Recently, a group of Japanese were recognized for their outstanding work in the field of strange inventions. The infamous Ig Nobel Prize awarded these Japanese inventors for their work on a smoke detector that spews wasabi.

What Is The Ig Nobel Prize?

The Ig Nobel Prize is an annual prize awarded to inventions “that make people laugh then make them think.” These are inventions that won’t necessarily change the world as we know it or cure cancer, but are interesting in their own right in the ways they solve specific, niche problems. In short: this award was basically something created for wacky Japanese scientists like Dr. NakaMats.

The Prize is awarded for lots of different categories which vary from year to year including the typical Nobel Prize categories like peace, literature, and chemistry; but the Ig Nobel Prize can also award prizes for oddly specific categories like public safety, veterinary medicine, and aviation.

The Ig Nobel Prize award ceremony itself is pretty goofy. The Prizes are given away by actual Nobel Laureates, but that’s about the extent of the ceremony’s seriousness. Wacky rituals and running gags punctuate the ceremony, including barrages of paper airplanes flying at the stage and sword swallowing.

Japanese Domination

Not surprisingly, tons of previous winners have been Japanese; you could even say that the Japanese are building a dynasty of Ig Nobel Prize winners. Last year’s Japanese winners were scientists who determined that slime can be used to map out railroad tracks. 2009′s Japanese scientists discovered that kitchen garbage can be shrunk down using bacteria derived from panda poop. The list goes on.

And yes, Dr. NakaMats actually did win an Ig Nobel Prize in 2005 for photographing and analyzing every meal he’s eaten in the last 30 years, a contribution to modern nutrition that won’t soon be forgotten.

The Wasabi Smoke Detector

The Wasabi Smoke Detector won this year’s Ig Nobel Prize for chemistry. So what makes this particular invention so great? Not only was it an achievement for the scientists to get the wasabi to the right consistency to be sprayed out from the smoke detector, but the invention has uses you might not have thought about: it’s a fantastic solution for deaf people who wouldn’t be able to hear a typical fire alarm.

One of the scientists who worked on the project said this upon receiving the prize:

This prize is a gift from the subjects who slept in the examination room and had been choked with [the] pungent smell [that caused] tears and coughing. I do appreciate their courage and cooperation.

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Kyushu is the southernmost of the four main Japanese islands, right below the main island of Honshu. This new bullet train (also known as shinkansen) line is the first one to ever connect the whole island north to south, and it’s kind of a big deal.

Why is this new bullet train line so important? It halves the time it used to take to travel Kyushu, it introduces an awesome new type of bullet train (the N700 series, for all you train nerds out there), and is one of the last steps in connecting all of Japan (excluding Okinawa) via bullet train from north to south.

But the bottom line is that you can now cruise from the top to the bottom of Kyushu in style and luxury at about 200 miles per hour in about the same time it takes to watch a movie. Pretty cool, huh?

Do The Wave!

There was even a commercial made for the new bullet train line. 30,000 people ran alongside the train doing what they called the world’s longest wave as it took its 150 mile maiden voyage. People cheered, dressed up, did flips, made signs, and most importantly, flew rainbow-colored banners all the way up and down the line. It’s like if a giant Nyan Cat ran alongside the train for an hour and a half.

[yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5kU6mImUh0']

Unfortunately, the bullet train line opened the same day as the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami hit Japan. The commercial was pretty much immediately pulled after the disaster because it seemed in poor taste to have such a celebratory commercial when the country was suffering so much. Opening ceremonies for the line were delayed or cancelled.

A few months after the disaster though, the commercial won a Gold Prize at the international Cannes Lions festival (not to be confused with the Cannes that gives artsy films those palm awards). This new award made a lot of people see the commercial in a new light. Looking back an the commercial, it’s a nice sign of people coming together over something after the catastrophe.

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