This latter statement is gradually becoming moot, thanks to the efforts of another Japanese person with a tv personality.
Now, speaking as someone who has spent 65 of my almost 80 years, dealing in electronics, I have yet to detect an error or distortion of what you can see on your tv screen (the last 54 years in broadcast engineering) that was not completely and absolutely explained when analyzed, by General Relativity, including time dilation in an electron beam caused by the combination of its mode of amplification, velocity vs distance traveled, plainly visible on the video monitoring scopes at the voltages commonly used in Klystron amplifiers.
String theory, until it can make a testable prediction, which it has not in nearly 45 years, is to this old, un-papered but practicing engineer, strictly a means to keep a chair funded at some university whose management doesn't understand that a great number of us who do deal with relativistic effects on a daily basis, think its the pure stuff usually found, still warm and smelly, behind the male of the bovine specie. IMO they should close that chair and use the money to reduce tuition costs for other, far more practical subjects of study. But they cannot even think of doing that. They'll give the themselves a nice comfy raise instead.
My $0.02, in 1934 dollars.
Cheers, Gene