What a gorgeously minimalistic USB drive (and case). In this tiny empty bottle, you can store many, many messages – up to 2 GB of messages. It’s, quite literally, a digital reincarnation of the romantic message-in-a-bottle. Imagine, in a couple years, walking along the beach and finding one of these washed up on shore!

The “blank” USB drive is part of a whole stationary series designed by Saburo Sakata.

Coincidentally, one of the more bizarre stories about messages in bottles comes from Japan. In 1784, Chunosuke Matsuyama and 40-some seamen set sail to find buried treasure on an island. Doomed from the start, their ship struck a coral reef, forcing them to seek refuge on an island. And as fate would have it, the sailors were unable to find fresh water and food. Matsuyama and all his crew died on that island. But the reason his story survived is because Matsuyama carved it into thin pieces of wood, shoved it into a bottle and tossed it out to sea. About 150 years later is was washed upon shore and discovered in the village where Matsuyama was born.

The story appears in Robert Kraske’s The twelve million dollar note.