ALEXANDRIA, Va., Aug. 6 -- United States Patent no. 12,379,035, issued on Aug. 5, was assigned to KITZ Corp. (Tokyo).

"Valve, and method for manufacturing said valve" was invented by Masazumi Funato (Chiba, Japan), Tetsuya Watanabe (Chiba, Japan) and Mitsuru Hosokawa (Chiba, Japan).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A valve (10) of an embodiment of the present invention has a tapered section (55) on an opening side of a depression (51a) of a body (1). When a projection (4b) of a ball (4) is inserted into the depression (51a), a part of a tip end edge of the projection (4b) is brought into contact with the tapered section (55), and the tapered section (55) guides the projection (4b) so that the ent...