Yoshiro Nakamatsu

In 2019, Nakamatsu was featured in a short mini-documentary by popular YouTube channel, Great Big Story. In the documentary, Nakamatsu discusses some of his successful inventions and shows his process that he uses to come up with his inventions. As of December 12, 2020, the video has over 4.2 million views.

In June 2014, Nakamatsu, who has contended that it should be possible for people to reach 144 years of age by taking care of their health, revealed that he is suffering from prostate cancer and that his doctors did not expect him to live past the end of 2015. He has sought a new treatment for the disease. In September 2015, Nakamatsu appeared at the awards ceremony for the Ig Nobel prizes, where he performed a song about his medical condition.

In 2013, Nakamatsu was featured on the Sky 1 programme, The Moaning of Life, where Karl Pilkington travels the world to see how people face up to life's biggest issues. In 2015, Full Metal Breakfast released a song called "Dr. NakaMats." in 2016, Nakamatsu was awarded the first Museum Lifetime Visionary Award "in recognition of a uniquely decorated life dedicated to the pursuit of that which we do not yet know" during a celebration of his 88th birthday. The ceremony, held in Cortlandt Alley in New York City, was planned in conjunction with the museum's exhibition of various inventions and personal artifacts of Nakamatsu.

Nakamatsu is a prolific inventor, and he even claims to hold the world record for number of over 3,200 "inventions". While his claim to a "world record" has been described as a record for patents by several media articles, several other sources do not list Nakamatsu among the world's most prolific inventors (he has 6 patent families). Nakamatsu was the subject of the 2009 documentary The Invention of Dr NakaMats.

Nakamatsu has appeared on several American TV shows, including Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, Late Night with David Letterman, CNN's Make, Create, Innovate, and Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern. He also appeared on the BBC show Adam and Joe Go Tokyo and the BBC radio show Jon Ronson On... In 2005, Nakamatsu was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize (a parody of the Nobel Prize) for Nutrition, for photographing every meal he has consumed during a period of 34 years. In 2009, Danish filmmaker Kaspar Astrup Schröder made a humorous documentary about Nakamatsu titled The Invention of Dr. NakaMats. In 2010, Nakamatsu claimed he had been granted an honorary title by the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. Since then, he has introduced himself as Sir Dr. NakaMats, although his claim has been denied by a representative of the order.

Nakamatsu is a perennial political candidate. In 2004 he told the Japan Times that "politics is a part of inventions," explaining that it is an "invisible invention" along the lines of concepts such as education and happiness. Since 1995 he has unsuccessfully campaigned multiple times to be elected Governor of Tokyo, most recently in the 2014 election. He has also campaigned unsuccessfully for election to the House of Councillors, the upper house of the National Diet. In 2010 and 2013 he ran as a candidate of the Happiness Realization Party.

Nakamatsu claims IBM reached licensing agreements with him in the late 1970s. He also claims to have licensed his floppy disk to IBM in 1979, but that the details are "confidential". An IBM spokesman, Mac Jeffery, confirmed that the company did license some of his patents, but claimed they were not for the floppy disk, which he claimed IBM invented on its own. Another IBM spokesman, Brian Doyle, said they licensed 14 patents from Nakamatsu, but also claimed that they do not have anything to do with the floppy disk.

Upon the basis of the Juusyoku Record patent issued in 1952, Nakamatsu claims to have invented the first floppy disk well before IBM's floppy disk patent was filed in 1969. However, what Nakamatsu patented in 1952 was a paper for optical sound player. In contrast to a floppy disk, this Nakamatsu patent discloses the use of printed paper for storage instead of the magnetic material of a floppy disk. It is not rewritable and lacks most elements of the IBM floppy disk patent. Since the paper was 'floppy' material, he claims he had invented the floppy disk (sometimes he uses the phrase "floppy media"); however, flexible magnetic recording media was well known prior to 1952, in tape and wire recording.

Yoshiro Nakamatsu (中松 義郎, Nakamatsu Yoshirō, born June 26, 1928), also known as Dr. NakaMats (ドクター中松, Dokutā Nakamatsu), is a Japanese inventor. He regularly appears on Japanese talk shows demonstrating his inventions.