{Inter} Cultural Japan

For the French author Marcel Proust fragrances called up the strongest memories, also of forgotten things from a long past childhood. An accidental whiff of roses and you are a small child again, riding your bicycle in the old garden; the penetrating smell of charcoal fires and I am walking in the alleys of Kyoto, near the University on Yoshida-yama, 25 years ago.

But although what we see and hear can be perfectly recorded in digital form, our nose has been less lucky. Unless Japanese scientists at the Tokyo Institute of Technology have their way. As reported by ITBusinessnet, Takamichi Nakamoto of the institute has invented an instrument that uses 15 sensors to analyse a fragrance, record it digitally and then reproduce the same sort of smell again. Such a contraption could be used in the food or cosmetics sector, he believes. Or when selling flowers online, customers could first smell them…

[Can you smell the flowers? Sculpture by Kusama Yayoi in City Art Museum, Matsumoto. Photo © Ad Blankestijn]

Unfortunately, it will still need some work before you get a flowery fragrance from your computer. Reproducing the various smells is the bottleneck: 96 small bottles with chemicals are needed, making the instrument rather unwieldy, to say the least. And the result still seems primitive compared to the sniffing range of the human nose.

So we have to wait many more years until we can use our mobile phone to make a fragrance print and put that in our blog…

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