In the eyes of many Americans, Japan is known for ‘improving, not inventing’. Outside of the realm of technology, where they’ve given us everything from DVDs to side-scrolling video games, the Japanese are best known for utterly bizarre and useless modern inventions like the convenient eyedrop funnel. But many everyday items which we usually don’t associate with Japan actually originate in the Land of the Rising Sun. For example:

1. Flip Flops

Modern flip flops, indispensible for beachwear and moldy showers alike, started off as the Japanese zoori sandal, which are made from a variety of natural materials and worn with traditional Japanese garb. Although some straw-based varieties are considered as informal as flip-flops are in the US, others can be worn in full kimono getup, where they are combined with split-toe socks called tabi.

If these shoes and toe-socks seem weird, keep in mind that they were also worn by samurai, who didn’t need any stinkin’ ankle support to do their fighting thing back in feudal Japan. Zoori reached the US via New Zealand in the 1930’s, where to this day they are known as jandals, short for ‘Japanese sandal’. In several parts of Europe the footwear is still known by as local word for ‘Japanese’, and in Greece they’re even called sayonares for some reason. This is hopefully not a coincidence but a result of a Greek person naming them after the only Japanese word he could think of. (If they were imported to Greece today, they’d probably be known as karaokahondahentaisushi.)

Flip-flops became popular in the US in the 1950’s, possibly after being brought back from soldiers returning from war in the Pacific. These days, they’re widely recommended for use in communal bathrooms in order to avoid the spread of fungal diseases and general grossness. This is ironic, because for many years the Japanese have also been using ‘bathroom slippers’, which are worn inside bathrooms to prevent any ‘splashing’ from being trekked elsewhere in the house.

2. Rock Paper Scissors

Versions of this solution to so many domestic disputes has been documented in Japan for a very long time – some say back to the BC period, and in any case definitely long before it appeared in the West. Nobody knows exactly how the game first appeared – possibly a bunch of Japanese people arguing over who would go on the next saber tooth tiger hunt. It made its way to Europe from Japan in the 1700s, where it somehow became known as ‘Rochambeau’ after a local count (who knows, maybe he just enjoyed playing it?), and got to America from there. To this day, though, it’s far more common in Japan, where it is known as jankenpon and is often considered both entertaining enough for reality television and serious enough for grown men to get into fights over:

From this video, one would presume that rock-paper-scissors-related dueling is not unheard of in Japan.

3. The Adventures of Milo and Otis

This goofy, adorable kids’ movie from the 80’s, about a pug-nosed pup and a ginger kitten trying to find their way home, was originally a Japanese movie called Koneko Monogatari, orA Kitten’s Story. Despite the presence of kittens, the Japanese version was not a children’s movie but rather an art film that ran fourteen minutes longer than the eventual American cut. The American studio used some of the 70 hours of spare footage to re-edit the movie, added some wackier narration, and released it to thunderous applause.

Since its release, Milo and Otis has battled allegations of animal cruelty. Animal protection in movies in 1980’s Japan was far less strict than it is in modern day America, and the film does contain oddly disturbing footage of adorable pug-faced puppies fighting bears, cats being bitten by snakes, and kittens being attacked by birds and then tossed over cliffs. Animal rights groups alleged that many animals died in the filming, but nothing was ever proven.

4. Fortune Cookies

In America, fortune cookies are pretty much synonymous with Chinese food. Chances are you won’t find them in restaurants serving either Western or Japanese cuisine, and if you did you might assume that the owner was slightly confused about this whole nationality thing. But believe it or not, the fortune cookie actually originated in Japan. Furthermore, to this day they’re pretty much non-existent inside China itself.

Their origins long remained a mystery, but research recently linked the origin of the desserts to fortune-telling sweets sold near temples and shrines in Kyoto, Japan. Mentions of the practice of putting fortunes inside sweets there go back to the mid-nineteenth century, over fifty years before fortune cookies appeared in America. Once stateside, they spread from Japanese to Chinese restaurants in California, where Japanese immigrants would make Chinese-style food, since people in the early 20^th century had not yet cottoned on to the deliciousness of raw fish and seaweed. After WWII, the cookies became popular countrywide. Possibly the ‘Chinese takeover’ of fortune cookies happened during WWII, when many Japanese were interned and couldn’t do much baking. At some point the Japanese gave up on them altogether – maybe around the same time that the first Americans developed a taste for Japanese food, and they could finally stop serving ‘chop suey’.

5. Crystal Meth

Crystal meth is usually something you’d associate more with trailer parks than the supposedly clean and orderly streets of Japan. But crystallized methamphetamine was in fact invented by Japanese chemist Akira Ogata in 1919. This followed the invention of normal methamphetamine by another Japanese chemist in the late nineteenth century. Originally licensed in the US as a treatment for various mental illnesses and also hay fever (!), meth was also handed out freely to troops on both sides of WWII, who apparently wanted their forces completely clear of ADHD. Methamphetamine restriction only started in America in the 1980’s, and this type of drug is now legally used only to treat ADHD and some forms of obesity. Non-legal usage has, of course, skyrocketed since then.

If you’re thinking ‘Thanks, Japan!’, well, keep in mind that they haven’t gotten off easily there, either. Meth, or ‘shabu’, is the most commonly used illegal drug in Japan, where it is available cheaply and controlled by the yakuza. Its use is not unknown among students who need to stay up to study for grueling exams.

6. Leaf Blowers

They’re noisy, annoying and seemingly a symbol of American laziness and consumerist excess – just get yourself a goddamn rake, for god’s sake. But it was actually the supposedly ultra-polite Japan that gave us the leaf-dispersing noise hazard that always gets going at 8am on hungover Sunday mornings.

Japan gave us motorized leaf blowers in the 1970’s, when scientists dreamed of something that could both clean his garden and destroy humanity with the sound of a dying banshee. However, prototypical designs date back to the 19^th Century, when Japanese gardeners used hand-pumped bellows to blow leaves away. The new motorized blowers incorporated technology originally designed for spraying plants with insecticide, and the modern leaf blower was born.

7. Airsoft

Since guns of all kinds in Japan have been banned in Japan since the 1980’s, you wouldn’t expect this all-American pastime to have originated over there. But it was just this ban that in fact led to the invention of this replica firearm. The Japanese apparently liked to pretend they still had guns, because models that fired plastic or rubber BBs became popular soon afterwards, and were eventually exported to America in the mid-1990’s. They gained immediate popularity here because of their advantages of being less expensive, messy and painful than the more traditional sport of paintballing.

Since then, Airsoft weaponry has expanded to include everything from grenades to mines. It’s now used for a range of activities both in the US and worldwide, from military training to groups of young people reenacting video games. Say what you will about the Japanese reputation for oddness, but we haven’t heard much about them being into Airsoft zombie larping.