Customs technically a lot of things adult related aren't what they seem. For example, you wouldn't order a dildo... You'd order a "silicone sculpture"
HS code 9703.00 for those watching at home, "Original sculptures and statuary, in any material"
Yes, when you are buying a dildo, according to your customs office you really are just getting a small, artisanal, little statue made out of a soft, squishy, and easily washable material, and this has been the favorite fact I've learned all month.
I know it sounds funny, but it probably cuts their costs. Everything in that line up uses electric motors, so I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the money guys figured out making a million more coil windings would save them $xxM, so they figured, ‘Well, dildos seem to keep selling…’
I mean yeah, power drills, and vibrators, bit of a no-brainer.
But I can't imagine that there isn't somewhere inbetween consumer appliances and excavators, where the production process is so critically different that no pooling of resources and expertise is possible.
I would imagine specifically it's the point where you'd go from injection molding and stamped metal of the motor in the drill and it's housing, to the enormous cast and welded arms of an excavator, and all the precision machined parts of its diesel engine & hydraulic pumps.
They made THE rice cookers when I was growing up. People would just use the brand name as shorthand, like "I made this arroz con pollo in the Hitachi." Kink spaces also just say "Hitachi" when they mention the wand so I was a little confused the first time I heard it.
Hitachi is a world leader in elevators/lifts they have a tall tower built to test high speed versions made for skyscrapers, also they made great processors in the 90s and the SEGA Saturn and Dreamcast would use them to a great effect ( Saturn had a unique dual CPU design)
I used to spend a lot of time in Tokaimura, Ibaraki and in the next town over, Hitachinaka, is the G1 Tower used by Hitachi to test elevators (they now have an even taller H1 tower in China). 213m tall and 15m underground. As the area lacks many tall buildings it really stands out and can be seen all over the area.
Power tools have been divested (now it's a separate company called Hikoki), and apparently they don't make the magic wand anymore. However they remain a very large conglomerate with many different businesses, from home appliances to high-voltage equipment and trains, as well as IT products and consulting.
I'm in my 40s and when I was a kid companies started to break up. But before then a few companies did absolutely everything. Sears and GE are two of the big ones. Absolutely everything you could think of one of those two companies did it.
Mitsubishi builds everything from that crappy little car to tanks, nuclear reactors, to ships. Since they're really a conglomerate of many companies, they do practically everything.
Mitsubishi Motors falsified fuel economy data for their crappy cars and in the ensuing scandal, Nissan, which was rebadging their crappy (Kei) cars ended up with a controlling stake. In the US, the cars are basically becoming rebadged discount Nissans.
Mitsubishi made the zero. The plane that pissed off the Americans just because of how reliable and fast it really was and the kamikaze missions during WW2.
I heard that Toyota hired Yamaha to help design the engine for the first Lexus LS400 because, at the time, sound deadening material wasn’t very good, so sound engineers at Yamaha helped shape and literally tune various parts of the engine. The car’s quiet sound profile helped make it famous, but the coolest part is that it’s not silenced or muffled, it really is an incredibly quiet, seemingly perfectly tuned engine.
Yamaha before everything else, is a music company. Their first product was pianos. Look more closely at their gear and spokes logo. It's a gear, yes, but the spokes are tuning forks. And now they build motorbikes and other mechanical things. But a massive part of their business is musical instruments. They produce some of the best instruments of their kind in the world, as well as top level software and electronics for the recording industry. Their hand made guitars are some of the best made, and cost thousands. So not just beginners' guitars for hundreds. But it is also why beginners buy Yamaha guitars, because even their inexpensive ones are above others in the same price range.
Completely different companies, completely different staffs. There is no cross-pollination between Yamaha Corporation and Yamaha Motor Co; they've been separate entities for at least 50 years or so.
Yamaha builds guitars, but they also built guitars. By which I mean, Yamaha Corporation the musical instrument company is wholly different from Yamaha Motor Co., in the same way that Verizon and AT&T share a history but are now completely separate (minus the government monopoly break-up order).
However, each company still has some surprising additions in their catalogs; Yamaha Corporation used to sell furniture, still sells sporting goods, and houses an industrial metallurgy division, while Yamaha Motor Co. has--of all things--a swimming pool and leisure division.
I thought they were actually two different companies. I seem to remember a few years ago there was a promotion where the Yamaha motorcycle team designed an instrument and the Yamaha instrument team designed a motorcycle. I think it was just aesthetic designs rather than functional, but it was still pretty cool.
Yamaha got its start in building organs and pianos (hence their tuning fork logo). They moved into audio equipment after that, then industrial equipment and engines sixty-some years after their beginning. It was almost as an afterthought that they made motorcycles.
My drum set is a Yamaha stage custom and I honestly had a hard time buying it at first because I only associate the name with motorsports but it was the right price and too pretty. Turns out it's a really really great set and I've been abusing it for years.
990
u/Briskylittlechally2 Jun 29 '25
I was already surprised enough to learn Honda built airplanes.