On the fourth floor of Tokyo’s busiest electronics store, rack after gleaming rack of gadgets pay homage to a 21st century obsession. Moov, Fitbit, Jawbone, Garmin — the self-quantifiers are all here: sleek, wrist-borne talismans of a generation determined to record every step, heartbeat and snore.
In a less glamorous part of town, in headquarters grimed with a film of long-term corporate fatigue, is the Japanese business that started all this. Yamasa, the company proudly declares on its street-facing wall, “inventor of the Manpokei”: the world’s first commercial pedometer and a pioneer of wearable fitness technology five decades before it became a thing.
Today, Yamasa Tokei Keiki [Tokei means clocks and Keiki meters] is not well known. It has missed out on the boom it conceptualised 50 years ago. Its big hope for growth in this era of barometric-altimeter enabled pulse monitors and Bluetooth smartphone pairing? A paw-step tracker for dogs, deploying a flimsy pun and called the Wanpokei.