This film documents what happened when I (founder of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony) visited two Ig Nobel Prize winners at Hokkaido University.
Toshiyuki Nakagaki, winner (with his team) of two Ig Nobel Prizes (in 2008 for discovering that slime molds can solve puzzles, and in 2010 for using slime mold to determine the optimal routes for railroad tracks) and Kazunori Yoshizawa, winner in 2017 for the discovery of a female penis, and a male vagina, in a cave insect, were gracious hosts. Many of their colleagues and students joined in the mutual amusement.
Kiyoshi Furusawa and his colleagues tell the video story of my visit to the campus and especially to the two labs:
A second video shows what happened during the public event we held later that day with a group of happily rambunctious students:
This all happened in late September of 2018.
I was in Japan for the opening of the Ig Nobel Prizes exhibition at the Tokyo Dome complex. Professors Nakagaki and Yoshizawa—together with eight other Japanese Ig Nobel Prize winners—took part in the press opening of that event in (of course) Tokyo, as did some fifty-odd journalists. (Quick snippets of that day appear near the start of this video.)
The arrival of these Hokkaido videos comes at a happy time—in the middle of the 2019 Ig Nobel EuroTour, when scenes a little like these are happening in many of the ten European countries I’m visiting.