RestMap Daily Puzzle

Tokyo 🇯🇵 — Travel Facts from Waddles' World Tour

Tokyo, Japan, is one of fourteen destinations featured on Waddles' World Tour, RestMap's free daily 5-letter word puzzle. Each week's puzzles are themed around a different city, and every solve unlocks an authored travel fact about the place. The Shibuya Crossing anchors the Tokyo week. Below are five sourced facts that turn up across the Tokyo puzzle set.

History & invention

At the height of Japan's 1980s economic bubble, the land beneath Tokyo's Imperial Palace and its gardens was valued higher than all the real estate in the entire state of California combined.

Source: Time Out Tokyo, Factinate

Science & nature

In 2011, when a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck Japan, 27 Shinkansen bullet trains were running at high speed. Seismographs detected tremors seconds before the violent waves arrived, allowing emergency brakes to activate — not a single passenger was killed or injured.

Source: WeBuildValue, CNN Japan architecture

Restroom culture

TOTO engineers asked 300 employees to test different bidet spray positions before discovering that 43 degrees is the 'golden angle' for optimal comfort and cleanliness — a finding that became the engineering standard for every Washlet toilet seat sold since 1980.

Source: CNN, TOTO USA blog

Restroom culture

Japanese women were so embarrassed by bathroom sounds that they would continuously flush toilets to mask the noise, wasting enormous amounts of water. TOTO's solution was the 'Otohime' (Sound Princess) — a small device that plays the sound of flushing water at the press of a button, saving an estimated 20 liters per use.

Source: Tokyo Room Finder Blog, Facts and Details Japan

Food & drink

The fifth taste — umami — was discovered in 1908 by chemist Kikunae Ikeda at Tokyo Imperial University. While eating a simple seaweed broth, he identified glutamate as the source of a savory flavor distinct from sweet, sour, salty, and bitter, and it took nearly a century for Western science to officially recognize it.

Source: Sky History, Yokogao Magazine