Japan’s Minister of Defense Shinjirō Koizumi posed with a cardboard drone on Monday during a meeting with drone manufacturer AirKamuy. The AirKamuy 150 is a cheap pre-fab cardboard drone meant to die on the battlefield and it comes shipped in a flatpack like an IKEA shelf.
Whoever passed over the name Origami-Kaze should be fired
Often non-native speakers don’t see puns the same way as native speakers. It might be a case of the kanji for origami and the kanji for kamikaze are unrelated and therefore may not rhyme in japanese. I don’t know enough about japanese to be sure though.
You’re basically right. The kami in origami means paper 紙 while the kami in kamikaze means god 神. That doesn’t mean you couldn’t make a pun about it, but the more fundamental problem is that kamikaze does not mean “suicide attack” in Japanese. The actual word for it is tokkou 特攻, a euphemism that means “special attack”.
Kamikaze originally refers to this historical event where a “divine wind” protected Japan from invasion. The term was later used in relation to suicide attacks, but I think tokkou is the word that’s more commonly associated with the WW2 suicide attacks in Japanese and kamikaze has kept its original definition.Kami meaning god and kami* meaning paper do have different pitch accent patterns, but that’s never kept Japanese speakers from doing wordplay. In fact, the pun works even better in Japanese than it does in English. However, I think they would be confused why someone would want to name it that for a couple of reasons:
- The suicide bombers from WW2 would probably not be the first thing on their mind when hearing the word “kamikaze”. In the first place, the reason they were called kamikaze was because they were likened to the “divine wind” that prevented the Mongols from invading Japan twice. And the few times I’ve actually heard “kamikaze” being used in Japanese, it’s always used figuratively.
- It’s not actually made of folded paper. This is danbooru kurafuto (cardboard crafts), not origami.
*) It becomes “gami” in “origami” because it’s the second part of a compound word, but the word on its own is “kami”.
EDIT: I just realised something: the company making these is called AirKamuy. “Kamuy” is the Ainu word for god. So if you squint real hard, it does kind of invoke kamikaze. Probably not intentional, though.
The Japanese absolutely love word puns.
And they can take it a step further with kanji similarities.
This is the only real reason I’ll accept, that they saw the pun as low hanging fruit and left it
What is the difference between a “suicide drone” and a missile? Both are just guided to run into their target. It’s not like an ICBM wants to return home after dropping the payload.
So with the missile, it knows where it is because it knows where it isn’t.
I guess the method of propellment (not a word).
On other news, I hate how officials always try to avoid the word “drone”. Loitering munitions, unmanned aerial vehicle. Like just say drone, there’s no confusion.
It feels very zombie movie.
I cant wait til we’re all firing at each other with condensed fecal matter at mach 7.
Our species is really good at getting creative with low-budget weapons, whether it’s diseased blankets or catapulting our own plagued corpses at each other.
That’s right, the medieval era. Ridiculous shit man.
The blankets were given to Native Americans by colonists. I forget whether they knew or not, but the American genocide is 100% real.
The lobbing corpses thing is attributed to Genghis Khan, and it may be apocryphal.
We really are apes.
🌍👨🦱🔫🐵 Always have been.
But I assumed the airframe was probably the cheapest component after electronics guidance and munitions were added?
Probably right, but can it get even cheaper?
Not much substance in the article unless you pay.
Difficult to assess anything from it, one would hope they’ve calculated everything correctly. I know cardboard can be strong. But I have doubts about it’s rigidity and longevity. These things have to handle being stored in an improvised bunker that’s probably damp.
Building something like that is fairly trivial. What the article doesn’t talk about is the sensor or communications package these things will carry. I suspect the $2000 price tag doesn’t include any of that.
For $2000 it better have something. The real question is how good though - $2000 greatly limits what you can do, but a pi, 5 mile radio, and a camera well fit into that budget, while a full AI system that can navigate without GPS someplace and then decide on a target cannot.
I suspect it does include that, because otherwise I’d expect it to cost more like $200, if not even less.
Omg how much is worth life now? like 200bucks?
The war of the future SUCKS!
Terminator tried to warn us, but we didnt listen.
flatpack like an IKEA shelf
And at a size of 0.5% of an Olympic swimming pool
Ukrainian soldiers now unsure what to do with the mountain of excess allen keys that was quickly generated.
They were able to build 50 new tanks from the metal they obtained after melting them down.
I’m gonna need that expressed in eighteenths of football fields, pardner. 🇱🇷🦅
Hope you got a multitool
That refers to the form, not the size. Like it’s not a cube or cylindrical box, but a flat cuboid.
No, you’re a flat cuboid.
/s
* Minecraft noises *
How many is that in football fields?
Australia sent something similar to Ukraine a few years ago, but I haven’t heard too much about them since.
It was only a matter of time, and I’m surprised that it’s taken this long for a cardboard drone to come to market. Dirt cheap, but strong enough to hold together to deliver the payload.
Until someone rolls out the firetrucks.
Zero 2
