These rooms are like the space-efficient rooms of a standard Japanese business hotel, but, once again, with distinctive ryokan touches.

BBC: Capsule Ryokan Kyoto, where modern meets traditional

Before being compressed for transmission, the video stream is reformatted for the standard Japanese phone's 320-by-240 pixel screen.

ECONOMIST: America is finally poised to get mobile television

The I-MiEV and some Nissan Leafs will be equipped for this kind of fast charging, but the U.S. has yet to decide if it will develop its own standard, or embrace the Japanese form, which goes by the colorful name CHAdeMO.

FORBES: Hyundai, Mitsubishi, Nissan Electric Cars At LA Auto Show

Japanese industriousness and engineering has become the gold standard to achieve and replicate.

FORBES: Amid Japan's Earthquake, Entrepreneurship

Its predecessor, the Business Accounting Deliberation Council, appeared powerless to pass any standard that would damage the suffering Japanese economy.

ECONOMIST: Company accounts

But a universal 3G standard will allow the Europeans to tackle the Japanese on their own turf.

CNN: ASIANOW - TIME Asia | Phone Wars: Episode 3G

The show's curators, Judy Ogana and Joy Mboya, decided to try anyway, sifting through 2, 000 photographs, most of them taken by Boniface Mwangi, a young Kenyan working for the local Daily Standard, and Yasuyoshi Chiba, a gutsy Japanese.

ECONOMIST: Can art make the politicians try harder?