Month: June 2008

Transparent umbrellas

I think I’m starting to be too used to Japan and I’m loosing my capacity to be surprised by “things that make Japan different”. I uploaded his picture to Flickr and many users told me that all umbrellas in the picture except mine are transparent!

View picture on Flickr

Yes, the transparent umbrella is the most common one in Japan. They’re cheap and they break easily, but people does not care because it’s seen as a temporary or emergency umbrella. Many transparent forgotten umbrellas can be found on the streets after some rain,. Also, I call the transparent umbrella the “community umbrella” because when you put your transparent umbrella together with other transparent umbrellas when you enter a shop or restaurant… then when you leave the place you don’t really know which one was your umbrella so you just get one 🙂 It would be interesting to track a transparent umbrella around Tokyo during rainy week, I bet it would have many “owners” until it breaks.

Another advantage is that you can more or less see what it’s in front of you. In fact when riding a bicycle under the rain it is really useful, although I think it is illegal to ride a bike with an umbrella in Japan. I do it all the time and the police never said anything to me.

Japan is the country in the world where more umbrellas are produced during a year, and transparent umbrellas are the most common here. It must have some kind of record, It could the most successful umbrella of all times, maybe the news super-umbrellas will be the transparent ones 😉 ? Do you know which company makes these transparent umbrellas?

lluvia paraguas

Trains

Pushers extreme version

I’ve never seen something so extreme, it seems the video is from 20 years ago here in Tokyo.

Technology

Leader in Photovoltaic Cell Production

Post author By ageekinjapan
Post date June 29, 2008

In the last few years, the United States has lost its position as the leader in photovoltaic cell production and has stepped aside for Japan, which produces more than 50% of the “raw material” needed for the construction of solar power stations. In the late 90’s, the United States was the leader, due mostly to incentives by the Clinton Administration. From the moment Bush came to office, those incentives stopped being a priority. But in Japan, the government is setting up a lot of plans to stimulate installation, development and production of all kinds of technologies that allow to generate energy without the use of fossil fuels.

Below there is a graphic that shows the growth in world production of photovoltaic cells. More than 50% of the past few year’s production belongs to Japan:

Solar Cells production

Sharp produces 36% of all photovoltaic cells produced in the world in a year. Directors at Sharp say that they’re increasing production at a rate close to an annual 80% in order to cater for the great demand of the European market. Sharp will open the biggest photovoltaic cell production plant in the world in Nara in a few months. With the cells produced at the Sharp factory in Nara, a solar power station with a production capacity of 160MW per year could be built. Sanyo and Kyocera are great photovoltaic cell producers as well.

Japan, apart from investing on technology for the production of alternative energies, is also the world leader in production of hybrid and electric cars. It really looks like they want to stop depending on gas, something that still seems far but IS possible. The strategy of Japan and its big companies seems the best judging by what is happening NOW and “seeing” what is going to happen in a few year’s time. A country without great natural resources as Japan is, the best thing to do is turn into producers of the future “raw materials”. I hope one day the world will depend more on the production of photovoltaic cells than on the oil extraction in certain countries. And I’m sure that it won’t only be Japan, but lots of other countries where they’ll produce their own cells and will build their own solar power stations. In Spain we are not leaders in solar energy, but I think we are world runner-ups, both in production of windmills and in installations of wind power.

Solar Cells
This is how a photovoltaic cell looks like. It works thanks to the photoelectric effect discovered by Hertz and theorized by Albert Einstein more than 100 years ago.

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