Japan's long national nightmare is over: its citizens and residents are now finally able to use "Pokémon Go," a smartphone application that helps people find and catch pokémon around them. As you're no doubt aware, pokémon are a diverse class of creatures that were first discovered by Japanese scientists Satoshi Tajiri and Ken Sugimori in 1996, meaning species like the pikachu have forever been associated with Japan.

However, The Pokémon Company — the organization responsible for promoting the welfare of pokémon worldwide — has been reluctant to adopt smartphone technology for conservation until now, and contracted US developer Niantic Labs to create Pokémon Go. As such, launching the app in the United States appears to have been more of a priority, possibly because Japan's higher pokémon density than the US could have caused technical issues with users' pokédexes.

No matter: the app is available now — albeit with hammered servers making it a little difficult to download at present — so the loss to Japan's life sciences research shouldn't be too heavy in the long run.