the bill, which runs until 2033 and has two main funding provisions. One was for NT$300 billion of arms sales already approved by the US for Taiwan on Dec. 17 last year, the other was for NT$480 billion for another arms package expected to be announced by Washington. The bill, which fell short of the NT$1.25
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS