Strike! Bowled over in Japan
QUESTION Which bowling alley has the most lanes?
Japan has the world’s largest ten-pin bowling alley, Inazawa Grand Bowl, and the world’s biggest bowling complex, the nagoya Grand Bowl, Tokyo.
During the bowling boom in Japan, 3,700 bowling alleys were opened between 1960 and 1972.
The country’s 120,000 bowling lanes were second only to the U.S., which had 130,000 at that time.
Most of Japan’s bowling equipment was american: balls and lanes from the Brunswick Corporation and bowling pins from the Vulcan Corporation.
When the Grand Bowl opened its doors in the city of Inazawa on March 24, 1972, it became the world’s largest bowling alley with 116 lanes.
In 2010, its classic wooden lanes were replaced with Brunswick pro Lan synthetic lanes and new computers.
nagoya Grand Bowl has 156 lanes on three floors. The Tokyo World Lanes Bowling Centre, which closed in the 1980s, had 512 lanes.
The second-largest bowling alley in the world is the 90-lane Thunderbowl in allen park, Michigan. John Edgar, Leeds.
QUESTION Who coined the terms heterosexual and homosexual?
In 1868, Hungarian journalist Karl Maria Kertbeny coined the terms heterosexual and homosexual to describe sexual experience. They were derived from the Greek hetero, meaning different, and homo for same.
His two other terms, monosexual and heterogenit, used to describe masturbation and bestiality, are now forgotten.
He was an early advocate for homosexual rights. as a young man, a close friend who was gay killed himself after being blackmailed. Kertbeny later recalled his campaign as part of his ‘instinctive drive to take issue with every injustice’.
He first used the term heterosexual when invited to write a book chapter arguing for the decriminalisation of homosexuality. The editor, Gustav Jager, chose not to publish it, but used Kertbeny’s novel term in the book Discovery Of The Soul in 1880.
In 1889, austro-German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing included the terms in psychopathia Sexualis, a catalogue of sexual disorders.
a neurologist and psychiatrist, his view of homosexuality as a form of ‘mental illness, resulting in effeminacy’, dominated Western thinking until the 1970s.
The words appeared in dictionaries in the early 20th century, but were rarely used until popularised by U.S. biologist alfred Kinsey, founder of the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University.
His 1948 study Sexual Behaviour In The Human Male sought to rate sexuality on a scale of zero (exclusively heterosexual) to six (exclusively homosexual).
He concluded that a large ‘portion of the male population has at least some homosexual experience between adolescence and old age’.
It wasn’t until 1973 that the american psychiatric association issued a resolution stating that homosexuality is not a mental illness.
Simon McMillan, Hassocks, W. Sussex.
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