The Brand Names Japanese Turned Into Ordinary Words

In 1902, a pharmacy in Osaka started selling a stomach medicine called "conquer Russia pill." After Japan lost World War Two, the government made them change the name. They kept the same pronunciation and swapped one kanji for another. Nobody noticed. The medicine kept selling. Then a company tried to trademark it, went to the Supreme Court twice to defend that trademark, and lost both times. That process, a brand name becoming so widely used that a court rules the company no longer owns it is called genericide. Japan has a lot of it. This video goes through several cases: the word for vacuum flask that traces back to a Tokyo Imperial University professor misquoting an Aesop's fable that doesn't exist, the pedometer name that accidentally invented the 10,000 steps health goal, why NHK journalists keep a list of ordinary words they're not allowed to say on air, and how a British chocolate bar arrived in Japan with no particular meaning and left with one it never had in English. Also: the man who could have owned an entire food category, chose not to, and built a hundred-billion-yen industry anyway.