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Japan’s Master Inventor Has Over 3,500 Patents

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He says his best ideas arrive 0.5 seconds before he drowns.

Yoshiro Nakamatsu doesn’t sketch his inventions at a desk. He dives underwater without an oxygen tank, holds his breath until his brain starts to starve, and waits for the flash of insight he claims only shows up when death feels closest. The Tokyo-born engineer, better known to the world as Dr. NakaMats, says he’s filed more than 3,500 patents over his lifetime — enough, he likes to point out, to beat Thomas Edison’s tally outright.

• Nakamatsu, born in June 1928 and a University of Tokyo graduate, claims over 3,500 patents and openly compares his output to Thomas Edison’s.
• His creative process involves near-drowning underwater ideation, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and a nail-free, 24-karat-gold-plated “Calm Room” built to block radio and TV waves.
• He has long insisted he invented the floppy disk in 1952 and licensed patents to IBM in 1979, a claim IBM has disputed by saying the licensing covered other patents.

The Man Who Claims to Have Beaten Edison

By the time Great Big Story caught up with him, Nakamatsu was already deep into his tenth decade, still cataloguing an inventory of patents he puts at over 3,500 — a figure he uses specifically to draw the comparison to Edison, whose U.S. patent count famously topped out around 1,093. Whether every filing holds up to that framing is beside the point for Nakamatsu; the number itself has become part of his public identity, the same way “Dr. NakaMats” has replaced Yoshiro Nakamatsu in most headlines about him.

Underwater Brainstorming and the Golden Calm Room

Nakamatsu’s ideation ritual is the centerpiece of the mini-documentary, and it sounds less like R&D and more like a controlled near-death experience. He submerges himself without breathing gear, deliberately cutting oxygen to his brain, and says his sharpest ideas surface in that narrow window he describes as “0.5 seconds before death” — elsewhere quoted as “0.05 seconds” — at which point he scribbles the idea down on a waterproof notepad before he has to surface.

He visualizes his inventions in the moment just before death, then writes them down on an underwater notepad before he has to come up for air.

Back on dry land, the ritual continues in a room built specifically to remove distraction: no nails in the walls, and the whole space plated in 24-karat gold to keep out stray radio and television signals. He listens to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony while he works there, and he rides an elevator in his Tokyo residence that he calls a “vertical moving room,” insisting the motion itself helps stimulate his thinking.

From Soy Sauce Pumps to Love Jet

Long before the underwater routine became his signature, a young Nakamatsu built the “Shoyu Churu Churu,” a siphon pump designed to transfer soy sauce or kerosene without spilling. That early utilitarian streak eventually stretched into stranger territory: “PyonPyon” jumping shoes fitted with leaf springs on the soles, the “Cerebrex” brain-cooling armchair, an anti-falling-asleep pillow meant for drivers, and a self-defense wig. He also created “Love Jet,” an aphrodisiac spray he pitched as a response to Japan’s declining birth rate — the kind of invention that reads less like engineering and more like social commentary dressed up as a product.

The Floppy Disk Dispute

Nakamatsu’s most contested claim is also his biggest one: he has said for decades that he invented the floppy disk in 1952 and licensed related patents to IBM in 1979. IBM has pushed back on the framing, noting that its agreements with him covered other patents rather than the floppy disk technology itself. The disagreement hasn’t slowed him down publicly — it’s a claim he’s repeated for years, alongside the Edison comparison, as part of the broader case he makes for his own place in invention history, not unlike how The Homeless Boy Who Invented Louis Vuitton tells its own story of an unlikely origin behind a famous name.

A Regimen Built to Reach 144

Diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2014, Nakamatsu didn’t hand the problem to his doctors — he researched his own treatments and set a stated goal of living to age 144, backing it with a strict personal health regimen and constant self-monitoring. It’s the same instinct that runs through everything else in his story: distrust conventional limits, test the extreme version yourself, and see what happens. Figures who push a single trait to an extraordinary degree tend to draw that kind of scrutiny, the same way profiles like Robert Wadlow, The Tallest Man in History get remembered for how far past the normal range they actually went.

Nakamatsu never did back off the Edison comparison, and there’s no indication in his own accounting that the patent count stopped climbing after 3,500. For a man who claims his best ideas arrive half a second before he’d otherwise drown, stopping was never really the plan.