My brother works for a Japanese firm-he is always getting weird little gifts from the company headquarters. This is stuff like:
-a battery powered envelope opener
-a battery powered nose hair trimmer 
-folding opera glasses(with terrible color correction-you see colored rings around objects)
-a pen and pencil set that folds up
The Japanese seem to love this junk-do people actually use this stuff? He puts the stuff in his office desk-we look at it and wonder “why”?
I don’t understand the confusion. This is an absolutely normal thing for men of a certain age.
People or businesses that receive a lot of mail may find an electric envelope opener quite useful.
I haven’t seen a non-battery powered nose hair trimmer since the '80s. (Not that I’ve been looking.)
Opera glasses often have little handles on them that fold. I don’t think this is a Japanese thing.
Not sure what you mean about a pen and pencil set that folds up.
Yep, and the ones that run on gas produce noxious exhaust fumes, hence batteries.
Men of that age often produce their own gas and noxious exhaust fumes.
Battery operated for buisness travel, quick touch ups in the car, etc.
My home clippers use the 220 outlet.
His bosses are too diplomatic to tell him his nose hair is out of control, so the other items are sent along with the clippers.
I used to be a Buyer. I had reps from my suppliers give me all sorts of doo-dads and gadgets by the handfuls. “Promotional” items. They’d have the supplier’s brand or logo printed on them. I had so many I’d pass them out to coworkers, friends and family and still had them falling off my desk! I’ll bet most of those little corporate gifts your brother gets are provided to the company for free in exchange for a large purchase.
We sometimes host Brazilian and Japanese students in our house, and often they bring along some kind of thank-you gift. On average, the gifts we get from the Brazilian students (stuff like snacks or beauty products) strike me as more practical than the stuff we get from the Japanese students (stuff like teeny-tiny pads of paper or wee wall hangings).
There’s a Toronto-area chain of Japanese import stores called One’s Better Living. They sell some items that are fairly practical, like Japanese dishes and bedding, but there’s lots of stuff (especially kitchen and office doohickeys) that seems more cute than practical.
What the hell kind of nose hair do you have that you need 220?!
How about the little fan that attaches to your chopsticks to cool off your noodles?
Chindōgu is the Japanese art of inventing ingenious everyday gadgets that, on the face of it, seem like an ideal solution to a particular problem.
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What the hell kind of nose hair do you have that you need 220?!
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European hair, apparently. All of their appliances run on manly 240 instead of our wimpy 120.
I was once gifted with a wind-up sushi. One of those very, very realistic plastic food items like you see in restaurant displays, but with wheels and a windup knob. I’ve spent 30 years trying to figure out… why.
The Japanese are hardly unique in selling odd and/or useless gadgets. Have you never seen a SkyMall catalog? Or the ThinkGeek site?
Sometime in the 80s and 90s, there was a movement that invited creative folks to crank out “un-useless” inventions. Meant to be fun mostly, it also aimed to see how much ideas people had in mind that may one day be converted into products that would sell gazillions. Some un-useless inventions I recall:
- Non-slip spaghetti fork. A fork with long screws bolted between the tines supposedly to keep a spool of spaghetti from slipping out. Imagine one tooth being chipped at a time.
- Sleeper eyes. Just a pair of open eyes made of paper that one stuck to his eyelids to go to sleep during a boring class.
- Safety kitchen knife mate. A manequin hand set to hold a vegetable or meat while slicing it. Looks gruesome.
Heh. I’ve got a wind-up nun on my desk. She walks and shoots sparks out of her mouth. She would eat your sushi for lunch.
Nunzilla has been around a while and almost makes sense.
My sister collected windups for years and had some really bizarre stuff, but she always considered my sushi the pinnacle of inexplicable weirdness.
Bah. I burn the hair out of my nose with a lighted match.
I bought this one recently - it’s better than a battery powered one. Very compact, and solid build.