But my bigger question is why doesn’t Japan dominate the Ig Noble Awards ? those Nobel Prize parodies handed out at Harvard each year by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine. One would guess Japan would rule here the way the Russians have ruled in chess.
Yet Japan has won barely a dozen Ig Nobles since the prizes began 16 years ago, a modest amount but still almost twice the number of Japan’s genuine Nobels. And most of the Ig Nobles are genuine lulus….
So writes Thomas Dillon in the March 29, 2008 issue of Japan Times. He gives several examples.
(Thanks to investigator Mark Schreiber for bringing this to our attention.)