A TEAM of five Japanese won the Ig Nobel chemistry prize Thursday for their study estimating the daily saliva volume produced by a 5-year-old child.

Shigeru Watanabe, a professor of pediatric dentistry at the School of Health Sciences at Meikai University in Japan, accepted the prize on behalf of his team at the 29th Ig Nobel Prize award ceremony at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the United States.

The other, absent, recipients were Mineko Ohnishi, Kaori Imai, Eiji Kawano and Seiji Igarashi.

It marks the 13th consecutive year a Japanese national has won the spoof of the Nobel Prize.

The quintet were a part of the study “Estimation of the total saliva volume produced per day in 5-year-old children” that was published at Hokkaido University in February 1995.

The 68-year-old Watanabe was accompanied by his sons, who were among the 15 boys and 15 girls used as test subjects for the experiment conducted some 35 years ago.

Watanabe received his prizes — a trophy made out of a coffee cup, a Zimbabwean 10 trillion dollar (less than US$0.02) bill and a certificate — from the 1993 Physiology or Medicine Nobel Laureate Richard Roberts, who discovered “split genes.”

“We found out an important fact that the total saliva volume per day in 5-year-old children is 500 milliliters,” he told about 1,100 audience members at Sanders Theater.

Watanabe’s sons also attended the award ceremony and reenacted the experiment, drawing roars of laughter from the audience.

The chemistry prize was one of 10 handed out at the ceremony, which had the theme of “habits.”

The biology award went to an international team for its discovery that dead cockroaches remain magnetized longer than living ones. (SD-Agencies)