Hiko's Blog

Taking Cooler iPhone Photos Using Olloclip Fisheye/Macro/Wide Lenses

2012-01-25T16:25:00.000+09:00

I blogged recently about my recent Instagram addiction and how if compact camera makers don't get a clue and start adding smartphone operating systems to their cameras, the connectivity and utility of smartphones will render them obsolete. Today I want to share a cool little accessory I got for my iPhone that has helped me to enjoy iPhone photography even more as of late.

Last year I noticed some of the very cool fisheye photographs of TokyoFashion on Flickr and wanted to look at getting such a lens myself for my Lumix GH1. The problem is that the fisheye for the Lumix series has an official list price of 99,750 yen (US$1,250), about 80,000 yen in shops - but still a pretty high price for a very cool but occasional photo accessory.

I recalled seeing some videos on fisheye (魚眼) accessories for iPhone by JetDaisuke and so went digging around Rakuten (http://www.rakuten.co.jp/) to see if I could find something good.

After finding lots of options for fisheye lenses, the one that stood out to me most that I ended up getting was the Olloclip attachment (http://www.olloclip.com). It costs a bit more than other iPhone fisheye lenses, but it includes a macro lens for up close shooting, and a wide converter lens in a 3 in 1 set up that I picked one up for just over 4,000 yen (most now are listed at around 6,000 yen), which is a big saving over the cost of a fisheye-only lens for my GH1. I

It is designed to work with the iPhone4 and 4S, and I was pleasantly surprised by the results. The wide converter, macro shooter and fisheye all work as expected, with the fisheye giving a real 360 degree view which is cool. The cool thing I found when using it at night was that the macro lens gives a very cool bokeh effect when pointed toward distant lights. It fits in my pocket and lets me carry it around everywhere, and adds a little extra fun to iPhone photography and Instagram, as you can see in the samples below. Check out the video review I did of the Olloclip above, and some sample shots taken using the clip below.

Peace

Macro Lens Shots

Agapanthus by the pool taken with olloclip macro lens on iPhone, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Going through old toys at home for jnr to play with, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

More olloclip macro lens fun with flowers in the back yard, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Tokyo Illumination shot using olloclip macro, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Night Bokeh, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Fisheye Lens Shots

Boxing Day in Brisbane, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Tokyo Eki Twilight, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Karaoke - Shibuya Style, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Marunouchi illumination still going on, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Tokyo Eki, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Mickey Fisheye, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Wide Lens Shot

Good morning Tokyo! Gonna be a lovely day again today (but coooold), a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Review - A Brutally Honest Take on "Hi! My Name is Loco and I am a Racist" by Baye McNeil

2012-01-23T13:35:00.003+09:00

I just finished reading "Hi! My Name is Loco and I am a Racist" by Baye McNeil, aka @locohama (aka Master Unique Scientific God Allah). The book is written with confronting honesty and directness. I feel like reviewing it, I should take a leaf from the man and do this in the same brutally honest, self reflective light that he writes under.

I started getting into Twitter, and reading blogs by people resident in Tokyo probably a little before the quake. I had been pretty much exclusively in the video blogging community up until that point (and online news forums for many years prior to that) and enjoyed the new cast of characters and experiences that the world of blogs and Twitter opened up to me. Reaching around for any blog on Japan that I could find that was active, somewhere I picked up word on the blog "Loco in Yokohama" by @locohama. I added it to my RSS, and eventually, I found one of Loco's blogs come up in my feed.

To be honest, I really didn't quite know what to make of his post. I wish I could find it. All I remember it was a polemic, not unlike rants about Japan I had read and heard, frankly, a thousand times before. If it was unique, it was unique in the sense that he wrote differently to others I had read saying the same thing. He language was more metaphorical... colourful and descriptive... tangibly angry. To me, it seemed like an overly dramatic version of stuff I was already well versed in and frankly tired of hearing. I looked at the comments - most saying something along the lines of "chill out, the world isn't out to get you", with some of his responses. I'm pretty sure I wrote a comment saying more or less the same thing, and I'm not sure if I posted it. I've tried searching his blog to see if there is any trace of my leaving a comment on there. I get the feeling I probably wrote a comment saying "hey man, sometimes you just have to accept what you can't change and try to see it from their side" and then decided not to post it. The moderator in me came out. I don't know this guy, I know that he's coming from a very different place and undoubtedly has a very different view of Japan, and indeed life to me. He doesn't need me patronizing him over something I should admit I experience in a different way to him.

I'm pretty sure I let it be, and I don't remember reading too many more of his blog posts.

Then in May 2011, I met him in person at a "Tweet Up" organized by @silverstar22b at a maid cafe in Akihabara.

Akiba Tweetup - Tweeting, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

It was my second Tweet Up, and much like my first, and very much unlike YouTube meet ups, it felt kind of awkward. I was sitting at a table of people who I knew were all very articulate and interesting, but many of whom I had only read tweets from and had no idea of their appearance or back story. It feels strange to have someone who you feel like you know on Twitter or through a blog, only to meet them in person for the first time, and be jarred by them appearing different to how you imagined them, and then realizing that as a complete human being, you really know nothing about them. There is something about video that makes people FEEL more familiar when you meet them for the first time. After going through the jarring "reality check" a video blog meet up first gives you, every meet-up after that feels like a meeting with old friends. Blog festivals and tweet ups are different. You suddenly realize you are at a table of people who are all there and who you wanted to meet because you know they are all very interesting people, but you are kind of struggling with how to break the ice.

Loco sat across the table from me. He had an aura around him that came across to me as "cool". He was relaxed, smiling, but not loud or outgoing. Some conversations went around the table and I'm sure we talked a bit, but I spent most of the night awkwardly trying to get to know the people sitting beside me on either side.

Overall, I've had limited interaction with him, but those that I have had, and meeting him in person in particular at least took the edge off that I had gotten from reading one of his blog posts. He seemed friendly and affable - a guy that I would be interested in trying to have a proper chat with if the chance ever came up, but nothing really more. I like his Instagram photos and often favorite them. But I wouldn't say that I know him, or in any way that I understood him from what little I had read of his blog.

What I did see was that other people that I know and respect, respect Loco, based primarily on his writing. I realize that maybe I just kind of was caught off guard by him, and recognized the "mana" he has among others, which at least caused me to reserve judgment on the guy until the opportunity presented itself to get to know him a bit better.

On Saturday I logged into Twitter and saw the buzz going on everywhere about Loco's book release. Not being a close follower, I didn't even know he had a book coming. But I recognized and respected that by completing and publishing his book, he had done what every frustrated blogger aspires to do, but very few ever see through and get around to. And the fact is that this guy isn't just a blogger. He is a Japan blogger. To me, that makes him a part of my team, even if I don't know him very well, or what to expect from his book.

Akiba Tweetup - Locohama Remino Kimiecat, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

I saw the title, "Hi! My Name is Loco and I am a Racist" and chuckled. Frankly there is nothing I find more appealing in a person than self honesty and a self deprecating sense of humor. I tweeted right away that I was happy to help him plug the book whichever way, and then I went and put down what I admit I felt was the obligatory $9.99 as a show of support and thought to myself - "It's inspiring that this guy has gone and done what so many people like me dream of doing, and I know the many more people who just read and follow the kinds of blogs I make would be very interested in reading a book done by one of us, so it's good material for my blog/vlog. I'll buy the book, read it, and let him come on and explain it a bit and get the word out."

Now, by "read", I mean...

Well, more self honesty here... I'm a terrible reader. I have a shelf of books I have bought, or been given, that I've never gotten more than a few chapters through. Although English literature was my strongest subject going into University, and one where I had actually gathered a few awards at national level for (albeit in a country with the same population as Yokohama), my guilty secret is that I was never much of a reader, particularly of novels or fiction. I enjoyed the analysis aspect of stuff we were assigned to read, but if ever found reading in my free time, it was a copy of the Economist, or a book on some aspect of life and society in Japan, or some book about politics that I would reach for, and more often finish.

And then there are e-readers....

When I first got my iPhone, the Kindle App was one of the first apps I installed, being aware of how e-books were the future and even believing that this change might even turn me into a more avid and broad reader. I've bought several e-books before, including Quakebook and it is much to my own personal shame and embarrassment that I've never gotten through them.

I don't like the small screen. I don't like the small increments that it forces you to read in. I don't like the fact you don't physically know how far you are through the book or how much there is to go (you have a percentage number at the bottom, but it's not like holding a book). It never felt comfortable or fun, and living off my RSS reader, I'm used to bite sized blogs and articles that usually never take more than five minutes to digest. Reading a novel or a whole book on the iPhone Kindle App feels like a chore, and as a result, after buying some books and never reading all the way through any of them, I actually uninstalled the Kindle App from my iPhone until purchasing this.

So when I say that I thought to myself I would "read" Loco's book, I was really thinking about reading the first couple of chapters so I could show him I'd read some of it at least, and let him plug his book himself for people who are better readers than I am. That was how I saw all this going down.

Well, I was wrong.

I've talked about this before, but for me, for all the flashy self promoting bloggers and blogs out there, some of the most engaging I have ever found have been superficially not well done at all. There is a type of blog that I have seen done in video by BlkUnk, and in Tumblr by SabotenGirl, that has a way of catching you off guard with a very thrown together appearance, that can draw you in and show you the world through a pair of eyes other than your own. It's like taking the red pill. Going down the rabbit hole. The way I most like to describe it is the "John Malkovich" blog. Someone can catch you off guard and take you into their mind, and all of a sudden their entirely different thought process, vision and perception, history and outlook becomes your own. And it becomes your own in a way that makes you question everything about your own experience and perspective when you stop reading and find yourself back within your own skin. Well, I'm going to add Locohama to this list.

The first chapter of the book is entirely different to what follows. It lays the groundwork, brilliantly, for following the mishmash of narratives that are to follow. It offers a confrontingly frank, and refreshingly different assessment of what racism truly is, and indeed, how much of an evil it is. He offers three archetypes of the racist - the stereotypical racist "shitkicker", the hypocritical "poser", and the innocently ignorant "oblivious" racist. He talks about each at length from an internalized perspective, and frankly, it is hard not to see SOME aspect of yourself in each one. He rounds out the discussion by cheerfully announcing that he is a "poser", and then sets aside the direct discussion of the topic more or less for the rest of the book.

The narrative kicks off with a scene every single non-Asian foreigner in Japan has experienced. The empty seat beside them on the train. And yes, that, and people handing out tissue packets on the street that keep their arms tucked in as foreigners walk by are the two most immediately discomforting things I felt when myself came to first live and work in Tokyo in 1997. For me, as a blonde haired blue eyed Caucasian, it was an occasional occurrence. The train being full, the seat next to me being open, and no one coming to sit down. But I learned not to let it bother me. Frankly, either I don't notice it, or it just doesn't even happen to me that much any more. I don't know. When it happens now, I tend to do as Loco himself does - I I'll spread my legs out a bit and enjoy the extra breathing space. However, it was his explanation that the empty seat was and remains a constant in his life that highlighted to me first of all the real difference in his experience to mine.

Part of the reason that I don't complain too much, and I will often rip mercilessly on other foreigners, particularly Caucasians, that I perceive as "whiners" is that the whining is often done in complete ignorance or disregard of the positive discrimination that Caucasians in Japan almost exclusively benefit from, the much tougher time many other minorities have in Japan in ways that make an empty seat pale in comparison, and the ignorance of what it is to be on the receiving end of "real" racism back home. It's why the rant by Louis CK on "Being White" is one of my favorite stand up routines of recent years:

I needed no more reminding of the very different experience that Loco has of Japan to me, than to be transformed from the familiar Japanese train setting, to the classrooms and halls of Uhuru Sasa Shule, his private "African Culture" oriented elementary school in New York, where his teachers would talk to him in a mix of Swahili and English, and where he was indoctrinated with a world view of white Americans not dissimilar to that we hear of Koreans being educated with of Japanese - through shocking images of the most base and disturbing crimes any human being could ever perpetuate against another, through images of hangings, burnings and castrations that the perpetrators sent to their family and friends unmasked, in plain dress, smiling, as POSTCARDS. His description of the values instilled in him through this early education, and of his experiences through the Five Percent Nation of Islam, took me from the familiar and comfortable setting of a Japanese train car, to the completely alien world of Brooklyn in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Even the things that felt familiar to me about his story - the reference to hip hop idols that I loved and worshipped through my own upbringing in NZ army towns - Rakim, Wu-Tang Clan, Queen Latifah - to understand that these were all members of the Five Percent Nation of Islam, and what specifically that entailed, opened my eyes wide.

It isn't just the new world view the book is giving me. It's the way Loco writes. I think looking back now, reading his blog as a one off without context, is a little like turning on all the lights all of a sudden when you've been sitting comfortably in a dark room. Everything is too vivid. To be hit with it suddenly on his blog midstream I found it a bit overwhelming. Over dramatic. I'm trying to assess whether this guy is on the level or not, but am being bombarded by images that are too strongly described for me to get a handle. However, going into this through what I've concluded is the brilliant structure of his book leads me now to see the guy as a genius. It takes you from a thought piece, to a familiar "safe" setting, to a loud, vivid, dangerous, intriguing place that I had never seen before, and through it, you start to see and understand the world through his mind.

I couldn't put my bloody iPhone down.

By Sunday night, my wife, who doesn't like the attention I give my iPhone (who she calls "my lover") at the best of times, was close to physically harming me. If I had 30 seconds, I could grab, or my wife was distracted taking over playing with my son for a moment, I would sneak a read of a few more pages. Here's more honesty for you - I had a noro-virus that gave me diarrhea all weekend, which gave me excellent cover for running off and knocking off another chapter.

The book continues in narrative form, switching between his adventures growing up in New York, and and his experiences living, loving, and messing up as most foreigners I know can relate to in Japan. We are taken from the streets of Saitama, to boot camp in South Carolina, to a soapland in Tokyo, back to an upmarket department store in Manhattan.

More honesty... I consider myself a relatively open minded, liberal thinking, new age kind of guy. But I also have a lot of ideas and values that I know I shouldn't have, but that are traditional and conservative. One is this: dudes shouldn't cry. I know we have had years of Oprah and Sally Jessie drumming into us that men suppressing emotions is harmful and that men need to break down those misogynistic attitudes that crying is something for women... and pussies... but I come from a military household, and a country where the "coolest" way to react to scoring a try in rugby is to just get up and walk back poker faced for the restart with the rest of your team (and then drink a ton of beers after the game, and drive home and....) What I mean to say is, I'm kinda proud, in a messed up kinda way, of my ability to block out and not react to "tear jerker" movies. I can count, probably on one hand the number of movies I've ever actually broken down watching. And it's only been movies, nothing else.

I've never cried reading a book before. Let alone a fucking e-book. Let alone a fucking e-book on my fucking iPhone. And there I was, admittedly sitting on the crapper at the time, trying to suck it up and failing miserably at holding myself back from crying reading this book. Not once but twice (second time with my son obliviously playing in front of me). And moments before that, and all throughout, otherwise laughing out loud.

I'm still trying to make sense of it all, frankly. The narrative of the work is deafeningly vivid and loud. But it's not just how vividly he writes (the biggest frustration I felt with the e-reader was the inability to mark some pages, just because the expressions he used were such genius that I wanted to keep them). It's the way the stories are structured, the way the chapters are organized. The whole thing. It's a roller coaster ride. I tweeted him last night, still 2 thirds the way through, to tell him that he was blowing my mind. I finished today.

All I'm going to say is that, and I mean this, his book is the best thing I have read since I came to Japan 13 years ago.

I hope a printed copy comes out, because I want to read it again and mark pages in it next time for quotables, and damn, I'd even love to see a movie made out of this. Seriously.

The best part about the book for me was how it set my own mind racing - I probably spent half the time I was reading in pauses, self reflecting, thinking of memories of similar or contrasting episodes that the book reminds me of, and the stories I would tell if I ever attempted the same thing... before suddenly realizing that this is a great reminder of what good writing is, and I'll need to lift my game a long way if I ever want to consider that.

Anyway, I'm not just blowing smoke up your or his ass. This is the best thing I've read since I can remember. I laughed. I cried. My eyes were opened wide and I saw things I had never seen before. I can't recommended it enough.

Peace

You can get the book for Kindle or Nook, and find more info on it at:
http://www.himynameisloco.com/

Japan -- How Bad is Japanese Immigration? [UPDATED]

2012-01-19T14:04:00.000+09:00

The Banyan column of the Economist recently took the unusual step of pretty much verbatim quoting an account of Japanese immigration abuse and robbery at Narita Airport. The fact that they did this, admitting that they did so without any corroboration of any fact in the account (the full version of which comes across as rambling and incoherent at time s) implies to me that the Canadian journalist in question must be a personal friend of the columnist, whose word they trust. It is certainly unusual for the Economist to put something like this up without any kind of fact checking (which they admit to and disclaim in the opener).

[UPDATE - I have added some more links on this topic to the bottom of this blog - it turns out before being taken up in the Economist, this story was doing the rounds on a number of forum sites in Japan, and Mr. Johnson himself got directly involved in the debate. Well worth looking at. Also, fellow oyaji and partner in crime Gimmeaflakeman did a video blog on this topic last night - very entertaining and worth watching just below]

The Case of Christopher Johnson Beggars Belief

Kolkata Immigration, a photo by markhillary on Flickr.

This is what the Banyan column itself said. This is true on two levels. For starters, I honestly have trouble believing some portions of the account given. But, if true, then indeed, it is "unbelievable".

You can read the column and original blog for yourself, but to quickly summarize, Mr. Johnson was stopped while reentering Japan from a visit to Seoul, and placed in immigration detention for a day or so, where he claims he was abused by his interpreter, claims private security guards attempted to intimidate and extort large sums of money from him, and Airline Staff attempted to take advantage of him by overcharging for his deportation air ticket.

Key facts missing from the account that aren't really highlighted enough are:
- Why was he pulled up and why was he deported? (Mr. Johnson claims not to know, but suggests it may be because of his "critical" coverage of Japan. I don't believe that Mr. Johnson doesn't know why he was stopped and I am certain it has nothing to do with the content of his reporting)
- What was his visa status? (Mr. Johnson's lawyer has advised him not to discuss it -- so.... probably a tourist visa?)

I don't know about Narita Airport immigration security, and I don't know Mr. Johnson. I find it hard to believe that guards would steal from or physically abuse detained passengers, but interestingly, there are similar accounts listed by Amnesty International so perhaps they are using a dodgy security firm. I don't know. But because the topic of what a nightmare immigration in Japan is often comes up, particularly among caucasian expats, allow me to share a little of what I do know.

Never Get Involved With The Police or Immigration in Japan

Prison cell with bed inside Alcatraz main building san francisco califfornia, a photo by Tim Pearce, Los Gatos on Flickr.

Police live a lonely life in Japan because of the social convention that you simply never get involved with them. You seldom ever see or have anything to do with police in Japan, but when you do, things usually go through smoothly if you remain polite and cooperative. A lot of western kids come here so uppity about "knowing their rights" that they believe they can act antagonistically toward police here and get away with it. To them, I'd just point out that they have a 99% conviction rate for criminal cases in Japan, and this means that there are a lot of people in jail here who were in the wrong place at the wrong time and showed the wrong attitude to police.

Immigration is similar. I'm not going to go into a cultural seminar on this, but things generally work out here that the easier you make things for the authorities, the easier they will make them for you. I know of cases of people overstaying visas accidentally, being stuck having put in incorrect paperwork - all kinds of situations that would be treated with zero tolerance in the US, Canada, Australia or New Zealand, where things have worked out in a smooth polite manner with immigration officials when they were cooperative and sought help. But it works like this - the system here can be like quicksand - the more your squirm, the more you sink.

I have a good friend who used to work at a Japanese law firm and one of her roles was to head out to Narita detention to debrief detainees before being shipped to immigration detention (which she herself called the "outer circle of Hell") in Ibaraki. She gave me the example of a young swaggering surfer guy pulled up after being found with a joint in his luggage. Apparently, during the first meeting before he was moved to detention, he was treating the whole situation like a bit of a joke. He was sure he would just get processed and shipped out and said he was fine with spending a couple of nights in detention if needs be. He was joking and in good spirits.

Part of her job was to debrief him that basically, being in immigration detention, he wasn't in criminal detention, and so even the very few rights that criminal detainees have in Japan didn't apply to him. He would be shipped off to a holding facility in Ibaraki until he was processed, and would not have any outside contact with the world until that was done, which could take days. Her job was to contact people for him and ensure he knew what was going on.

She said that she was finally able to see him again over a week later, and had never seen anyone so completely broken in her life. He was later processed and deported. The moral of the story from her was, whatever your opinions on the prohibition of marijuana and whatnot, Narita Airport is NOT the place to raise the debate. You just don't mess with the authorities in Japan.

Differences Between New Zealand and Japanese Immigration

Guayaquil airport immigration, a photo by zieak on Flickr.

I've had a lot of experiences with both setups. In New Zealand, I would often help out Japanese flatmates and friends with the numerous small issues that came up with New Zealand immigration officials, most commonly relating to permanent residence applications, and seeking temporary summer vacation work permits while on student visas. I would hear stories of friends being messed around and offer to go into immigration with them to help out. It was amazing to see. My Japanese friend would call immigration in front of me asking about applying for a temporary work permit on a student visa and be told it is impossible. Then I would call and ask in my Kiwi accent, and would be told "it's fine, just come in and we'll do the paperwork for you". Then I would have friends who would queue up for hours at immigration to get their work permit, only to be randomly denied it when they got to the front of the line. Days later, I'd join them and be sitting with them and everything would go smoothly.

My Japanese friends were dumbfounded by these kinds of experiences. I remember one friend who felt self conscious that this made him look he had done something wrong or misrepresented things to me. However, I saw this situation happen so many times, it was clear what was happening. I found that staff at Immigration in New Zealand seemed to come from one of two backgrounds - they seemed to be people who took the job because they enjoyed the statutory discretion granted to immigration officials and the power it let them wield over people, and the other large group seemed to be other immigrants. Having a New Zealand born, New Zealand accented person accompanying a Japanese student seemed to put the fear of God into immigration staff, who generally seemed to show an arrogant, arbitrary attitude towards less confident Japanese. It seemed to me that they felt less likely to be held to account dealing purely with foreigners and enjoyed exercising the small powers they had over people.

Japan is a complete contrast to this. I've spent many years in Japan here dealing with regulatory authorities in Japan through work and immigration, and I have never once met a single bureaucrat who I considered to be enjoying wielding arbitrary discretionary power in the way that is common with bureaucrats in western countries. What it all comes down to is "sekinin" or "responsibility". There seems to be a subconscious fear throughout Japanese society that stepping out of line will lead to some sort of unforeseen fatal consequence, so everyone sticks rigidly to the book, and refuses to make personal discretionary calls, often even where they are needed. This is GREAT for people dealing with immigration. Processing is long and tedious, but it is also rigidly by the book. I've never experienced and almost never heard of unexpected or unforeseen outcomes from any kind of regular immigration application, other than the difficulty many used to have getting permanent residence (which seems to be getting much easier now). Point is, you always know where you stand, and don't have to deal with people on power trips. And where there is difficulty, or awkwardness, like visa troubles or special paperwork, usually a bit of politeness and being apologetic for the trouble you are causing is all that is needed to ensure a smooth outcome.

Now, I realize this is only my experience, and that of people around me, and there are many cases and circumstances that contradict this, but at least in terms of day to day processing, I'd rate Japanese immigration as MUCH better to deal with than any immigration I have ever encountered in any western country.

So, What To Make of This Case?

Stasi Prison, Berlin, a photo by CxOxS on Flickr.

I've lived here a long time and dealt with immigration a lot, in both standard and non-standard procedures. I also have friends familiar with the very unpleasant detention system and am familiar with the horror stories that occasionally arise regarding people in detention, and in particular with regards to Japan's shameful reluctance to accept refugees in nearly all cases.

The sum of my knowledge and experience suggests to me that the Economist's account of this Canadian journalist is missing some pretty key pieces of information. And since the Economist offers no critique or assessment of the credibility of the account given and leaves us to guess, I'll share with you my assessment.

I do not believe that Mr. Johnson would have been pulled up and deported from Japan for writing articles critical of Japan. I also don't believe that he would be deported for no reason. I don't believe that Mr. Johnson spent a day in detention, speaking to numerous English speaking staff and never understood why he was being deported.

The fact Mr. Johnson is not sharing his visa status also speaks volumes to me. Again, the Economist doesn't add anything to this, but it seems to me, his visa status was very likely the reason he was not allowed to reenter Japan. That is to say, it was most likely known that he was violating the terms of his visa and his entry was denied. This comes back to my earlier point - IF that is the case, and Mr. Johnson was "trying his luck" at getting in and out of Japan working without a proper visa, he was asking for trouble.

When it came to his accounts of the interpreter, the Asiana Airlines Staff, and the English speaking detention staff, again, I have no idea what really went down, but those interactions sound to me like the kinds of interactions English speakers have in Japan when they take to being antagonistic towards the people they deal with. Rather than listen, or react, or even argue back, Japanese tend to respond to antagonism by shutting down and they start to shut down the person they are talking to. That is how those interactions played out which suggests to me that Mr. Johnson very likely did a lot to make those situations worse for himself.

I initially didn't believe the references to him being "shaken down" by security guards for cash, but it is interesting to see the corroborating accounts in other cases cited by Amnesty International. If true, this is the most serious accusation of this whole account, and given the legal grey area in which the private security company working for immigration operates, it is important that it is properly policed and given oversight. Given the accusations of theft, assault and torture, these, and other cases should be criminally investigated. I've never heard of this kind of behaviour anywhere in Japan before - you have criminals and gangsters in bad neighborhoods, but even then, aggravated robbery of strangers is pretty rare in Japan. It is disturbing to even hear this accusation being made so consistently. I hope that part of this account is raised with authorities and is taken seriously - certainly, it would be very disturbing if immigration was using security companies with ties to "anti-social forces" as the alleged conduct seems to infer.

And Then There Is the Economist...

Stephanie Strange creates typgraphical art inspired by free-form poetry, a photo by That Other Paper on Flickr.

I've never seen anything like this in the Economist. I'm a big fan of the magazine (even though it calls itself a "newspaper") and it's writers. I've always most respected the wonderful combination it gives of clear concise writing, very balanced accounts making out arguments and perspectives for multiple sides, and the clear and consistent liberal economic editorial line it generally applies to such stories.

This story doesn't disturb me because of the horrific account of this Canadian spending a day being deported from Narita. There are many much worse stories out there that exist that go on in airports all around the world. What disturbs me is that the story, albeit in a column, is so completely out of place in the Economist - the verbatim reposting of rambling prose making numerous unsubstantiated and unchecked allegations is unlike anything I have ever read in the Economist. I could imagine such a column appearing in Time Magazine, or being shown in the Guardian, or reported on CNN. But I always looked up to the Economist as being a step above the fray journalistically in this regard. I can only infer that this was done as a personal favor for the victim, who works in the same field in the same region as the columnist. Which again, is fine, but a bit disappointing from the Economist.

Now that they have picked up this ball, I do hope that the Economist does the right thing and doesn't walk away from the story. I presume that if Mr. Johnson is taking "legal advice", he is trying to do something legally about raising claims about his abuse at Narita. If that is the case, I'd say the Economist is now obligated to follow what happens and report on the facts that come out, particularly where they fill in for the rambling account we are given to read.

These are serious criminal allegations, particularly of systematic aggravated assault by Narita airport staff. Given that the Economist seems to have held out its own credibility for that of Mr. Johnson, I hope it sees this matter through and provides updates when more facts are known.

UPDATE 20/1/2012

It turns out that this was already the subject of much discussion prior to the Economist article. The three main venues of discussion are as follows, and Mr. Johnson is a direct participant in many of these discussions (where the interactions between him and some of his doubters have been... "colourful")

Big discussion here
http://www.fuckedgaijin.com/forums/showthread.php?t=27818

Further discussion here
http://www.debito.org/?p=9868
http://tepido.org/dont-put-your-finger-in-my-ass/629

Mr. Johnson has also had some interesting interactions on Twitter with fellow freelance journalists TokyoReporter and JakeAdelstein
https://twitter.com/#!cjinasia

Someone started a Reddit thread based on this blog with a lot of interesting comments
http://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/omvv9/how_bad_is_japanese_immigration/

The Japan Probe blog has also weighed in, also citing comments from this blog and other sites where this is being discussed
http://www.japanprobe.com/2012/01/20/christopher-johnson-under-fire-for-gaijin-gulag-article/

Keep up with ongoing edits Mr. Johnson is making to his account of events here
http://versionista.com/diff/5B4j33tIjCgq7iXAqMtpTw/

Photoblog -- Reliving Childhood Star Wars Memories with Vintage Kenner Figurines & Toys

2012-01-18T23:42:00.000+09:00

I never really had a lot of toys as a kid. No big deal. Fact is that every time we moved house (which worked out at nearly every year sometimes), stuff would get lost or get discarded. The result of this was when I went back "home" to my mother's house in Australia over New Years', it was pretty easy to engage in the joy of showing my two year old son my toys. They fitted into two boxes. One was for Lego. The other was for my Star Wars figures.

The Empire Strikes Back was the second movie I ever saw (first was Fantasia - in a theatre with dozens of screaming five year olds like myself, and an angry projectionist who stopped the movie two or three times to scream at everyone to shut up - must have really wanted to see those dancing hippos again... but I digress...). I don't remember much of it, other than that it was scary... and pretty confusing to a six year old kid in Wellington. However, next move in 1982 was to Singapore, which was just around the time Kenner released what are now termed "vintage" Star Wars figures, and was there to watch the release of Return of the Jedi (was supposed to be called Han Solo's Revenge) where as a seven year old, I could enjoy the speeder bikes and Ewoks.

One thing about watching movies in Singapore was that even at the best of times, you have Chinese, Malay and Hindi subtitles on all movies. So when they had Jabba the Hut speaking... erm... Jabban (?), the screen was basically covered top to bottom in subtitles. But that kinda thing is what made Sinagpore a cool place to live.

Every pocket money day, I'd rock down to Transit Road with my parents and get one or two new Star Wars figures, and did this every weekend for about one and a half years. Between the figures I had, and the ones my friends had, I'm pretty sure I have seen, and at the time, could probably have named every Star Wars figure in existence up to 1983.

I attended a NZ Army base school in Singapore, as part of a NZ military family and the school had NZ school teachers sent out to teach us. The teachers must have been compensated pretty well, because I remember the teachers' kids had the best kit. One had the Kenner Millennium Falcon. While another had the AT-AT, which to this day, I think remains the most awesome children's toy ever made.

I got a Snowspeeder. I was cool with that. As you can tell by all the missing bits off it, I got more than my moneys worth out of the thing.

I didn't have any free time to blog or tweet when in Australia, but I could grab a couple of moments to Instagram, and one thing I loved about the break in Australia was Instagraming and reminiscing about the old Star Wars figures with people who had any sort of clue what I was posting and talking about. Running quizzes on some of the toys, much to my embarrassment, I had to look these up myself, and found an amazing and nostalgic web of sites on the Internet devoted to the collection of vintage Star Wars toys and their original packaging and manuals, that I could vaguely remember briefly glancing at as a seven year old before destroying all the packaging to get to the goodies inside. There are some pretty cool sites for this.

A friend once told me if I had so many vintage Star Wars figures, I should take them to the otaku collectors shops in Nakano Broadway where collectors pay top dollar for such nostalgia. And yes, I do have some collectibles. Apparently an original Darth Vader figure with hollowed out arm for a light saber can go for $6,000... except that mine has lost the light saber... and the vinyl cape... and the head... I have Bobba Fett (busted), several figures with paint worn off and meltedd limbs from a tropical heatwave in 1983.

But more to the point, aside from being unsellable, even if they could be sold, I wouldn't sell them. They belong to my son now.

Peace

Missing a few bits, but a working snow speeder with Luke on Hoth battle gear, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Okay, who can name the star wars character and vehicle here?, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Going through old toys at home for jnr to play with, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Star Wars trivia: 50 points to who can name this character, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Obscure star wars figure quiz of the day, for 60 points and a chocolate fish, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Right, an easy one, then, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Close up of the bounty hunter on the back, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Speeder bike (explodable) with scout, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Another challenging one - name the star wars vehicle and characters (I realize that the wookie isn't the usual pilot), a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Bonus points if you can name this vehicle too, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Last day in Australia, time for another name that Star Wars vehicle quiz, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

The Best Vid I Almost Ever Made

2012-01-16T09:29:00.000+09:00

Everyone who has made videos seriously for any length of time is aware of hitting bumps in the road that can cause a bit of a loss of motivation - at worst, take away your energy to continue making videos.

I encountered two such bumps last year, from each of the types of hurdles that can confound YouTubers. The first was a very ambitious documentary project that I started on, that had an overwhelming amount of video footage to work through. Shooting too much footage and being too overwhelmed to take the time to edit it is a trap that has hit even the best vloggers I know. I ended up putting the project on hold for a while, but do hope to bring it to some sort of conclusion this year.

The second is the issue accompanying the last video I made of 2011. The video, uploaded onto Gimmeaflakeman's channel about homosexuality in Japan is getting a lot of feedback as being one of the best videos we have ever made. And it is. But what kills me is that the video is actually the second recording of the show, and the original video was by far the best talking vlog I have ever been in. It was interesting, there was great humour and interplay, great insight - Ren was amazing, as she always is, but really outdid herself. It was 30 minutes long, but there was almost nothing to edit. It was the most watchable long vlog I had ever made, and I laughed my head off all the way through the editing process.

For various technical reasons that are being dealt with, my computer was low on memory and I needed to remove the original temp editing files as I edited and rendered them on the project. I got the editing just perfect, rendered the video, deleted the base data files to save some memory while the final vid was being rendered, and then checked the final vid to find that there had been a glitch in the sound that made my voice ten times louder than Victor and Ren.... I spent a couple of weeks going through desperately trying to find a solution to fix the sound, with audio plugins and editors, with different filters and settings. What I learned is that once your audio is mixed and rendered once, and the underlying voice tracks are gone, you're basically stuck.

It took me a couple of weeks before I could bring myself to deliver the bad news to Victor and Ren, and we agreed to do the vid again, and it was still great. But it was one of those learning moments that really took a lot of energy to pick myself up to start again, and taught me another great lesson about checking and rechecking EVERYTHING when editing these vids.

Good news is that it's a new year and there are more Oyaji vids and PODCASTS on the way. And check out the latest vid if you have a moment - it was great that everyone got together to shoot it again, and it still came out great.

Peace

Photoblog - Escaping Japan

2012-01-13T11:42:00.003+09:00

Time has shown me time and time again that one of the best ways to improve my feeling of being well adjusted living in Japan, and the best way to make real advances in Japanese, was to take the occasional break from Japan and using Japanese. I spent my first three years in Japan without leaving, except for a quick trip to Hong Kong, and one to Korea. My first trip back resulted in some severe reverse culture shock, and some important reminders.

Australia is where I spent about half of my early life, and both my mother and sister are from there. As a result, my mother's house in Brisbane is the closest thing I have to a "home" outside of Japan, even though I've never actually lived there. Besides being a great break for me to relax for two weeks, it also proved great for my young son, who enjoyed the wide open spaces, long days and summertime Christmas and New Years, as well as the chance to play with my mother's two small dogs, and be someplace totally new.

Australia is also a great way to regain perspective on being in Japan, just because the outlook and quality of life there is so different. While Tokyo beats almost any city for interest and excitement, Australians have the "work to live" approach to life figured out better than any other country I've ever encountered. They work hard, but they also prioritize time at home above all else. They have a great quality of life there, and they know it (which is probably what Kiwis find the most annoying about them ;) ), but for me, it is always a great opportunity to remind myself of where I need to make sure my priorities lie. In Tokyo, it's too easy to be wrapped up in the busy pace of life, working and going out - often ending up short on both sleep and money. It's nice to remember sometimes that you can have a great quality of life without being busy all the time, and the importance of keeping time free for the things that matter most. I had a great trip, and enjoyed sending Instagram updates of the highlights of it. All recharged now for an exciting and challenging year ahead!

Love the internal lighting on Airbusses, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Where to next?, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

One of my favorite views in the world. Floating in the pool looking up at clouds at home in Australia, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Christmas dinner by the pool, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Agapanthus by the pool taken with olloclip macro lens on iPhone, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Kookaburra on a rotary washing line - Australiana, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Boxing Day in Brisbane, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

More olloclip macro lens fun with flowers in the back yard, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Reading the morning paper from inside a Christmas ornament, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Squall coming..., a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

A little rain must fall into every paradise, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Typical Aussie breakfast. Eat cereal. Play with slightly damaged radio controlled helicopter on the deck, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Right, looks like I have a busy schedule lined up for today..., a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Just back from the Queensland rail museum, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Jnr had his first ever day at the beach yesterday, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Holiday Scrabble Battle, played nearly every day since I was 10, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Flower from the front yard. Queensland is lovely, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Aussie flowers, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Queensland paraleets, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

What I admire most about Aussies is their work ethic, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Time for an Aussie lunch, sauerkraut, onions and three kinds of Bavarian sausage on the barbie, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Yuuuuuuummmmmm, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Omiyage shopping time!, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Right, breakfast bacon, onion, egg and cheese toasted roll on Turkish bread, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Another hard day ahead, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

What do you mean he don't eat no meat?! It is okay. I will make lamb..., a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

As a Kiwi, the thing that always gets me is that the spiders are HUGE and I have no idea which ones are poisonous, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Final dessert in Australia, Pavlova cake, invented in NZ!, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

All agree, this was a highly relaxing Australian vacation. Can't wait to come back again :), a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Love this shot - descent into Seoul during sunset, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

The sun sets into clouds, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Korean Air using an Ibaraki Love Hotel lighting theme during the takeoff for the final leg home to Tokyo, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Exciting Times, Big Changes Afoot...

2012-01-10T00:16:00.000+09:00

Hey all, a belated Merry Xmas and happy new year to you all. I'm sorry I've been quiet lately - I took the end of the year to take a complete break out, save for some Instagram posts, to enjoy the sunny summer Sun in Brisbane, Australia. Although travelling with a two year old doesn't give you a lot of time to read books, and blog, I had a great time to relax, regroup, and set out what my new priorities, challenges and goals will be for this year, and to reflect a little on the blogging and world of YouTube in 2012. So sit back, and take this as my "state of the tube" as it were. I'm going to share some personal secrets, opinions, and give a taste of what lies ahead for 2012.

What I admire most about Aussies is their work ethic, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Next Up, YT Awards and the JVlogging Community

Since I started vlogging three years ago now, I've been constantly impressed with the blossoming of the community of Japan video bloggers and the constant arrival of new and energetic vloggers who all add their own stamp to the very strong online community that exists here. What stood out to me most throughout 2011 was the shift from "holiday vlogs" and "bedroom vlogs" to more highly polished and professional looking videos that hold their own alongside anything anywhere on YouTube. Standouts that illustrate this to me are newer vloggers like Japanarchist, Ozzy78 and BCPodcast.

Another interesting dynamic that added to the drive to raise the quality and level of online content was the YouTube Nextup Contest, that offered a bunch of video making equipment, $10,000, and a week long video production course for the winners, as part of Google's own drive to foster flagship channels that create consistent professional grade content on its service - something Google is no doubt keen to do with YouTube and online media being a key pillar of its apparent growth strategy for future years.

I don't intend to ever try living or making a substantial living off YouTube, and my neither my work, nor my wife could ever really permit me a week off for a video making course, as much as I would love to do it, so I sat out and chose to watch the contest unfold. What was interesting to me was that, as is the case with the YouTube Awards each year, the Japan community of gaijin vloggers poses a challenge for YouTube. Strategically, it is understandable that they want to foster Japanese content and Japanese flagship channels to encourage new users, and foster a strong local identity. At the same time, in terms of regular high quality content, there are very few Japanese vloggers out there, and many of the best and most consistent video makers out there are undoubtedly from the jvlogging community.

While the winners all were chosen rightly for making good videos, and being able to benefit from the support Google offered, I must admit, I felt that some of the foreign entrants were hard done by. I've already mentioned people who I consider were the flagship channels this year. In terms of an audition video, I don't think anyone made a better pitch than Ciaela, and almost no one consistently makes Japanese language videos of the high quality and consistency that she does (even if not always what I myself go for), as is reflected in the number of features she gets. The fact that she of all people was left out tells me that the winners were chosen not just for being good video makers, but for fitting in with Google's own marketing strategy for YouTube in Japan, which basically means that many of the strongest entrants were unfortunately wasting their time this year...

But all this has had an interesting and unforeseen upside...

I don't know the extent to which the Nextup Contest galvanized foreign vloggers to lift their game, but it has been interesting to me to see how many vloggers like her have not only raised their game, but really shown that they can equal and outperform the Nextup Winners without needing the money and video making school that Google gave those winners. I don't know whether it has sparked a competitive streak, or just made people think more about their quality and having another shot again next year, but between the fantastic videos of Kumigar, SasakiAsahi, and Megwin from the nextup winners, and the powered up content of regular jvloggers, I'm hoping that YouTube will run the contest again next year and think a bit more broadly about supporting users deserving for their content, and not just the demographics they represent.

Best, Simplest and Hardest Advice I Ever Got

Akihabara with Danny Choo, a photo by shibuya246 on Flickr.

It's become kind of a tradition, but for reasons about to be announced further down, my life is going through a major change this year, which will involve a dramatic change to my weekly routine. I'm hoping to use the opportunity of this change to finally implement the best, simplest and hardest advice I ever got about vlogging by Danny Choo, which is to make sure I embed my blogging into my routine.

It has been a joy to write more blogs this year, both here and as a guest blogger on the most excellent blogs of Zonjineko and Tofugu. In all modesty, I think it's something I'm good at, and I've got a lot to share, so I really want to make sure I do this sort of thing more often. Like Danny said, it's just a matter of blocking out a couple of hours, to create written, photographic and video content that lets me consistently keep creative and in touch with what all of you are thinking. I really want to move to weekly written and photo blogs, and fortnightly (that's 2 weeks, folks) video blogs.

The changes leading to this will be revealed at the end of this but one of the factors is... well... I've decided to make my blogging a little more "interesting".

I'm Selling Out

Leslie & Brandon - Apartment - 7/1/07, a photo by Rob Boudon on Flickr.

I've never monetized my content online before, mainly because the job I do has ethical requirements that I disclose external incomes received. Blogging and vlogging for me is a pleasure and an escape from my working life, and not receiving money for it kept it honest and fun for me.

However...

I must admit, I do miss out a little when I get to talk with so many accomplished vloggers and bloggers about SEO, and I have always wanted to understand monetization better. It is also a hobby that costs some money, and it is always easier to justify to the missus when it can cover its own costs, more or less.

The biggest factor is however that the job thing won't be such a barrier any more, so I've decided to allow monetization for the first time, and to the extent following that adds to the interest of this as a fun hobby for me, I'm hopeful it will lead to more consistent content that you enjoy.

Oyaji Time

Old Chinese Men, a photo by watchsmart on Flickr.

One of the great joys for me of this year was executing the long held idea of the Two and a Half Oyaji Show with Victor, first as a two person talk show, and then onward to a three person show. There are still some technical bugs we are working out both with the Skype setup for it, and the recording setup we have in place, but once everything is humming along smoothly, I'm very happy that we have found a way to do this that is very easy and low stress to do, and that I think is unique in the format of talk videos in the sense that we have been able to steer away from the newsy formats of podcasts, and the "meet a vlogger" introduction format of most collab YouTube vids, and cut right to the core of what I think is the very best in what vlogging can be - which is interesting and engaging conversations involving people with wit, who know what they are talking about.

I think we have a great spin on the format and I'm very proud of the way it has come together. When we get some of the final kinks ironed out, I will make this a fixture in my online activity, and plan to respond to requests to release the episodes not just in the video format, but also in an audio podocast format so those who have asked are able to hear it in their cars or on their headphones (which will be another fun area of growth for me to learn).

Other Vids

"There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.", a photo by Twig_is_the_Future on Flickr.

I have the simple goal of trying to bring something new and original, however small, to each personal video I make on my own. I want to either make you chuckle, a bit better informed, or every now and then, try to drag, kicking and screaming a "wow, I had no idea he was capable of making something like that" out of you. I'm going to keep doing that, if it's okay with you :) Look for some more artsy vids, and some new tweaks to what I already do.

Creative Commons

I've been quiet on this front this year, although I have been most honored to have been invited to talk at two Google run seminars about Creative Commons and it's usefulness for YouTubers and digital content generators. However, far from becoming more mainstream and accepted, I think it is more important now than ever to spread awareness of Creative Commons as a shield against the increasing war being waged on user generated content in the online space by big media providers that don't want to share computer screens with content they can't profit from.

I'm not going to rant about SOPA or the other "bad legislation" that is currently being lined up by paid lobbyists in the US, which will spread around the world if passed, to try to take the online world and make it a space that non corporate users are unable to do anything other than consume within. However, I do think that our videos, that are not all just cat videos and kicks to the groin, do represent a new and important cultural movement, and if we are not smart and aware of the significance of what we are doing, and careful in how we go about it, the day could come when ordinary users are not allowed to upload their own content to the Internet.

Creative Commons is a great solution because it lets people do what they instinctively feel they should be able to do with digital content, but also protects them at the same time from falling into the traps that vested media are wanting us to fall into, to have our content erased and removed from the internet. Besides which, it's fun, and helps you make better content, and support other creators. I'll talk a bit more about Creative Commons in my blogs this year, and how you can get the most out of using it.

And Now For the News...

I'm not going to sit here and pretend that 2011 was a good year. In fact, just about everyone I know, inside and outside of Japan is glad it is over and behind us. It was hard not to feel like my entire family was being targeted - my Mum went through the Brisbane floods in January, my grandmother and uncle's family both were in the most severely affected parts of Christchurch during the very large quake that happened there (again) in February, and my sister and father were both in London during the riots that took place there later in the year.

Japan of course went through what without question was its most trying year since the end of World War II. The triple disaster of the enormous earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident has really profoundly affected everyone in the country in some way. I'm confident I would not have worried if I were single, but being responsible for my young son, I'm quite happy now to admit that the brief contamination of Tokyo's water supply caused me to take steps to prepare to pull my family out of Japan. All I can say is that it was a profoundly stressful year, that I'm sure affected everyone in Japan, foreign and local, both inside and outside of the disaster area.

Beyond that, the global economy also has been doing badly and this, along with the floods in Thailand has also had a very strong negative effect on the economy of Japan. Personally, the economic slowdown has been a hidden blessing for me, giving me much more time to spend at home with my family throughout the trials that we have all been through here. It has given me the time and ability to slow down and think long and hard about my life, and make preparations for the changes that I am now approaching going into 2012.

And So, This Is Me...

I deliberately refrain from sharing much personal information on the web. I enjoy being known by the pure form of my personality that I show to you in my thoughts through my videos, blogs and tweets, and the people that this lets me connect with. I also think it is more interesting to know less about someone.

However, I can tell you that I have spent the last five and a half years working as a corporate lawyer in Tokyo at an international law firm. Professionally and intellectually, it has been the most demanding five and a half years of my life. I get to do amazingly interesting work, alongside some of the smartest people I have ever known, and am constantly challenged to push myself to my own limits of being able to think, communicate, and physically keep up with the long arduous hours of work I can be called on to do.

I was lucky enough to meet and marry my wife when I worked in an environmental policy research think tank, on a much more 9 to 7 work day with free weekends and a salariman pay packet before getting into this world. For all the great benefits of my job, it led to me needing to sacrifice many of the things that gave me the quality of life I enjoyed in my last job, namely the time to sit and talk to my wife each evening (I can go weeks living with but never seeing my wife while awake in my current job), to be engaged in sports and hobbies I love, to be in contact with friends, and most of all, to be a prominent part of the raising of my young boy.

Given the poor economy, it was a long hunt for a good transition that gives me the mix of challenge, personal time and flexibility that I am looking for, but after a long time of looking quietly, I'm very glad to say I've found it, and in the process of that move, a lot of the restrictions I've imposed on my own blogging (such as with regards to monetization) will now be lifted.

I don't think much will change from where you sit, but I'm hoping the control I will now have over my routine will allow me to pursue my conversation with you in a more structured manner. I'm not aiming to be Danny Choo, or a Next Up winner, but there's still a lot I want to explore and share about Japan, and the things I love within it, and if you're up for it, I do hope you'll join me, and have a great 2012.

Peace

Photoblog - Tokyo Modern and the End of Compact Cameras

2011-12-09T12:14:00.000+09:00

Tokyo Space Hangar, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

I don't like the design of my iPhone 4S. Compared to my iPhone 3G, my iPod Touch, or even my Ipad 2, it doesn't feel comfortable to hold. I don't like the battery life. I don't like the glass back or fragile glass screen. And yet, I picked mine up on the day of sale for one decisive reason - the camera.

The camera on the iPhone 4S is not a compact digital camera killer.

Fountains at Night in Tokyo, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

It has a bunch of lenses, a clever sensor and all that, but it is STILL more or less a tiny pinhole camera that struggles for light and with stability, as nearly all mobile phone cameras do. And yet, in spite of there being much better compact cameras out there, with better lenses, better sensors and so on, the plethora of photo Apps and the easy, nearly infinite ways that they allow you to manipulate and post process your photos in what, for all intents and purposes, is also your camera, is what makes the iPhone decisively better than any compact camera. I am surprised for this reason that compact camera makers don't try to respond by building up competing Android Apps (which has a fairly anaemic offering still in comparison to iOS) and installing large Android OS controlled touchscreens on their cameras. Because until they do, iOS will slowly make them more irrelevant, forcing dedicated camera makers to survive by shifting to removable lens cameras, and designing more advanced phone based camera sensors.

Anyway, the camera on my iPhone 4S, combined primarily with the wonderful Instagram App is a daily source of joy for me. Other apps I love and enjoy using with my photos are;
Picture Show
PhotoStudio
SlowShutter
BeFunky Pro
Tiny Planet
ToonCamera
PEStudio

Try some of these out yourself and let me know if you have an Instagram account!

Kanda Bridge Tunnel fisheye, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

La Policia!, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Night Fountain Bokeh w/4S, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Havin' Babies in Japan - A Gaijin Dad's Tale

2011-12-05T17:12:00.000+09:00

I suppose you always have an image in your head of how you are going to propose marriage, and how you will react to finding out that you are expecting a baby. Mass media tells us, the best way to propose is to hire the use of a blimp, or a scoreboard at a packed sports stadium and to telecast the proposal on a live global feed. Movies also taught me that the appropriate procedure for finding out your other half is pregnant, is to jump around the room singing, and then go and grab a box of Cuban cigars, and run all over the place shoving them in people's mouths.

However, real life is different, and what seem like good ideas in the view of the world we see through our television sets aren't really how things are, or indeed, even how they should be in real life.

I was sitting on the sofa, watching TV. My wife came and sat down next to me. She handed me what looked like a thermometer and asked me - "this means positive, right?" It was a home pregnancy test - I had no inkling that she was even taking such a test (there had been no morning sickness or visible signs to me) - and it indeed was a clear pink line I think, which the instructions said clearly meant she was pregnant.

I was happy and surprised, but the first reaction I felt, and that I suspect many others do is immediately - "okay, you have to go and see a doctor and make sure it is all okay, and then we have to figure out what we are supposed to do". I decided to hold off telling anyone for a couple of months, just to make sure everything was okay. And so started my road to gaijin parenthood in Japan.

Get in Early

photo by vera46 on Flickr.

My wife was already over two months in by the time she did the test. She had no morning sickness or other such symptoms - in fact, she had what was probably the smoothest pregnancy I have ever heard of among my friends, with none of the crazy hormone induced mood swings, food cravings, and morning sickness you are used to hearing.

However, Japan being Japan, the first reaction of my wife as soon as we confirmed the pregnancy was "we have to find a hospital to handle the birth, and to register on the waiting list for publicly certified daycare". New Zealand is very much a "take it as things come" kind of country, and I thought she was exaggerating, but then not long after came the news story of a woman in labour in an ambulance being turned away from half a dozen hospitals around Tokyo. It was also around the time that the lack of daycare facilities around Tokyo in particular was a major issue of concern raised around the time that the DPJ was elected to power.

Cost of living and the state of the general economy in Tokyo means that nowadays, it is next to impossible to support a family without both parents working. Although Japanese companies have made progress accepting greater numbers of women in to full status career employees within many companies, and allowing them to take maternity leave and then return to work, the infrastructure to support working families is barely there, with babysitting companies and daycare rare, expensive and desperately oversubscribed causing enormous waiting lists that often end up necessitating that one of the parents sacrifice their job anyway.

The shortage of daycare was brought to a head by daycare waiting list induced mass migrations around Tokyo and surrounding areas, Ironically, it is the family friendly satellite cities and suburbs where these issues are most acute, which prompted a mass migration of families at one point from Yokohama to the mainly office district of the Chiyoda Ward in Tokyo, whose ward municipal offices were consequently overwhelmed by the thousands of daycare refugees moving there in order to be in a ward with a shorter waiting list. Local governments around Tokyo met to resolve the problem, agreeing that once a child is registered on a waiting list in one ward, that child may not re-register on the waiting list of another ward, the idea being to prevent families moving to areas with shorter waiting lists for daycare.

I really wish they had instead considered INCREASING the number of daycare centers, but the difficulty of adapting Tokyo's cramped highrise apartment rooms into daycare facilities that meet all the space, fire safety, teacher qualification conditions of certification requirements of law mean that there is little the government can do. There was a proposal to allow certification of daycare that did not meet such standards, but this was shut down at the committee stage, and the Social Democrats leader who was acting welfare minister and had promised to address the daycare issue gave up her crusade and turned back to old socialist form, demanding the withdrawal of US bases from Okinawa instead...

Looking online, Tokyo is currently in the absolutely ridiculous situation that to even have a choice of getting your child into public daycare when maternity/paternity leave runs out, you basically need to register your child on the waiting list before they are born.

Risky Childbirth and Yamato Damashii As Anaesthesia

Not even wanting to think yet about daycare, my wife and I turned our attention to medical care. This was particularly important to me, because while I have never heard of anyone in my circle of acquaintances abroad be involved in the death of a mother during childbirth outside Japan, it is something you hear about in Japan, in spite of its very thorough, prevention oriented public health system. I had always presumed this was due mainly to the slender physique of most Japanese women, making them more prone to difficult births.

I was a little shocked to learn that of all the areas of medicine that Japan lags behind western countries in technologically, childbirth is one of the most old fashioned, not just in attitudes of doctors and nurses, but patients too. I could hardly believe the attitudes to childbirth, that sounded to me more like old wives' tales.

The first one is that many Japanese consider any kind of non-natural chemical interference in the pregnancy or birth process to be something that can have lifelong damaging effects on the child. Because of this, many, if not most, women in Japan opt for natural childbirth, even where such childbirth is expected to be difficult. Which is fine. But what surprised me was how few hospitals even offer the OPTION of local anaesthetic should one become necessary or things go wrong. That, combined with stories of malpractice by incompetent obstetricians leading to death that I had heard from friends meant that getting a good hospital lined up early was of vital importance.

photo by andy z on Flickr.

My wife made it clear that she had no aversion to using whatever drugs necessary to ensure that the birth could be as low risk and relatively pain free as possible. We searched for hospitals that offered epidurals and in all of greater Tokyo, turned up just three results. One was an extremely exclusive hospital that caters almost exclusively to wealthy expats. The other was the Keio University hospital, which was handy to where we lived and seemed the best choice. The only problem we were told was that at that hospital, even if we schedule an epidural, the anaesthesiologist only works between 9am and 5pm, so if you went into labour outside those hours, as roughly two thirds the patients there who schedule epidurals do... well... apparently you are shit out of luck.

So along came choice number three. A Lutheran hospital in Ogibuko, in the western suburbs of Tokyo. A bit of a hike for us, but 24 hour epidurals, Japanese but gaijin friendly, and the only practical choice for such a birth in all of Tokyo.

What's In a Name?

The pregnancy raised another issue that arises with most international marriages in Japan. Whereas people in most other Asian cultures I know seem to have little resistance to taking on foreign nicknames and adopting foreign surnames through marriage, Japanese stand out for their attachment to their Japanese names. There are lots of reasons for this. Perhaps the most basic and practical one is that the limited range of sounds used in Japanese means that most foreign names - even simple ones, are a challenge for most Japanese to hear and pronounce correctly. What this means is that when changing a surname or name, coworkers and colleagues can struggle to adapt to a new foreign name, and it can lead to the often unsought perception that the person themself is not Japanese. A further complicating factor in this is that unlike western countries where traditionally names were past through the patriarchal line, and in more modern times hyphenated joint names are sometimes used as a compromise, it was traditionally common in Japan for names to pass by the higher social status rather than gender. It is quite common for family trees to have ancestors where the mother's surname was used for generations, and in spite of the Meiji era reforms that brought Japan into line with Europe making use of the male surname the automatic default, it is still not uncommon for people to choose either to keep separate family names (at least in international marriages where this is possible to do), or for men to take their wive's family names. I have former Japanese coworkers who have done just this.

Because foreign resident information is kept on a separate database to the Japanese family register, foreigners are an exception to the Japanese law that automatically updates the wife's family register to that of her husband upon marriage. If a Japanese woman marries a foreigner and wishes to take his surname, she must apply for a legal name change in the local family court and get permission from the court to do so, and then go through the arduous process of updating all her personal identification documentation on her own. It's an enormous pain. Even where the name change is automatic, the burden of changing names on women in Japan is such that it has even become an election issue, with the leader of the Social Democratic Party refusing to marry her partner until the law is reformed allowing separate surnames or the wife's name by automatic choice upon marriage.

What this means is that in my case, as in the case of nearly every other foreign man I know married to a Japanese, my wife was less than enthusiastic to change her name upon marriage. I consider myself a liberal open minded modern new age guy and all, but I had been guilty of presuming that we would have a shared surname upon marriage, and that it would be mine (even if only for the fact my surname is actually quite rare, and my wife's isn't). After some debate, we came to a compromise, whereby we would just keep separate surnames, but my wife would take my surname if we had a child (which after marriage, we were not sure was possible). Incidentally, I would say that in the vast majority of international marriages of western husbands and Japanese wives I know of in Japan, this is the standard initial pattern, where the spouses maintain different surnames.

When the pregnancy was confirmed, I raised the name issue again. The reason for this was, as happens with many foreign husbands, the surname given to the baby at birth is that on the family register of the Japanese parent. I was fine with my wife having a separate surname, but not my son. My wife was reluctant to go to the hassle, but I eventually persuaded her based on two points; (1) husbands in Japan (Japanese or foreign) generally have no rights of access to children upon divorce. Basically in the worst case, my wife is the one with all the rights over our son, so the least she could let me have is at least the same name, and (2) again, doing a survey of married gaijin husband friends, the majority do a rejigging of surnames when a child enters the equation. All possible combinations of this happen - some do hyphenated names (which some local governments in Japan will recognise, but many do not), sometimes the husband will take the wife's name, sometimes the child will take the husband's surname (by legal name change) and the wife will keep her surname, although this involves removing the child from the mother's family register in a procedure similar to the one used for infant death, that can spook some mothers. A reasonable majority of my friends in that situation seemed to do what my wife did, the mother would change her name prior to the birth in order to ensure the whole family had the same surname upon birth of the child. It was a huge inconvenience for my wife, but I appreciate her doing it immensely.

Knowing You Know Nothing

While I understand that there are people who spend their entire lives waiting to have babies, and become experts on all aspects of pregnancy and childbirth as soon as that process begins, it's fair to say that in our case, my wife and I took the approach of being thorough with getting checkups and taking advice from doctors, but hadn't a clue about where and how to gather information otherwise. If we have another child, this will obviously be different the next time around, but for now, we acted as if any advice given by the doctor would be the best advice we can find anywhere, and treat it as such. I was surprised to find out how out of sync a lot of the advice you get in Japan is with the advice and approach taken in many western countries.

photo by slava on Flickr.

Nothing Worse Than a Fat Pregnant Lady

One thing that was noticeable, especially going to some local government run "preparation for parenthood" classes with other similarly expecting parents, is how many Japanese women manage to go all the way through pregnancy without ever even looking pregnant. I was also surprised at the increasingly stern lectures my wife was getting from her obstetrician to ensure that she not allow her weight to increase by more than 10% during pregnancy.

This didn't make logical sense to me at all. I always thought, surely the best thing a pregnant mother can do is eat lots of (healthy of course) food to make sure the unborn baby is as well nourished and healthy as possible at the time of birth. It wasn't until watching a TV special on this very subject that I learned that some doctors are struggling now to finally overturn the logic used in Japan for centuries that the healthiest course was to hold your weight down during pregnancy and give birth to a small baby, and then build them up as quickly as possible after birth. This comes back to the issue that Japanese women often lack strong childbearing physiques, and doctors have traditionally advised that the best way to avoid birth complications was to restrain the growth of the child in the womb, and then to make up for lost time once they were out. Apparently, many doctors are pointing out that with modern medicine, difficult births can be better dealt with, and it is better from the perspective of the health of the child to feed them and allow them to develop in the womb as much as possible.

This was a challenge for my wife in particular because having no morning sickness, she skipped out on the phase most women in Japan go through in pregnancy where they lose weight at first, and then put it back on with hunger cravings later on. My wife skipped straight to the cravings, and the doctors we were seeing were threatening to check her into hospital and put her on a hospital diet for a week if she didn't try harder not to put on weight, which really was ridiculous given that other than being pregnant, she wasn't noticeably fatter at all.

A Half Caucasian Baby?! GET THE FORKLIFT!

Godzilla, a photo by AndyCunningham on Flickr.

The other somewhat odd, and looking back now, slightly ridiculous way of thinking we ran into was the presumption that because I was the father, the baby was going to be some kind of human version of King Kong. Even three or four months out from the due date, with all indications being that the foetus wasn't developing at any faster or slower rate, or bigger or smaller than normal, the doctor insisted we should schedule an induced birth one month prior to the expected due date.

This didn't make any sense to me. The baby was no larger than normal, or showing signs of anything that would require cutting the pregnancy four weeks short. The view I shared with my wife was that if there really did end up being any kind of problem, we had no aversion at all to getting a cesarean section for the delivery, or doing whatever. The main thing we were concerned about was making sure the baby had a full healthy term in the womb.

However, the doctors were insistent, and... they were the doctors, so we went along with it. They pointed out, I'm 30cm taller than my wife, and usually with that kind of size difference between parents, they err on the side of caution recommending an early induced birth to be on the safe side. This kind of made sense, but I heard later that a rugby team mate of mine who also had a baby coming at the same hospital around the same time was told the same thing, even though he is pretty much normal height by Japanese standards, and only 10 cm taller than his wife. However, in his case, after being told to expect Godzilla to be born, they decided in the end it was okay to not induce and go with the scheduled timing.

So nervously and cautiously we waited for the date to come when my wife was to check into the hospital and have the induced birth.

Dazed and Confused at Akachan Honpo

With the date coming closer and the pregnancy going as well as we could have asked, we realized we were soon just a week or so out from actually checking into the hospital to eventually come back out with the baby. And at that point, we had made absolutely zero preparations for that. It is hard to explain, but we were both so focused on the pregnancy at each step and just keeping up with everything happening, we really hadn't allowed ourselves to start visualizing our baby (who we knew was a son at this point) actually being in the house or what that was like. As soon as my wife and I realized we had no baby clothes, no baby cot, barely even an idea of what sleeping arrangements were going to be, we realized that we had to go and start getting baby supplies.

Rowan bewildered, a photo by onenjen on Flickr.

Expecting that we should just get the bare minimum to begin and add stuff as needed as we figure everything out, I asked around friends about what you are supposed to get and where to go. I consistently got the advice that Akachan Honpo and Babies 'R' Us, both in the Shitamachi district of Kinshicho were one stop shops for everything. Akachan Honpo in particular, an enormous 7 storey high baby good department store, actually has a shopping checklist for newborns, with a suggested list of stuff you need to have when a baby arrives, to use as a shopping guide. My friends recommended the list, for use either at that shop or anywhere else. So my wife and I got on the train to Kinshicho and went to just buy whatever we had to buy.

It's hard to fully appreciate what we were walking into unless you understand the geography of Tokyo a little. "Shitamachi" refers to old neighborhoods of Tokyo that predate the development of "modern Tokyo" since it became the capital in the 19th century. Such neighborhoods tend to be somewhat bleak and grungy as Tokyo neighborhoods go. They are inner city with short travel times, but also relatively low rent and lower income areas, and are often the neighborhoods that new migrants to Tokyo, from around Japan and abroad, move into trying to make a life for themselves within Tokyo. These "hungry" new migrants share the neighborhood with Tokyo's minority original traditional inhabitants, who tend to give no quarter to modern migrant Tokyo-ites in terms of niceties.

So the scene we walked into in Akachan Honpo was an enormous, packed, bustling baby shop. It is amazing in scale - it has about every baby product you could possibly ever imagine. The only problem is if anything, there is too much stuff. Even with the checklist, you have no idea where to start or how to select baby undergarments from the dozen equally priced equally sized alternatives on offer. And among that, you have brash, elbowing customers in complete survival mode rushing around the place like they are reliving a montage scene from MacGyver improvising home solutions for the kids they are looking after at home.

My wife and I took the catalog and walked around for about half an hour, completely bewildered. Then we looked at each other, left without buying anything, went home and lay down. Reality was starting to hit home. The next week, we went back and grabbed the first of whatever we saw on the list, and searched for items like the baby bed, and stroller online and in specialty shops. All just a few days before it was time to check into the hospital.

Expectations for Childbirth

The one thing you hear about childbirth is that every case is different. Some people give birth very quickly and easily naturally, and some people can take a long time, even with assistance. I felt good knowing that the birth was going to be induced, if only because I hoped it would ensure the birth process would be relatively speedy.

I was wrong....

Induced Birth With Scheduled Epidural

So as I checked my wife in to the hospital the night before the planned induction for the next morning, I got familiar with the process. The plan was that my wife would get the shot to induce labour, and once she was dilated 10cm, they would administer the epidural, which would make the rest of the childbirth more comfortable.

The Japanese term for "birth with epidural" is actually "無痛分娩" (mutsuu bumben), which literally means "painless birth". It makes me wonder with a name like that, why there aren't more people lining up for it.

hippie dog, a photo by istolethetv on Flickr.

The complicating factor here was the induction. Even at the scheduled time, although my wife was carrying the baby very much in front, he still wasn't anywhere near being outside the scope of "normal" baby size, and I was still wondering why in the hell this was necessary. I learned that not being natural contractions (which were still weeks away), induced contractions feel more intense and more painful to the mother. The aim was obviously therefore to transition from the induction to the epidural as quickly and as smoothly as possible.

The Best Laid Plans

The process was scheduled to begin at 9am, so I came into the hospital and watched as the induction medicine built up its intensity over the hours. The first 3 hours were relatively mild and relaxed. It wasn't really until it got past midday that the contractions became very strong and painful.

As the pain became more intense, I began to feel more helpless, and did what I could to help keep my wife calm and her mind off the pain. We didn't take Lamaze classes (probably would have been a good idea) but having broken arms and legs myself, and playing contact sport, I at least tried to coach her through the kind of pain diversion techniques I learned - focused breathing, visualization, distraction, humour or anything else I could come up with to try to reduce the misery of the situation.

There were three complicating factors to my plan.

The first was that no matter how long or how intense the contractions were, my wee lad just wasn't interested in coming out to play, and she never got beyond a centimetre or so dilated.

The second issue was that my wife was hooked up to a remarkable device in the room that somehow measures her level of pain. I'm not exactly sure what the measure used by the machine was, but apparently it could detect physiological cues that the body was preparing to experience pain, and would show a line graph and make loud beeping noises whenever pain was on its way. It's good for the doctors to measure discomfort, and the patient to brace themselves I guess, but it makes the one distraction in the room a device that loudly measures pain, which I felt wasn't all that helpful.

The third issue was my mother in law. Much like with the doctors, my initial thoughts were to defer to her, as someone who had been through childbirth twice and could relate to my wife's situation directly. However, in spite of my deciding not to get involved when my mother in law wanted to intervene, her unconscious reflexive reaction of saying over and over "oh it hurts doesn't it? I'll bet that really hurts. You seem to be in a lot of pain. Oh no, it's probably going to hurt more and more", and her obsession with the 'pain machine' I just mentioned, and how she started calling in the waves of upcoming pain and contractions by the machine like a horse race commentator ("oh, here comes a big one, this one is really going to hurt, ouch ouch ouch!") made me begin to wonder if she was really acting in the most appropriate way possible to help her through a drawn out and painful birth.

I was trying to counsel my wife with controlled breathing and self hypnosis techniques ("visualise a nice beach, or floating in the ocean...") any my mother in law would intervene "oh, it really hurts doesn't it?!" Late in the afternoon with no progress made and the difficult labor continuing, I took my mother in law aside at one point and told her "I'm really not sure constantly talking about pain is a good idea. I'm trying to help take her mind off it, don't you think that is a better way to go right now?". She looked at me and realized what she had been doing. "Oh Hiko, you're absolutely right. We should be calming her down, I'll stop it right away".

We then went back in the room as another contraction started. "Oh, it hurts doesn't it, I can tell - just look at how big the line is on this graph!" ....

Time to Call It a Day

As the day wore on into the early evening, I was growing more and more frustrated with the hospital. The induction was doing nothing more than creating agony for my wife, which she had to go through for hours. While nurses would come in about once an hour, the doctor only came in two or three times that entire day. The nurses would update that no progress was made with dilation, and by the end of the day, all I could do was try to comfort my distraught agonized and exhausted wife (with my mother in law at my side doing her best to do the opposite).

Having left us since lunch to deal with outpatients, the doctor finally came by around 6pm and noted the lack of progress. I was relieved - both my wife and I had presumed that given the failure of the induction, the next step was to move to c-section and just get the process done with.

The doctor however was reluctant. "Nono, we will take her off the induction drip now and let her recover tonight, but we can try this again tomorrow when we might have more luck...." Given the complete failure to make any progress on that day, I was surprised he was even talking about trying this for another day, but fine I went along with it.

Not What We Paid For

photo by bcrofts2 on Flickr.

The next morning, I had run some errands on the way into the hospital, thinking I had the time given that the induction medicine hadn't kicked in really until between 11 and 12 on the first day. However, when I arrived there at 10am, things were already in full swing this time, and my poor old wife who was exhausted from the previous day and hadn't managed to eat or sleep well overnight was looking in bad shape.

The never ending process of waves of painful contractions, and hourly visits from the nurses checking dilation to confirm no progress continued. By the time we got to the afternoon, it was getting ridiculous. My wife was exhausted, screaming, kicking the walls beside her bed, and when she could catch her breath, asking "what the Hell are they doing calling this "painless birth?! I WANT A REFUND!" It was pretty much the worst case scenario. I was getting angry too. She had taken 36 hours of induced labor to dilate 2 centimeters, and was at a point now that even if things did suddenly progress, she was clearly now too exhausted to be able to do the birth properly. I called the nurses over and demanded to have the doctor, who had been absent since morning, to come and look. They reacted like they were stalling for time. They didn't want to be in the room with all the painful contractions, and were holding to hope that delaying long enough would end up with progress eventually coming. It was only when a nurse had to spend two minutes alone with my wife helping her to the toilet at one point that they finally ran off to get the doctor.

The doctor came back and the reason for his absence became clear. He was seeing outpatients again, and had wanted to let things run until 6pm (it was about 2pm at this point) and then decide whether to change plan. I'm pretty sure the look on my face told him that now was a good time to change plan. He acknowledged, the induction is going nowhere, and indeed, even if it did, at this point she is too exhausted to do the birth part anyway, so he said that they would administer anaesthetic and reduce the induction drip, and make her comfortable with a view to doing a c-section at the end of the day.

It took less than 5 minutes for my wife to become comfortable once the anaesthetic was given, and I was livid thinking that the plan the doctor and nurses had been going to was to keep my wife in full induced labor for four more hours without even checking on her. And as it turned out, once my wife became more comfortable, by 6pm, she was fully dilated. However, the doctors agreed c-section was at this point the most safe option (my wife was saying that she wished they had just skipped the labor and gone straight to c-section if they were going to insist on forcing the birth a month early).

Watching The Door

So when the moment finally arrived, the doctor and some nurses came in - time for the c-section. They unlocked the wheels of the bed and began to wheel it along the corridors assuring me "okay, this will be over in no time now". Suddenly they made a left turn through some doors marked "no entry". I paused wondering where they were going, but before I could ask, the nurse directed me to the waiting area in front of the elevators in the guest area. Apparently they were going to look after the whole "giving birth to my firstborn" thing, and I could kick back and read a magazine or something.

I actually was reminded vividly of that moment when I saw the scene in Mad Men where Don Draper is similarly sitting alone in a waiting room awaiting the birth of his daughter in the 1950s. I guess I can appreciate now, that doing birth 1950s style with Dad in the next room awaiting the news (which isn't how it was planned, it was because of the c-section) isn't easy for the Dad at all. Yes, the Mum and the doctors are doing all the work, but there you are, sitting staring at a pair of elevator doors tuning in to every footstep in earshot hoping it will be the news of the most important moment in your life. And while they told me it would take the Japanese equivalent of a "jiffy", I sat there blankly staring, worrying, unable to do anything at all for over 30 minutes before anyone came up to me. And even then, a nurse walked up, checked my name, and then handed me a small piece of paper.

Congratulations!

Time of Birth: 18:40

Gender: Male

Weight: 3312g

Height: 48.2cm

It was a magic piece of paper. But then having given it to me, she walked away and I was left for another 20 minutes just to stare at the paper, holding it more or less like the paper was my newborn son.

It wasn't until finally after nearly an hour of being told to sit by the magazines and to wait that I was ushered into the newborn meeting room where I was able to meet and hold my wee lad for the first time, for at least 5 minutes before mother in law elbowed her way in and took control... :)

Drinking from the River Lethe

It's a funny thing about human brain development that it is difficult for us to remember what it was like not having certain abilities that we now possess. For example, I think it isn't simply that we don't have memories of being babies - even memories we have as children and toddlers, it is very hard to remember the state of mind we were in being unable to fully speak or express ourselves. We can remember everything about a situation we were perhaps in, where we were frustrated or unable to do something, but we can't really remember not being able to ride a bicycle, or use a fork, or say certain things. As an adult, I have experienced the same thing with speaking Japanese. Even when people I haven't seen in a long time say how much I've improved at Japanese, I really can't remember very well what it was like not understanding Japanese even though I can remember everything about those times we previously met.

With Hiko Junior a happy healthy two year old now, it is constantly astounding to my wife and I how hard it is to recall him in his earliest stages of development when he was unable to do anything, just as I'm sure that within a few months, it will be difficult to remember him now, only being able to say a few words still. To be honest, this makes it very hard for me to really remember the first year, in terms of what it was like day to day, but fortunately I have photos and other things to help remind me.

I'll add another follow up post to this in future on the first two years and the ups and downs of figuring out how to raise a young multicultural lad in Tokyo, but for now, I hope you enjoyed the whirlwind story of how we more or less stumbled into the world of parenthood.

Peace

Tokyo Photoblog - Why I LOVE Instagram

2011-12-02T16:12:00.001+09:00

Although I had held out from getting the iPhone 3GS and the iPhone 4, my iPhone 3G was getting pretty old by the time the 4S was released, and particularly since the release of the 4, I was blown away at the high quality of photos many people were starting to take and creatively use with the very nice camera on that phone. Indeed, the quality and ease of use of the camera on the iPhone 4S is well known, and the number of amazing photography related apps are mind blowing. But what really has made having all these things together really work for me lately has been the app Instagram.

Good Night Tokyo, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

The App itself, like many other photo Apps has a bunch of stylistic image degrading filters that give a cool edge to photos that you take, and like most other photo apps, allows you to send your photos to existing social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Flickr - although infuriatingly not Google Photos (formerly Picasa) or Google+ due to restrictions on Google's APIs that will hopefully be lifted soon. However, what I am loving most of all is the very active community of users on Instagram itself who take advantage of the app's huge userbase and easy to access feed and comment/fave features to mean that even someone new to the app can usually plug in their SNS info and find dozens of friends, and start viewing and getting comments and likes back on photos they post almost right away.

Night time in Tokyo, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

It is the same mojo that makes Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and other sites work. It isn't that it is the best or most feature rich site out there. It is that there is a large critical mass of users on the site who are active, that keep it interesting enough to hold the interest of new participants. And indeed, the feedback one can instantly get on the site has made me dig more through the app store and other apps I have to try to figure out cool new ways to make my photos stand out in the feeds of other people.

Night Fountain Bokeh w/4S, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

I'll talk a little more about Photo related apps I have discovered and give my views of them in upcoming Instagram update posts, as well as other iPhone photography related tips and accessories that I have picked up and recommend. For now, please enjoy five of the first ever photos I posted on Instagram, and look out for future updates of the ways in which I try to show off through all the abilities of my iPhone the millions of ways in which I love Tokyo, as what is undoubtedly the coolest city on Earth.

Enjoy!

Night Lights Bokeh Tokyo, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

Off the point at Greenmount, Coolongatta NSW, my favorite surf spot in the world, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

When Talking About Burakumin, NEVER SAY "BURAKUMIN!"

2011-11-21T01:00:00.001+09:00

It is fair to say that in almost any comprehensive western academic treatise on modern Japanese society, there is usually a chapter covering the topic of, what is referred to still in most English writing as "Burakumin". Because of the attention given to the topic in a lot of writing about Japan, I think it is natural for eager foreigners coming to Japan to want to broach the topic with their homestays and Japanese friends, as I did myself many years ago.

An excellent summary on the topic was done on a recent blog by Tofugu, which sets out the origins and modus operandi of how such discrimination often works. My intent here is to supplement that blog, and the many treatise that explain the origins of the issue, so as to give a practical idea here of how the issue exists in Japanese society today, and the minefields that exist about raising the topic with Japanese people.

First Point - When Talking about Burakumin, NEVER SAY "BURAKUMIN"

Picture this... your Japanese exchange student is sitting down for dinner with a nervous excited well to do middle class caucasian family, somewhere in the American midwest. As they pass around the mashed potatoes, and little Taro takes his first mouthfulls of steak and coleslaw, he leans over toward his homestay father, overcome by enthusiasm and curiosity, and asks his homestay father:

"So, I hear that there is still a real problem in America with discrimination against niggers..."

Now hold that thought, because this is pretty much the scene you will recreate as the homestay student asking a host family about "burakumin" over sushi.

It is easy to get the mis-impression that the discrimination against such people is so profound that even the term to describe them is taboo. This is the impression I first got. But that's not the case.

Modern Understanding of the Burakumin Issue Starts With Understanding the "Dowa Discrimination Law"

Japan is well known for being a little late to the party when it comes to laws against discrimination, be it against women, disabled, or ethnic minorities. Even now, parliament is in the process of formulating Japan's first ever Human Rights Law bill, which is the subject of much angst among conservatives concerned that it could be used to empower groups, such as yakuza, that face discrimination seen by most as being legitimate (on a quick side note, Japan is seldom given credit for having tried to include a provision against racial discrimination in the League of Nations Charter, that was defeated by a racially segregationist USA and nervous Imperial Britain, worried about the ramifications for itself, and its then colonies in Australia and South Africa).

The strongest laws against discrimination that currently exist in Japan are against Dowa (同和) discrimination, and have been in place since 1969. A translation used for Dowa that I have seen is "assimilation" - it is in itself a clever piece of social engineering nomenclature, that means literally "same - Japanese", the idea being to replace the term "buraku" linked to discrimination, with a term that emphasizes the "sameness" of buraku residents with other Japanese. National and local governmental initiatives have sought to eliminate "dowa" discrimination by effectively wiping all vestiges of how it is practiced from existence, including its very name.

As part of the many steps to eradicate the practice of discrimination against Dowa people, the term "Burakumin" has effectively been prohibited from broadcast or print in Japan. It's a forbidden term, that corresponds similarly to the use of politically incorrect terms for minorities in the US - hence the "nigger" analogy. Therefore, in the rest of this blog, and when you talk about this subject in Japanese, PLEASE NEVER USE the term "burakumin", even if that is what you read it is in English. The term is treated effectively an illegal discriminatory term. The appropriate term to use is "Dowa" - and you talk about the Dowa Issue - "dowa mondai" or Dowa people - "dowachiku no hito" using that term. Unfortunately, very little English literature has kept pace with domestic efforts to combat use of this term, and regrettably still uses the now prohibited term. Japanese people, in the few examples of English writing on this subject by Japanese that I can find, show a tendency to prefer the politically correct modern term "Dowa".

Too Sensitive To Print

I can give you a good practical example of how sensitive this term is. I used to help put together the Corporate Social Responsibility Report for a major Japanese corporation I used to work at. As a leading company and a high up in the Keidanren, my company was expected to play a leading role by example in implementing modern progressive working policies to accommodate women, disabled, working mothers and so on. The idea is that by encouraging voluntary initiatives in these areas, led by top corporations, the Keidanren can work with government to achieve policy goals without overbearing coercive rules needing to be introduced.

I helped to prepare the English version of this annual report listing out the ways in which the company was being a good corporate citizen.

One year, one of the flagship social awareness drives within the company was an internal employee education campaign to make people aware of the Dowa Issue, and to recognize and help prevent the practice of discrimination. It was a great and eye opening program, both in the content of the training, and the fact that in my office in Tokyo, less than half my Japanese co-employees had even heard of the issue.

The video went through all the issues, from outright discrimination in employment and marriage Dowa people have traditionally faced, to more subtle discrimination that still happens, for example in restrictions regarding where such families are allowed to have their cemeteries, and such areas were often are left out of town improvement plans in the past.

I'll talk a bit more about the reactions to this campaign a bit later, but the point is, in the Japanese report, the internal campaign of Dowa Awareness was a flagship issue, that I was commissioned with preparing the English version of.

The problem was, while I knew that you were not allowed to say the terms Buraku or Burakumin in Japanese, in English, these are the only terms used to describe this issue. I considered using the term "Dowa" instead, but the problem with that is that it is very seldom used in English and would not be understood as readily as "Burakumin". I think I arrived at a translation of "Buraku People" as a kind of compromise and nervously sent it on for approval.

My boss was semi-apoplectic...

"Hiko... Hiko... why on earth did you use this term?!"

"Well, I know it's sensitive in Japanese, but this is widely discussed academically in English, and this is the term always used there. Google it yourself."

"Well, yes... but... can't we just use another term...?" The problem here is obvious. It was the equivalent of Microsoft having a section in its CSR report about "Steps to Stop Discrimination Against Niggers".

After much squirming, and consideration of the idea of using the term "Dowa" instead, the conclusion was handed down from upper management days later. There is no need to discuss this topic in the English version of the report.

So, What's With The Discrimination Anyway?

I think reading about Dowa Discrimination in western writings, it is hard to get a concrete sense of what is in the mind of the people who are prejudiced. Most people, no doubt wanting to be mindful of not perpetuating discriminatory stereotypes themselves, skirt around the issue by referring to the historic origins of the people as "ruffians" or "untouchable", and in a modern sense, somehow "punks" or "lower class". Truth is, the nature of the discrimination is very similar to the discrimination seen in Western societies against Jews, and in Asian societies against diaspora Chinese.

At the crux of the historic discriminatory perception of Dowa people is the vicious cycle that Dowa people being prohibited from respectable employment and marriage, inevitably fall in to working in organized crime and loan sharking, and because of perceived high rates of participation and membership of yakuza drawn from Dowa areas, discrimination against yakuza was pre-emptively extended across all people from such areas. This is precisely the same way in which many Zainichi Koreans are also discriminated against to this day.

The best description of the issue I ever heard was from an Osakan friend who wasn't Dowa himself, but used to work in a leather jacket factory in Osaka, owned and run by Dowa people. In a very frank, old town Osaka way, he set it out to me as follows. To paraphrase; "I know lots of those guys, and most of them are good hard working people, and the discrimination they used to get was complete bullshit and stupid. I'm not like that, I have friends from those areas and I used to work with them." Great, an enlightened knowledgeable friend to fill me in on the issue I thought. But then came the kicker "BUT, you know, I would never let anyone in my family marry any of them..."

I was a little flabbergasted. "You just said that you think the discrimination against them is BS, but you wouldn't let anyone in your family marry one of them?"

He explained "The problem is that in a place like Osaka, once you are connected to a family that has just one guy anywhere involved in the mob, you and your whole family gets tainted by that. You can't get a bank loan, or buy land, or start a business in some areas. It sucks for them, but that is the only way to avoid it."

He succinctly explained with this the reason measures to combat Dowa discrimination have taken the "thermonuclear" approach, forbidding even maps and lists of names of people from such backgrounds. Where the discrimination exists, it is so deeply embedded and profound that anything less than complete eradication would risk quietly fostering the discrimination further.

The Dowa Issue Is Extremely Geography-Specific

Another key thing to bear in mind before ever raising this topic in polite conversation in Japan is to be aware that while it is slowly being combated and wiped out in older regions of Japan such as Kansai and Kyushu, where communities have collective memories of who did what going back to the shogunate period, in the more recently populated north and east of Japan, this kind of issue is unknown to many. Within Tokyo, there are old districts such as Ueno and Asakusa where the trademark signs of old Buraku areas exist (lots of leather/shoe shops, and Horumon BBQ restaurants), but most people who live in Tokyo and further north are migrants who came since the Meiji period, and while other issues of discrimination exist, this is not well known or understood to most people.

In contrast, people in East Japan look on and shudder at the deeply embedded prejudices that accompany the deep traditions of the much older regions of Kansai and Kyushu, where this issue was most pronounced and still exists. So this is to say, it is not unusual at all for Japanese people to know absolutely nothing about this issue, particularly in Eastern Japan. Just reading the recent Tofugu blog, you are probably more informed than many Japanese are, who receive no formal education on the issue, other than the vague knowledge that the term "Burakumin" is a discriminatory and prohibited term. Don't be shocked or misinterpret ignorance about the issue in newer parts of Japan. The ignorance is generally because the issue does not exist in those areas.

And in contrast, in those old parts of Eastern Japan and Western Japan where such discrimination remains, it is best to listen with an open mind, and sensitive to people's willingness to engage on the issue. The prejudice where it exists, is based on fear, generally associated with the Yakuza. Of course this is a grossly unfair association, but people have astoundingly long collective memories in many old parts of Japan, and breaking such associations can take time, extending beyond the largely successful actions taken to date to prevent institutional discrimination.

Training Day

I have to admit, when I was sat down to watch the corporate training video along with 30 or so other people from my company, I had no idea what anyone was talking about for a long part of the video. I wasn't familiar with the term "Dowa", and most of the video even refrained from that term, describing "dowa-chiku" (assimilated areas) and showing examples of how such people were treated worse than the general population traditionally, and the negative associations held.

As the only gaijin in the room, and in the broader company, people were interested and asked if I knew what the video was about. At that point, half way through, I really didn't. In fact, I thought it was a video warning people about using loan sharks. When I said that, people responded "well, that is kind of what it is..."

It wasn't until the marriage and employment discrimination bit came up that I clicked and realized this was talking about the Buraku issue. The entire training video went on for 30 minutes without even using the term "buraku" once. And even after that, I was surprised that so many people reacted saying that they had never heard of it (with some of the older guys being a bit more knowledgeable).

I had been in Japan about 5 or 6 years at that point, and it is fair to say that I hadn't openly discussed that issue once since coming to Japan, or heard it openly discussed in the media, save for one or two news articles mentioning Dowa rights activist groups as measures to combat Dowa discrimination were wound down in 2002.

Forgive or Forget?

It's fair to say that the response to this issue is very illustrative to me of the broader cultural contrasts that exist between Japan, and similar East Asian cultures influenced by Confucianism and Buddhism, against western cultural values.

There is definitely a tendency in the west to confront issues like this through open dialogue, and concerted efforts to bring about an internal change in people through education and dialogue. The upside to this is that it effectively creates a "crusader" populace that proactively holds values that abhor such discrimination and carry on the battle to confront it and eliminate it through future generations. On the downside of course, such openness about discrimination can also have the unintended side effect of reinforcing or even fostering perceptions of separation, and informing people of prejudices they might otherwise have never formed. It's fair to say that racial discrimination in countries like Germany, Britain and the US is far from conquered, even though instinctively to my own values, it seems that you can't fix the broader issues of discrimination without confronting and defeating such prejudices openly.

Japan however is different - the culture is, generally, pathologically anti-confrontational. Indeed, it is this very aversion to conflict that anti-social groups in Japanese society feed off to survive - their willingness to push things to a conflict where most people will do anything at all to avoid such confrontations. The Japanese approach to Dowa discrimination is to comprehensively seek to strike it from the collective memory.

My problem with this approach is that Dowa discrimination is in nature very similar to ongoing discrimination still practiced against other unprotected minorities in Japan. Rather than confronting the practice of prejudice, or the values that foster it, the approach instead has been to eliminate from the public record all vestiges of memory of the existence of Dowa discrimination, and make it impossible for future generations to practice such discrimination in the way former generations did, by preventing people being able to research and discover such family histories and so on.

While this approach leaves the core issue of the prejudice itself unaddressed, my observation is that it has arguably been more successful in many ways than similar drives in western countries to eliminate racial discrimination through a more engaging approach. Where the French approach might have my Japanese coworkers all proclaim that they respect Burakumin and treat them equally as fellow Japanese, the Japanese approach is "Burakumin? What are they?" Judging by the high level of ignorance about the topic among my coworkers, who by extension are incapable of fostering such discrimination, the Japanese approach of whitewashing that discrimination from the collective consciousness deserves perhaps more credit than many westerners would instinctively grant it.

In any case, please please please bear in mind that it is a measure of the success of countermeasures against Dowa discrimination that raising it as a topic of discussion will either meet complete ignorance that the issue ever existed, or a reaction that you yourself are awkwardly and inadvertently breaking the taboo against such discrimination just by naming the subject matter of it. Be careful how and when you raise it with Japanese, NEVER use the term "burakumin" when speaking Japanese (use "dowa") and don't superimpose your own ideas of racial discrimination on how the issue exists and is being addressed in Japan.

Peace

Nikkei Trendy Japan Hit Predictions for 2012!

2011-11-15T11:38:00.000+09:00

In my previous post, I outlined Nikkei Trendy Magazine's choice of the top 30 trend and product rankings in Japan for 2011. However, the same December edition of Trendy also featured a predicted top 20 trends for 2012. As I've said before, Trendy is one of the most popular and influential trend magazines in Japan - many predictions it makes become self fulfilling. So there is no better way to get an idea of what is going to be big in Japan in 2012, than checking out their ranking.

In reverse order, Nikkei Trendy's hit predictions for 2012 are as follows (also be sure to check out the detailed coverage of the ranking done in the most excellent blog post of Gakuranman):

Hit 2012, a photo by Hikosaemon on Flickr.

20. Full Eclipse on May 21 visible in Toyota, Nagoya, Osaka and other major cities
19. Facelifting rollers for men
18. Alergion10 - popular anti-hayfever drug will become available without prescription required
17. Video game based fitness gyms
16. Pet style home helper robots
15. Sweet drinks that you mix before drinking (like McFlurry)
14. High tech plastic Gundam models with embedded IC chips for new modes of play
13. Cloud connected digital cameras
12. Low cost family targeted cruises to near Asia destinations
11. Turkish Yoghurt

10. 4G based portable WiFi routers
9. Bars specializing in non-alcohol drinks
8. Food condiments with accompanying time saving cooking tools included
7. Domestic low cost air carriers
6. Toyota Prius Aqua, and other Plug in Hybrid Vehicles
5. DVRs able to record all channels simultaneously for up to 15 days for under 100,000 yen (US$1,300)
4. Order Made Smartphones targeted at new users
3. Dance Gear for kids
2. Augmented Reality Based Trading Cards that can be used with portable gaming devices
1. Tokyo Shitamachi Tours to see the Tokyo Sky Tree

There are a lot of talking points here to pick up. The list overall is the usual well balanced mix between travel, children's interest, women's interest, food and gadget products. Some of the items on this list are already on the market or have even been around for a long time already, but are predicted to take off and become "booms" in 2012.

In terms of travel, the list picks up the very well placed full solar eclipse of May next year, low cost cruise liners, the emergence of low cost air carriers for domestic travel, and tops the list with Tokyo Shitamachi tourism with the opening of the Tokyo Sky Tree, which will hold the Guiness World Record for being the world's tallest tower. More than travel, the eclipse, visible to 80 million people in Japan, is expected to trigger another surge of interest in space and astronomy in Japan. Low cost carriers exist, but more are planning to start up next year, and will hopefully bring some serious price competition to domestic travel, which as things stand, make it often make it cheaper to travel from Tokyo to Korea or Guam than it is to travel to Osaka. They will also be making use of the many white elephant airport projects around Japan struggling without flights or passengers.

The gadget items - all-channel recording DVRs and 4G portable routers - are already available, but it is predicted phone carriers will push mobile WiFi as a way of getting added contracts and revenue from existing customers. I'm still not entirely convinced at the utility of all channel recording DVRs, but I guess it will change the nature of couch surfing, allowing you to browse and discover TV from all times of the day, and then settling on the shows you like for the DVR to pick up each week - given that the best television in Japan is shown after midnight, this could be a great way to discover more decent TV.

Another item that caught my eye is video-game based fitness gyms. And by that, I don't just mean jogging machines with Konami video games built in, as is already common in Japan, but more like the Xbox Kinnect camera system with full body action games and lasers and stuff. I don't know how that would work and if it will really "boom" as soon as next year, but the photos look really cool.

looking trendy as usual, a photo by A_of_DooM on Flickr.

The last point I'll touch on is the prediction of Shitamachi tourism in Tokyo driven by the Tokyo Sky Tree. I know there is a huge weight of expectation surrounding the economic effect of the Sky Tree (which is primarily being built as a digital television tower), but for me... Frankly, I'm looking forward to the Tokyo Sky Tree diverting attention away from the much better located Tokyo Tower, which has a much better view of the city, and getting to go up that tower, probably with fewer crowds and for cheaper entry. People who live in Tokyo easily split between whether they love the Shitamachi northern and eastern part of the inner city known as Shitamachi, which is the traditional and historical heart of Tokyo, or the newer and more modern central, southern and western parts of Tokyo. I've lived in both, but frankly, I just don't get into Shitamachi all that much. Yes, it is the home of "real" multigenerational Tokyo residents, and has all of Tokyo's traditional culture of craftsmen, food and festivals, but at the same time, I personally find the suburbs, best represented by major stations like Ikebukuro, Ueno and Asakusa, to be a bit grungy, treeless, and depressed. All of the money and crowds in Tokyo tend to prefer rushing towards the newer shinier stations on the west side of the Yamanote Line like Shinagawa, Shibuya, Harajuku and Shinjuku, leaving the Shitamachi areas grey, treeless, more aged, both in terms of architecture and residents, and full of public housing blocks and gambling pachinko bars.

The hope for the Sky Tree is that, located deep in the heart of the Shitamachi suburbs, it can draw the families and young crowds that tend to instead make day trips away from Shitamachi. I'm skeptical. The Tower is cool and all, but it is in the middle of a pretty bland suburb, and so rather than the very cool architecture and geography seen from the Tokyo Tower in the center of Tokyo, the view will instead be of sprawling, flat Shitamachi suburbs. I guess it will be interesting to go to at some point, but don't be surprised if the real boom happens with revived interest in the older better located Eiffel Tower replica in Roppongi.

Design gibberrish shirt shop, a photo by Suviko on Flickr.

We won't know how this will all play out in real life until the end of next year of course. Personally, I'm very hopeful in seeing leaps and advances in smartphones, cameras and computing devices, as I am every year. What I hope most is that however 2012 is and whatever booms they bring, that they do something to help pick Japan back up onto its feet. Nobody is complaining out loud, but 2011 has been a tough year for Japan, with the Great East Japan Earthquake, a rampant yen, the Thai floods which have been economically devastating to Japanese manufacturers, and the end of year corporate governance scandals coming to light in multiple companies. All this combined with unprecedented unemployment and a gloomy global outlook, I think people will look forward to turning the page to the year of the Dragon next year, and picking up and rebuilding the economy and general mood bit by bit with cooking condiments, dancing lessons for kids, and alcohol free bars...

What would you like to see take off in 2012?

Peace

Nikkei Trendy Top Hits of 2011 in Japan

2011-11-14T08:47:00.000+09:00

I blogged last year about my love for the magazine Nikkei Trendy and how it is one of the leading gadget/consumer trend magazines in Japan, that is notable both for tracking, and in some cases setting the trends for cool products and things to do in Japan that become "booms" here.

The December edition of Nikkei Trendy, only available in Japanese, in hardcopy, in Japan, is my favorite edition because it comes out with two great roundups:
- A summary of the top hit products of the last year in Japan
- A list of predicted big consumer trends in Japan for the year to come.

They have a great strike record, and since it is a great insight into what is big in Japan right now, I'm going to provide a quick English summary of each of these rankings, starting in this blog today with the top hits of 2011. I'm just going to list out the ranking itself and add a few of my own comments. If you are in Japan, Trendy can be picked up at almost any train station kiosk, convenience store or bookshop. It uses lots of graphics and info boxes, which makes it interesting even if you can't read the fineprint Japanese.

So, on to the ranking...!

Nikkei Trendy Top 30 Hit Products of 2011 in Japan

30. Asahi W Zero Cocktails - alcohol free cocktail soda pop
29. Maru Maru Mori Mori - The ending theme song to a popular drama on Fuji TV, the first time in 34 years a child's song has sold more than 200,000 CDs
28. JINS Air Spectacle Frames
27. Attonon - a cream you can buy that hides cuts and bruises (?!)
26. Maa-Pika - Toilet disinfectant
25. Nestle Cocoa D'Or - Special edition hot chocolate for adults
24. Microwaveable Fried Chicken - In the never ending and surprisingly high quality range of instant dinners in Japan, a number of makers have come out with high quality microwaveable precooked fried chicken
23. Radiko Radio - Internet based Radio has been a big boom, led by radiko.jp web page and Internet radio apps.
22. CN-SG500 Hand Held Travel Navigation System
21. K-Pop music

20. Tablets (iPad 2 in particular)
19. Sofina Primavista - Long keep base cosmetic UV cream
18. Honcho - Korean health supplement drink aimed at women
17. Tanita Empoyee Cafeteria Low Fat Cookbook - popular with dieters
16. Shot Note - Stationery notepads designed for photographing and storing as memos on smart phones
15. Ponzu Jure - A new line of vinegar based dressing/sauce
14. Sunshine Aquarium - a new popular aquarium in Ikebukuro that got 600,000 visitors in first two months of opening
13. Cardboard Box Fighting Machine Plastic Models (LBX Series) - a popular line of toys
12. Toning shoes - shoes designed to tone your body just walking around in them
11. Linear/Railway Museum - a popular JR railway museum that features Japan's new upcoming maglev high speed trains

10. Kamen Riders Transformation Belt (DX Orz Driver) - popular children's toy in power rangers tradition
9. Loxonin - recently available without prescription painkiller/headache medicine
8. PHS Phones With Flat Rate Unlimited Calling to All Carriers
7. Makkori - A cloudy version of the popular Korean drink Jinro
6. Daihatsu Mira E:S and Mazda Demio13 Sky Active - high mileage compact cars
5. Nissin Cup Noodle Company Mixed Rice Meals
4. Sanyo Gopan bread maker
3. "Energy Saving" Fans
2. Facebook - thanks to a lot of help from Dentsu, and also in part to promotion by Nikkei Trendy...
1. Smart Phones

The main thing I would point out first is that, just as I noted last year, I think this list demonstrates the enormous economic clout of women in Japan, and the extreme domestic focus of many of the most popular products and trends that are neither sold, nor heard of outside of the Japanese market.

Some interesting exclusions from the list were notable flops such as glasses free 3D TV displays, and the Nintendo 3DS. One item that could certainly have been considered for addition would be Geiger counters, although staying away from such topics is perhaps understandable in light of the ongoing sensitivity about the impact of the accident in Fukushima.

Shinjuku Geiger Counter, a photo by cesarharada.com on Flickr.

The power saving focus of some items highlights the heightened awareness of such issues in light of the power crisis that followed the Great East Japan Earthquake. The inclusion of K-Pop, and Makkori reflects the media trend to broadcast an increasing amount of Korean content and give positive coverage to Korea on television, which has resulted in somewhat of a backlash from some quarters.

Korea Fans, a photo by Carrie Musgrave | Livebabylive.com on Flickr.

Facebook is for me, probably the most interesting example. This time last year, Facebook was dead and buried in Japan, unlike Twitter which was very much up and coming. Uncomfortable with the requirements of disclosing personal identity and other information, Japanese users have for years avoided Facebook. However, very astutely, Facebook threw its substantial pile of cash at a commercial tie-up with Japanese advertising monolith, Dentsu back in February, and instantly Facebook suddenly started getting not just widespread advertising, but a lot of favorable media coverage and discussion embedded in existing magazine articles and TV shows, including Nikkei Trendy. The quake itself was used to boost the profile of Facebook - where Twitter was far and away the most useful source of information after the quake, many magazines started - questionably to my mind - claiming that Facebook was the most useful online tool after the quake.

facebook logo, a photo by marcopako  on Flickr.

Whatever was going on in the background getting Facebook so much media attention, sure enough, the Dentsu generated boom occurred, and this year I have been flooded with Facebook friend adds from hundreds of old Japanese workmates and friends. The rise of Facebook this year has been something to behold, and completely against my expectations, which shows the power of institutional marketing machines in Japan.

Anyway, an interesting lineup.

I will follow up with the 20 hit product predictions for 2012 in my next post. I highly recommend picking up a copy of the latest Nikkei Trendy for 630 yen from just about any magazine stand.

Peace!

Check My Guest Post on the Japanese Work Ethic on Tofugu

2011-11-10T21:07:00.001+09:00

Today I wrote a guest post on the most excellent Tofugu blog where I talk a little bit about cultural perspectives of Japan, and the origins of the Japanese work ethic. I throw in a few personal anecdotes, a bit of personal philosophy, some recommended reading materials, Karate Kid, Ninja Turtles, Admiral Ackbar and Little House on the Prairie. Even in all my personal extreme levels of modesty, it's a pretty good post, so if you like my posts on Japanese culture, please go over and read it.

I also highly recommend the Tofugu blog. Although it started out (and still remains) a Japanese learning based site, Koichi and Hashi have teamed up to put together some great culture and society blogs that I have been impressed by and forwarded frequently on Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus. Koichi invited me to guest post, and it was my pleasure to contribute to the site. Go check it out, tweet me if you like my blog, and if you like the vibe of Tofugu, subsribe to it's RSS.

Right, now, onward to the blog: Understanding Japanese Through the Karate Kid

How To Create Custom Links Directly to iPhone System Settings & Apps

2011-11-10T12:26:00.001+09:00

[UPDATE: It seems that in the week or so since information about these system shortcuts in iOS got around the web, a number of web pages have popped up that allow users to add icons for links to system settings simply by viewing web pages with the iOS codes embedded. Unlike the method set out below, you don't choose the icons yourself, it makes the four step process described below a simple 1 or two step process, so go and check out these sites:
http://hazisarashi.com/static-content/iphone-setting-shortcut/
http://iphoneza.co.za/IconSettings/

If you want to personally customize the icons, and understand how these work and what system shortcuts are available, read on below...]

A year or so ago, for a time, I jailbroke my iPhone 3G for a time. I was planning to upgrade anyway, and wanted to check out the benefits of having the phone unlocked were. While there are many handy things you can do with a jailbroken phone, particularly in terms of customizing the look and feel of your iPhone, the features I appreciated most were simple taboos such as being able to have customized background wallpaper, the ability to multitask and kill background apps, and being able to access specific often used system settings like brightness and bluetooth directly without needing to scroll through the settings menus.

Een deelnemer aan Hack de overheid toont Katalin Gallyas van het ministerie van EL&I een iPhone applicatie, a photo by Sebastiaan ter Burg on Flickr.

Over time, iOS has incorporated most of the most popular features offered by jailbreaking of iOS 3.0. The most recent version of the iPhone operating system actually leaves very little reason to really feel like you are missing out on anything from jailbreaking, especially if you are lucky enough to have a carrier that supports functions like tethering.

However, the one function I still missed and was annoyed about was the inability to create shortcuts to often used system settings, screen brightness in particular for me.

Well, the Japanese Hatena Bookmarks blog recently posted an explanation of how you can actually create bookmarks to iOS system settings without any need to jailbreak. I posted the link on Twitter, G+ and Facebook, but given that it is all in Japanese, and very helpful information, I thought I would do a quick summary post in English of how it is done.
http://daisukeblog.com/?p=1705

Step 1 - Get System Icon Graphics

Not the most important step, but good to have ready so that you can select a nice looking homescreen icon when you are creating the system setting bookmarks in later steps. All you need to do is find icon graphic packages for system settings, and sync them to your iPhone through iTunes. You can find resources to download all kind of customized iOS icons here;
http://www.mediafire.com/?rru3y4psh9g81hg
http://www.mediafire.com/?9dcr5ptj10cn0bn

Step 2 - Install "Touch Icon Creator" from the app store.

It costs 85yen or 99cents. The primary way this app is advertised is that it lets you create customized internet Bookmarks, but also allows you to create bookmarks for telephoning, SMS texting, or emailing specific people. A nice idea, but not as useful as the use this blog uncovered for the app.
http://itunes.apple.com/jp/app/touch-icon-creator/id357419508?mt=8
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/touch-icon-creator/id357419508?mt=8

Step 3 - Create a URL for the System Settings You Want to Save

Within the App, you go choose to create a URL, and choose a Bookmark name, and enter the URL of the system function you wish to save. A list of URLs that go straight to useful system settings are below. You can also tap on the icon placeholder to select a custom icon, which is where you go into your photo folders and select the appropriate system icon you saved at the start of this process.

Here are two great sources of URLs to iOS system settings and applications that you can customize with this app (note that these links are not officially announced or supported by Apple):

http://www.mokten.com/2011/11/ios-5-custom-url-for-settings-app/

Airplane Mode On prefs:root=AIRPLANE_MODE
Wi-Fi prefs:root=WIFI
Location Services prefs:root=LOCATION_SERVICES
Sounds prefs:root=Sounds
Brightness prefs:root=Brightness
Wallpaper prefs:root=Wallpaper

General prefs:root=General

Twitter prefs:root=TWITTER
Phone prefs:root=Phone
FaceTime prefs:root=FACETIME
Safari prefs:root=Safari
About prefs:root=General&path=About
Usage prefs:root=General&path=USAGE
Siri prefs:root=General&path=Assistant
Network prefs:root=General&path=Network
Bluetooth prefs:root=General&path=Bluetooth

Auto-Lock prefs:root=General&path=AUTOLOCK

Date & Time prefs:root=General&path=DATE_AND_TIME
Keyboard prefs:root=General&path=Keyboard
International prefs:root=General&path=INTERNATIONAL
Accessibility prefs:root=General&path=ACCESSIBILITY

Reset prefs:root=General&path=Reset

http://daisukeblog.com/?p=1705

Wi-Fi prefs:root=WIFI
Notifications prefs:root=NOTIFICATIONS_ID
Location Services prefs:root=LOCATION_SERVICES
Sounds prefs:root=Sounds
Brightness    prefs:root=Brightness
Wallpaper prefs:root=Wallpaper

About prefs:root=General&path=About
Software Update prefs:root=General&path=SOFTWARE_UPDATE_LINK
Usage prefs:root=General&path=USAGE
Siri prefs:root=General&path=Assistant
Network prefs:root=General&path=Network
VPN prefs:root=General&path=Network/VPN
Auto Lock prefs:root=General&path=AUTOLOCK
Date and Time prefs:root=General&path=DATE_AND_TIME
Keyboard prefs:root=General&path=Keyboard
Language prefs:root=General&path=INTERNATIONAL
Accessibility prefs:root=General&path=ACCESSIBILITY
Profile prefs:root=General&path=ManagedConfigurationList
Reset prefs:root=General&path=Reset

iCloud          prefs:root=CASTLE
iCloud/Storage prefs:root=CASTLE&path=STORAGE_AND_BACKUP
Mail/Contacts/Cal prefs:root=ACCOUNT_SETTINGS
Twitter           prefs:root=TWITTER
Phone           prefs:root=Phone
FaceTime          prefs:root=FACETIME
Safari           prefs:root=Safari
Messages           prefs:root=MESSAGES
Music        prefs:root=MUSIC
Music Equalizer prefs:root=MUSIC&path=EQ
Music/Volume Limit prefs:root=MUSIC&path=VolumeLimit
Video          prefs:root=VIDEO
Photos          prefs:root=Photos
Notes           prefs:root=NOTES
Store          prefs:root=STORE
Nike + iPod         prefs:root=NIKE_PLUS_IPOD

Step 4 - Create Home Screen Bookmark

The final step is that you tap on "Create" and choose to save by "Add to Home Screen". You now have a customized system icon based URL link that can take you directly to a number of useful systems settings without needing to go through the settings menus.

This is probably the most useful thing I have discovered for my iPhone in a while. Enjoy!

Don't you want to be an Oyaji too?

2011-10-25T11:51:00.000+09:00

So, if you watched the most recent Two and a Half Oyajis on my channel, you would have heard Victor and my cunning plan to start opening the sofa for audition candidates to be the extra 0.5 oyaji on our show. I see from the comments, and the messages from Victor asking "how are we going to do this?" that there is some confusion, so without any consultation or serious forethought, I'm going to set it all out now, and offer a little background and a peek into what is coming up.

The concept behind the extra oyaji auditions and what we are looking for is as follows:

1. Demographic

Our audition demographic is the same as our dating demographic. Two legs, breathing, and human. We tend not to think of "oyaji" as simply that tired sweaty salaryman on the train who ate natto and mackerel for breakfast and is leaning on the support rail fidgeting to get off the train, have a cigarette, and start kicking around his juniors at work. Oyaji is a state of mind. To me, a non-oyaji oyaji is someone who is thick skinned who can give and take some ribbing, has a good, even slightly corny and self depricating sense of humor, and for all their visible and obvious flaws, has a good heart that comes through. The half oyaji role will be open to all ages, genders, geographies, nationalities, religions, sexual orientations, and in certain cases, we will even shop outside of species (REALLY want to get Maru-chan on the show...).

2. Personality

We started this series because Victor and I have funny Skype chats. Our Skype chats are so much fun that, disturbingly, we started to notice our private conversations were funnier and more informative than our actual videos. Keeping, or ideally, enhancing the vibe is key. A bit of insight, a lot of tongue in cheek humor, and borderline obnoxiousness is good. Someone able to dish it back to the oyajis and get rowdy with is ideal.

3. Technical Requirements

Sorry to do this, but at least for now, our routine is that we alternate between channels - one long show in English on Gimmeaflakeman, one (mercifully) short show in Japanese on my channel. Doing vids in Japanese on my channel is important to me - although they are not visible in the comments, I can tell you that lots of Japanese people do watch and enjoy my videos, and I get many shy private messages from people telling me they love the show. You don't have to be fluent, in fact stumbling Japanese to some point actually is more likeable to many Japanese than the way I speak. BUT, you do have to speak well enough to keep up with the conversation.

This won't be a ban on English only vloggers, but at least starting out, bilinguals will get preferential booking. I like to introduce gaijin bloggers able to reach out to Japanese on my channel, and it's also a good filter for me to choose people who can keep up with our Japan related conversations.

Please send us your audition videos and messages even if you don't speak Japanese - we will work something out, but please understand that just in the initial phase, bilingual auditions will get called up first.

4. Extreme Musical Talent

Bear in mind that all candidates WILL be required to help us with our theme song at the start of each episode. As such, superb musical dexterity and lyrical genius matching, or even exceeding us (if that is even possible) will be required.

That's really it - you have to be human, and able to hang out with oyajis and show a good time. That's all you need.

Look out for the Oyaji Podcast - Japan Oyaji-Cast

We have had requests in the comments of many of our episodes to make make a podcast version of the show, particularly the longer English version. Victor and I both have good podcasting mics that we use, and I've always been interested in how that is done. I'm currently still mapping things out, and have had great recent advice from TokyoPodcast, and advice in the past from the most excellent guys at BC Podcast, among others. It's an exciting genre for me, and I will try to roll that out in the next few weeks.

How This Came About

As I've mentioned before Victor and I started this show basically when I found out and started using VODBurner software to record and edit conversations. The seperate recording and editing process that guys like BC Podcast do was too timeconsuming and technically demanding for us (their show looks GREAT and they put a LOT of effort in, I know), and this made things sufficiently easy for us to be able to do collab videos regularly in this format.

From the beginning, we had talked about getting an extra member, to balance us both out, and had a number of ideas for who this could be. The problem was that adding an extra member would necessitate going back into the editing software we use, and taking lots of time again, so we put the idea on hold. However, the good folks at VODBurner contacted me with details of a new version coming out that could record videoconferences with more than two users, that I am helping them test. I've gone and paid for Skype Premium to enable videoconferencing, and so basically, since I've paid for the extra features on Skype, and I need to give feedback on the software, the time has come to get our extra oyaji.

However, although we considered just getting one person to do it, we both realized how many great vloggers there are out there that would be great on the show, and how much fun it would be to give them each a go to introduce them to you, and figure out where the chemistry works best. Hence, we will give multiple candidates test runs on the show, and when we run out of candidates and everyone agrees, we'll probably pick someone for the regular spot. YOU will get the chance to help choose, and if you want to give it a go, to BE the next Oyaji.

Standard Disclaimer

Standard disclaimer here is that as oyajis, all this stuff is very much done on the fly. Even the name of our show was done live on a recorded blog, as you can see in our first show. The audition idea was Victor's and it was completely spontaneous in the last recording. As such, all the above is subject to change and our adjustment depending on circumstances, convenience, and whatever kind of mood we happen to be in at the time. So stand by and get ready for more oyaji goodness. We will aim (no promises here) to do our first 2.5 member broadcast following the next Two and a Half Oyajis on Gimmeaflakeman.

Peace!

Fighting Colds and Influenza with Samurai Fighting Spirit

2011-10-17T08:32:00.000+09:00

Of all the things that make working in Japanese offices stressful - the constant surveillance of your computer screen, the overly cranked up thermostat, and the emphasis on body and soul grinding "nommunication" probably winter brings one of the most bothering sources of irritation that took me a long time to adapt to. This is the Japanese spirit of fighting through highly contagious cold and flu based mucous storms in public in unpartitioned shared air conditioned open office space. Why Japanese fight through such diseases by continuing to go to work through fevers and migraines, and what you can do about it to protect yourself was an issue that kept me occupied for years trying to figure out how to cope.

Gigazine recently highlighted a survey taken by Lion Co., Ltd in Japan looking into "how modern Japanese respond to colds", covering 1,000 company employees between 20 and 50 years old.
http://www.gigazine.net/news/20111011_cold_questionnaire/

sneeze, a photo by placbo on Flickr.

The Facts

The survey makes for interesting reading. When asked if they would take the next day off work if they caught a cold, 35.9% of respondents indicated that they would, while 64.1% said that they would go to work regardless. Another interesting question posed from a cultural perspective was "how high a fever would it take for your coworkers and superiors to accept you had no choice but to take a day off?" Given a scale to answer on, 48.8% of respondents said it would have to be over 37.9 degrees.

Cultural Contrasts

In New Zealand, I was raised in a culture and a legal system that acknowledged that there is a difference between sick days and vacation days, and hence, at least as I recall, most workers get a number of allotted days for each. The upside of this is that people who are sick or contagious can stay home, and get better, and not infect everyone else at work. The downside, at least for employers perhaps, is the propensity for abuse, where workers take "sickies" as extra vacation days. This is why it isn't uncommon for employers to require doctors' notes for days off.

That said, Kiwis take "sickies". It's kind of part of the culture. I remember as a 19 year old working part time in a Japanese souvenir shop, being confused at my apoplectic Japanese shift manager who had discovered that on a day I had taken off for illness, I had hosted an All Blacks rugby match party at my house that had half the people at work. He couldn't believe I would fake a sick day. I couldn't believe he would expect me not to fake a sick day when the All Blacks had a test match on against Australia. I've certainly got a little more sympathy for my bosses' view now, but I guess it just shows how ingrained in me the entitlement to non-vacation sick days was at the time.

Nations At Thy Feet, a photo by Brainless Angel on Flickr.

Land of the Single Stream Paid Days Off Labor System

It was therefore a bit of a shock to the system to come and work in Japan and learn that in addition to only having 10 days leave per year in the beginning, it was even more of a shock to learn that these 10 days were regardless of whether they were for vacation or sickness. They grant you 10 days away from work. Whether you spend those days lying on the sofa with an ice pack on your head watching midday television, or on a beach in Hawaii is up to your personal health management abilities.

Right then, all you have to do is not get sick. Easy...

Actually no, not so easy...

The Wave

Nearly all Japanese offices are open plan design. This is to say not only are there no offices (except perhaps one office for the company president), there are often not even desk partitions.

20080911_201, a photo by peter-rabbit on Flickr.

The standard layout of a Japanese office is rows of desk perpendicular to the windows, with team leaders nearest the window, and staff at the opposite end nearest the aisle and the printers, with about two rows of 8 desks in each column. This pattern is repeated systematically,through 30 people or 300 people all in the same space. Besides the complete lack of privacy, and stale air, winter really makes you start to feel more like you are in a germ warfare lab rather than a regular office.

It often starts far away. Someone four or five columns down is sniffling and rubbing their nose constantly. Perhaps they show up one day wearing a face mask, out of consideration to others trying to hold in germs. This is another point to make - Japanese tend to not like blowing of noses in public. The idea is that you are exhaling and spreading germs. As such, the reflex is usually to inhale and sniffle instead. The problem is of course that you can blow your nose and be clear for a few minutes. A sniffle won't keep you clear for more than a few seconds. And so the sniffle is constant and unrelenting...

The next day, you notice two or three people sitting near the first person show similar symptoms. Then the next day half of that group has it, and someone on the next column has it. Over the days, and sometimes weeks that follow, you can literally watch the cold rolling towards you like a wave. You know it is coming. You even know when it is going to hit. And there is almost nothing you can do about it.

GClueオフィスでiPhoneアプリ開発中！, a photo by kawanet on Flickr.

When the wave hits, you are surrounded by people with symptoms. You have to talk with them and work with them, share the ventilation with them and sit by them. And surely enough, you wake up the next morning with an aching throat, and slightly dizzy with a mild fever.

The Dilemma

きれいになった！, a photo by masahiko on Flickr.

For Japanese waking up in this situation, the decision always seems to my eyes to be pretty straight forward. They still have deadlines and tasks to do at work. They are worried about inconveniencing other coworkers. And more honestly, they are probably worried about the extra attention from superiors who might think if they take a day off without warning just for a minor cold makes them look like a slacker, in need of greater attention and "character shaping". The social and work life consequences of not going to work are worse than going and having a miserable day.

For someone who grew up in the land of sick days for sports events, and decisions made by pure self interest, the formula is more complicated. I still (optimistically) hope to use as many of my vacation days as possible. Perhaps I have already put down for using 9 of my 10 days on a trip abroad back home. The idea of needing to cut back on vacation plans for the sake of a cold is too much. So I fight it out - I figure at least if I show up and it turns out to be really bad still, I can go and just make it a half day off.

The end result of this is that short of requiring hospital treatment, people pretty much always go into work when they are sick. Some even seem to play up the symptoms to show off how dedicated they are, coughing and spluttering obnoxiously. I would actually go up to such people and ask them to leave myself, but would get the martyr routine back "oh no, it's okay, I can manage, I just have to do four hours more overtime and attend two more meetings and I'm done..." Dude, that's not the point I'm trying to make...

Easy Steps To Cope

大正パブロンゴールドＡ微粒44包裝, a photo by hoshiko-san on Flickr.

Japan's culture and employment law encourages sick people to make other people sick. Working with contagious sick people is unavoidable. Having run out of days off altogether after getting salmonella once, I really focussed down and developed some systems for making sure I got sick as little as possible in the office. The secret is, you kind of have to become more Japanese, and learn to see cooties everywhere. Whenever I feel a cold coming on, or see "the wave" getting too close, here is what I do:

1. Wash Hands and Gargle Around 6 Times a Day. Yes, I know this sounds very Howard Hughes, but it was advice from my wife that I took and it works. Gargling in particular - winters in Tokyo are extremely dry, and it is your dried out throat that tends to be the first receptor for cold and flu germs. If you gargle, it can't get infected as easily.

2. Be Mean. I hate to give this advice, but if being nice means sacrificing a vacation or working through a 38 degree fever, I decided it was better to be mean. At least to people showing symptoms of sickness. Basically, I would put out every signal and body language I could that such people are not to come near me. Scowling, shifting in my seat, and going to wash my hands and gargle after every direct conversation. It sucks, but it works.

3. Up the Vitamins. I don't know if this works, but I learned at the early stages of catching colds or being around others, turning almost completely vegetarian, having soups and stuff, seemed to do a lot to help stave things off. Paranoia about catching colds from coworkers also got me into the habit of drinking Japan's not so bad tasting fruit juice flavored vegetable juices.

4. Chinese Medicine. 1 billion people and 10,000 years of civilization can't be wrong right? Well, maybe except for communism... But whatever, it was much to my surprise that that Chinese medicine (kampou) stuff works! As a kid in Singapore, I had seen the traditional Chinese medicine shops with shelves of different roots, leaves and animal body parts run by an old Chinese guy. This is cool, but not what you have in Japan, where Chinese medicine is almost always produced on industrial scale, with little sachets of powdered medicine in bright modern packaging that looks more like washing detergent. A couple of Pabron sachets in between meals always seems to help the fight against oncoming germs.

5. Sleep. I really think this is where my strategy diverges most from many Japanese coworkers I had. Personal experience has taught me that exhaustion tends to make getting sick, and being sick much worse than it otherwise would be. Desperate to keep my last vacation days (I can't remember why, but I think it involved a hot date...), at the first sign of a cold, I remember rushing out of work unthinkably early (around 7:30pm) playing the martyr routine, and getting to bed at 10 (where I, like most people in Tokyo usually go to bed around 1:30am). Those three or so extra hours of sleep can help avoid and recover nasty colds.

All the above isn't perfect, but I've found combined together, along with other tricks like using humidifiers at home and facemasks on your commute to stop your throat drying out, you can do a lot to battle and/or minimize the waves of germs that sweep across your office seating plan towards you throughout the winter.

Final Point - Japanese Doctors

Japanese doctors seem to be much maligned among foreigners. Certainly, Japanese hospitals and clinics don't "feel" modern, particularly to someone coming from the States. Another feature is the noticable lack of tests that they run when you come in for something. In fact, doctors often do little more than cursory checks of the chest and throat, and then tell you confidently what they are sure you have, and start prescribing four, five, sometimes even more different types of medicine. This freaks out a lot of westerners, including myself when I first got here. But after 13 years living here, and using dozens of doctors and hospitals, so far so good. The doctors often recognize symptoms of bugs and colds that are going around, and even though you are sure they didn't check you properly, the medicine they gave me always did the trick, and the diagnoses always proved correct, even where I was skeptical.

Medicine is practiced differently in Japan to the states, but remember it is cheap and affordable, the doctors are professional, and the medicines they give work, even on your big gaijin bodies. A doctor's visit here just costs a few dollars, so don't hesitate to go preemptively if you feel or fear something is coming on. And go and get flu shots - you should presume that avoidance of cold and flu germs is unavoidable, so getting an annual flu immunization is a really good idea.

I hope that helps, and お大事に!

Steadycams, Action Cams, and Improvised Solutions At Creative Video

2011-10-12T12:03:00.000+09:00

One area of video creation that I've always wanted to explore more is the first person camera view where the camera becomes the eye of the viewer, and they fly or glide through scenes of a certain place. There are two basic ways of achieving this - a steadicam mount, or an action camera, like the GoPro Hero.

Trial and Error with GoPro

I've made a number of efforts at both of these approaches with mixed results. I picked up the cheapest version of the GoPro Hero, a wrist mounted lowish definition camera and took it out bodyboarding hoping to get the kind of footage you seen in GoPro surf videos.

Here is the kind of video I hoped to shoot.

... and here is what I got...

After realizing that the handheld Xacti was much better and easier to shoot with, the GoPro got put away and I struggled to find another use for it for years.

Attempts at Steadicamming

There are plenty of videos showing off what you can do with a good steadicam, and plenty of solutions out there that enable you to do this with your camera. The best example of Japanese steadicam shooting is Egawauemon:

Too cheap to get the Merlin Steadicam, or similar solutions, I discovered a video of a kit created by an MIT student/inventor that promised similar results. For the price, I jumped at it - and took the rig to Ueno and spent half a day walking around shooting video hoping for a similar result. However, the results were so bad that I never even made a video with it. I looked at software stabilizers that can produce odd looking effects as people noticed with this video with Yuichi:

An Improvised Mixed Solution

This issue has bugged me for a while, and after watching EricSurf6's recent surfing video shot with GoPros, I resolved to get my old GoPro out and figure out a way to mount it on my bicycle, buying a bicycle mount kit and protector case.

However, the kit doesn't give well with the design of the Mama-chari I ride around on, and first time out, the locking mechanism on the case fell off rendering the whole rig useless.

I was about to give up when I remembered an article by sports riders who mentioned that rather than mess with fancy mounts, they just used a lot of masking tape. I figured, the camera to me is as good as a toy, and this is for experimentation, so I walked into a Family Mart, bought some tape, strapped on the camera to the side of my bicycle and gave it a burl.

The results are in the video you can see - the video isn't great quality, but it is stable and clear enough that you get the gliding effect. To this, I added software stabilizers, and then rerendered the file multiple times, sped up with different effects, and combined everything for the video above.

The video above wasn't a planned upload, it was just testing out the rig. But I found some effects I liked, and a bunch of creative commons video friendly Japanese music I liked on Jamendo. I narrowed my choice to one track, and liked the result, so enjoy. Here are the great video friendly albums I found:

Royalty free music for professional licensing

Photoblog - Bicycle Life in Tokyo's Shitamachi

2011-10-11T12:45:00.001+09:00

Shitamachi (or "lower town") is made up mainly of the northern and eastern suburbs of central Tokyo, that are basically the oldest parts of the city, predating the development of modern Tokyo. You tend to know right away when you have crossed the street into a Shitamachi district. There are almost no trees, and the usual Tokyo jumble of buildings turns into even more of a jumble, with cramped houses and small artisan factories crammed alongside large modern pachinko parlors and office buildings.

You also often feel as if you are in a time warp - where few buildings stay up longer than 10 years in most newer parts of Tokyo, in Shitamachi, it can feel like you have been transported back 50 years in time. Few residents use cars - they walk and bicycle everywhere they go, and so bicycles are a prominent feature of such neighborhoods. Here are some shots I took walking around Kanda.

Sumo, Hysteria, and How To Get The Fans Back

2011-10-05T12:00:00.000+09:00

This is a little bit of a rant, and not one I wanted to make, but I think it's good to get the information out there and to make my own feelings of displeasure known in the hope that they add to any weight trying to cause change.

As you may have heard, the sport of sumo wrestling in Japan has been going through somewhat of a crisis in recent years. This blog isn't intended to go through the full catalogue of problems that have gone so far as to threaten the existence of the sport, but they include falling attendances, race quotas (affecting even foreign wrestlers with Japanese citizenship), the forced resignation of the previous grand champion for unbecoming conduct, murder within training stables and attempts at covering up the crime, evidence of ties to organized crime syndicates, and most recently evidence uncovered of rampant match-fixing in the highest ranks of the sport.

Between the domination of the sport by foreigners (Japanese often turnout to support regional hometown heroes), and public disgust at the conduct of the sumo association and its stablemasters and wrestlers, attendances at tournaments has nosedived.

The sport has been desperately trying to recover, amidst an atmosphere of public disdain and empty seats.

A Great Day Out for the Family

None of this detracts from the fact that sumo is a great sport, best seen live. I got hooked on it when taken by a friend ten years ago now. He insisted I show up before 10am, which I didn't understand, given that none of the big name wrestlers come out until around 4pm. He insisted, for watching live, it was better to go in the morning.

Showing up as instructed, he immediately took me down to the seats right by the dohyo (ring). In seats that usually are reserved for sumo association guests, there was a custom that early comers were allowed to occupy those seats until the ticket holders would come, usually in the afternoon, to claim them (with ushers coming in advance to clear the seats for the proper holders).

The close proximity to the matches, and speed of the lower ranked matches meant that indeed, watched live, the sumo between 10am and midday was more exciting and up tempo than the much slower and more ritualized higher ranked matches in the afternoon, that we would have to watch from the more distant second level in our purchased seats. The proximity of the morning, and liveliness of interaction between the crowd and the junior wrestlers made it half sport, half theatre, and frankly, in time, I learned it was actually better to go home in the afternoon and watch the final matches on TV. I actually made a video about tips for watching sumo wrestling live, that you can see here.

Why Some Information Is Best Kept Secret

One of the introductory paragraphs on any guide to Japan that you read will point out that Japan is one of the most densely populated countries in the world. Not only is Japan's vast population of 120 million crammed into islands with about the same surface area as California or New Zealand, but within that, only about 3% of the land in Japan is sufficiently flat to allow people to build cities upon. This is why you end up with cities like Tokyo, that are amazingly compact, yet brimming with tens of millions of residents. This highly intensive concentration of people has proved great for urban and niche culture and subcultures, and means that in a city like Tokyo, you can find almost any kind of thing of interest you can think of.

However, in a city where everyone has their favorite "secret spots" and hobbies, there is a constant tension, between wanting to be able to have your own "insider" secrets about places to go and things to do that you can show off to others and impress them with, and the constant fear of that information ever becoming too widely known. This is a particular issue where you have a geographically small city in Tokyo, with excellent public transport, 25 million people, and just half a dozen mainstream commercial TV channels. What this means is that if the place or thing you love ever gets featured even briefly on a popular TV show (and many TV shows are dedicated to showing off "secret spots"), you can kiss your hopes of enjoyment of those locations goodbye. Corner restaurants end up booked months in advance, quiet parks become trampled and overloaded with people, and queuing for hours becomes a matter of course for concert venues and fun parks.

It was therefore with some alarm that I saw TV specials on two Tokyo pastimes that I quietly secretly enjoyed, that have unfortunately done a lot to destroy the enjoyment taken from those. The first was coverage of the jogging route around the palace, which has always been crowded, but for a time in the last year has reached absurd proportions, to the point where it is practically impossible to run all the way around any more. The other was seeing a special spilling all my own secrets about showing up early and sitting near the dohyo. Not long after that aired, I tried to go to the sumo, but found all seats sold out hours in advance by people wanting to crowd in and watch the sumo as TV suggested. My secret was out, and I was no longer able to get in and watch the sumo live in the morning, without joining the long early morning queue hours in advance.

A Sad Return

Not long after this, my son was born, and sumo entered various scandals that meant after regularly attending sumo in Tokyo for many years, I recently went for nearly three years without going once. With Junior getting bigger, we thought it might be a fun way to spend the morning, where we can watch the morning session, have some chanko for lunch, and go home for his nap. It was widely publicised that attendances were at crisis low levels, and that the sumo association was desperately trying to spur interest in getting people to attend, even giving away numerous free tickets.

We showed up before 9am, and as usual, purchased the cheapest 2100 yen (about $28) seat tickets, and approached the lower level arena entrance to go and watch the young lower level wrestlers.

Approaching the door, I noticed the sign that said "ticket holders only". It was the first time I had seen this sign at the sumo. My wife and I kind of stopped and looked at each other, and thought it is still early, and there is hardly anyone inside watching, so maybe we can still get in and sit down. We walked into the arena and an usher came up and asked to see our tickets.

I said "in the past, we were always able to watch close up during the morning".

The usher said "no, we've had this rule in place for over a year ago now, you have to go up to the upper level".

I don't have all the information on what happened, but I'm pretty sure I can guess. The TV specials encouraging hordes of people to crowd in during the morning and waiting until ticket holders arrived most likely led to the inevitable cases of some troublemakers arriving, refusing to move, or legitimate ticket holders getting angry. It usually only takes one incident of "disharmony" of this nature in Japan, and the old custom is discarded and the now prohibition signs are raised.

I'm sympathetic to the sumo association and can imagine how the need for this arose. Particularly in a time when up to a year ago, the sport was going through a burst of popularity, and people would queue up for hours to get in.

Unfortunately, the continuation of this rule throughout sumo's recent crisis left the Kokugikan sumo hall a ghost town for the morning session. Where my memories of the morning having an intimate crowd of 100 or 200 of the most passionate sumo fans of lesser means, often family members of wrestlers or lifelong attendees, shouting out encouragement and sometimes taunting the young up and coming wrestlers, there were now probably less than 100 people, mostly spread among the second level, with the seats around the dohyo barren and silent. All the excitement and atmosphere of the morning session was now gone, as were the attendees. For my son, who loves sumo on the TV and was captivated, even watching from the distant second level seats, the whole thing was probably a bit of a mystery. He ran around outside a bit, we bought some souvenirs, and as per plan, we left at noon, to perplexed looking ticket stall sellers wondering why we would leave so early.

Realization and a Quiet Suggestion

As things are, there is no point in taking my son to watch the sumo really for at least another three years. He needs either the endurance to justify getting an extremely expensive masseki box on the lower level, or the interest to be willing to sit out watching sumo from eye squinting distances in the back of the arena. And even then, with the magical atmosphere of the morning session gone, it is hard to see the point in going, and this indeed is why the stadium was all but abandoned when we attended.

I can easily imagine the circumstances that gave rise to the prohibition on the old custom of letting fans watch the sumo up close in the morning, but I think in light of sumo's recent problems and the flight of fans, it could do much worse than to very quietly start allowing early attendees that ask nicely to sit near the dohyo again in the mornings.

Perhaps even allow all seats to be freely allocated until noon? It seems unfair to the young wrestlers to be competing in cold isolation, and detracts enormously from the sumo as a fun live event even for those unable to afford the best seats. Given the need of the sumo association to rebuild trust and credibility with the public, continuing the current policy of prohibiting non-ticket holders watching from up close in the early hours is counterproductive and diminishes enormously from the enjoyment that can be had from watching sumo live.

If they change this policy, I will be back with junior to watch during the next tournament. If not, I'm afraid I can't see myself taking the family along for some years to come.

RWC 2011 - Playoffs Guide and What if?

2011-10-03T20:01:00.000+09:00

The pool matches are now over for this world cup, and in a sport where upset wins are more rare than in soccer perhaps, this rugby world cup threw up two huge upsets. The first was Ireland defeating Australia, a win which shook up the entire predicted playoff tournament structure. The second was Tonga's defeat of France, which was probably the biggest upset of rugby world cup history, and left France only the second nation ever to make the playoffs having been defeated twice.

However, probably the biggest news of the tournament did not come out from the games, but rather a training ground kicking practice injury where Dan Carter, arguably the best player in the world, suffered a groin injury earlier this week that will keep him out of the tournament, where the favorites, New Zealand, barely have a back up for him, in what is the most important single position in the team.

The final point I'd like to run through below is to follow through on my hypothetical of "what if" the tournament had a fairer schedule with four additional teams, and based on the current results, what the outcome of a plate tournament would be.

Looking at the Playoffs Based on Form

Ireland's upset win against Australia has made the playoffs an entirely northern hemisphere team table on one side, and an entirely southern hemisphere table on the other side. If you consider team rankings, this clearly benefits the northern hemisphere teams most (NZ 1st, South Africa 2nd, Australia 3rd and Argentina 8th, compared to England 4th, France 5th, Ireland 6th and Wales 7th). The exciting thing about the tournament from here on is that apart from the Argentina v NZ match, all the teams competing in each game are ranked alongside each other (South Africa 2nd v Australia 3rd, England 4th v France 5th, and Ireland 6th v Wales 7th) meaning that each game is hard to predict and entirely up for grabs.

Based on the pool matches, I would summarize current form and predict as follows:

- Wales and Ireland have both shown excellent form in this world cup, with Ireland convincingly beating 3rd ranked Australia, and Wales not only almost beating tournament front runners South Africa, but arguably looking more convincing than South Africa in pool matches against other opposition. Either team here could win this quarter final, and I believe whoever does win, based on current form, would have to be the pick to defeat the winner of England v France and to go to the final. I'm picking Ireland to go all the way to the tournament final.

- England and France have probably shown the poorest form of all the teams in the playoff tournament. England has been disorganized, ill disciplined, and unconvincing in each of its wins, in spite of topping its group, and will need to vastly improve to become a serious contender to make it past a semi-final. France has been appallingly bad. But history has also taught us that this means nothing. In fact, it is usually the appallingly bad French teams that beat New Zealand. To their credit, they have shown the greatest discipline of any team in the tournament giving away few penalties, but they looked like deer caught in headlights both against NZ and Tonga. On form, they have no hope against England, but they are always most dangerous when they believe they are on their way out. Because of that, I'd predict France to beat England, but to be taken down by Wales or Ireland (probably Ireland) in the semis.

- The quarterfinal between Australia and South Africa will be the highlight of the quarterfinals, with the world's second ranked team playing the world's third ranked team. Australia has played exciting expansive rugby in this tournament, and won the Tri Nations against South Africa and New Zealand this year. However, based on form, it is hard to predict anything other than a comfortable win to the amazingly well rounded and powerful South Africans, who I believe may be in a position to upset the favorites in a probable semi final against New Zealand.

- The final quarterfinal is probably the biggest mismatch on paper, New Zealand versus Argentina. It should be noted however that Argentina is not a team to be taken lightly, having defeated France twice at home in the last World Cup. Argentina is probably the most unfortunate rugby team in the world, consistently showing it is a top 8 team for quality, but not having access to a top level tournament to improve itself within. It means the players always have a huge point to prove in the world cup, where they always show no fear to any team. They will battle in the quarterfinal against New Zealand, but don't have a realistic chance of defeating the tournament favorite, home team, and number one ranked team in the world. New Zealand's greatest test in the tournament will probably be in the semi final when it plays 2nd or 3rd ranked South Africa or Australia. If Ireland or Wales make the final, as I believe they can, it should be noted that Ireland has never beaten New Zealand, and Wales hasn't beaten NZ in more than 50 years. It would be one of the greatest upsets in history for them to defeat New Zealand, or South Africa in the final, but we shall see.

What If the IRB Took My Advice

My advice in my previous world cup blog had two main elements - including four extra teams to enable fairer scheduling, perhaps with all teams playing with equal rest time once every five days. Unfair turnarounds affected the results and performances of many lower ranked teams, and may have spurred some teams like Samoa to pull out the extra effort needed to go forward.

Based on current IRB rankings, the extra four teams would be Portugal, Uruguay, Chile and Spain, although if they spread those positions out geographically, it is likely that instead of Chile and Spain, Morocco and Hong Kong would qualify instead.

Based on pool results, using the same formula as for the main playoff tournament, the plate tournament would look like this:

Italy v Fiji
Scotland v Canada
Samoa v USA
Tonga v Georgia

These are some great closely ranked teams. Based on the above, I would predict a Scotland v Samoa plate final with either team capable of taking the win.

Let's hope they consider something like this in future world cups.

Riding to the Danger Zone

After what admittedly was a largely predictable pool tournament, the rugby world cup now gets down to business. Each of the matches from here on in are finely balanced between closely ranked teams. All the games should be close and highly competitive, but if you are looking for a great exposition of the game that is fun to watch, I would suggest following the southern hemisphere sides in particular. Can't wait!

Twitter, Blogging and Vlogging - Why I got a Tumblr

2011-10-02T15:42:00.000+09:00

I've read with interest the blogs of other YouTubers, BusanKevin in particular recently talking about the issue of "social media burnout" and the challenges of managing to sustain any kind of personal interests and pursuits while being a father to a toddler, and working long hours.

For me, the process has been one of needing to heighten my self awareness and finding a way of striking a good balance that allows me to keep my interests in blogging and posting content going, as I have been forced to wind back other (arguably healthier) interests, such as rugby and surfing, which in Tokyo really necessitate being out all day on a weekend to do.

This post is just to talk you through how I keep doing what I do, with as little effort as possible, and lessons I've learned, as well as why I have decided to start a Tumblr blog on the side for a repository of all the other cool stuff I come across and frequently mention on Twitter.

Video Blogging

Of all my online hobbies, my video blog generally requires the most effort, and probably to me also carries the greatest weight of obligation. Most of my followers on Twitter, Google Plus and this Blog know me from my video blog, and so I promise myself to maintain a regular interval of posting videos on YouTube, where I don't anywhere else. However, with only an hour or two a day at most to do all my personal stuff, and a simple vlog easily taking a few hours to put together, I've adopted a few principles for video making that seems to have worked in making it more sustainable and as enjoyable as ever for me:

- I've spaced out my videos a little more, now to once every two weeks. Weekly is an ideal target, but when life gets too busy, it gets impossible to sustain, and when you miss a goal posting date, it is easy to lose motivation. Two weeks works for me, and I shall try to get back to a more regular when or if I can get more time.

- I've begun looking at ways to make videos more efficiently. The Two and a Half Oyajis series has been a godsend in this respect. The VODBurner software I use to record and edit our conversations is expensive, but it allows me to record, edit and fine tune a long conversation (up to 20 minutes) in less than an hour, and the live interactivity and content and contrasting styles Victor and I can bring is refreshing, and more interesting than I believe either of us would do on the same topics on our own. I hope to make this a weekly thing at some point soon.

- I always look for new ways to be creative. The original kick that got me into video blogging was a simple obsession with figuring out how it was done. Now I have all the basics down, what I really love to do now, in addition to providing interesting watchable content, is to always slip something in that I have either never seen anyone do before, or that emulates something very cool I saw somewhere else, and want to adapt.

I still enjoy video blogging as much now as I did when I started in 2008, and sticking to the above principles, I hope to continue on as I am now.

Blogging

I would say that prior to the Great East Japan earthquake, I enjoyed blogging and tweeting, but all my interaction was almost exclusively with other YouTubers, and on YouTube related topics. Faced with the confusion and delays in crisis information abroad, I started writing daily news summaries here in order to keep my own family informed without having to make multiple phone calls. It was during that period that this blog started getting attention from a wider group of people, interested in what was going on in Japan, who didn't even know about my video blog. I'm really glad of that. To be honest, especially with how little time I have as of late, I find blogging both quicker and easier, and I find it a little easier to go into topics about news and politics that are difficult to do on YouTube. I very much enjoy the freedom this blog gives me to write about whatever I want.

However, one thing I do want to do is to give this blog more attention and shape. Danny Choo's advice on blogging was very simple - create a routine that you set aside a small amount of time to do it in a regular way. This is something I know I can do and want to do. Moving forward, I really want to post regularly about Japanese society, YouTube, and Photoblogs. Three blogs a week might be too much to manage, but this is what I would like to aim for, with a blog on each of those three things once a week.

Twitter and Google Plus

Twitter again changed following the Great East Japan earthquake from being a means of keeping up with other video makers, to being a critical information source, and a great tool for finding excellent user generated commentary about Japan. The best and saddest thing I learned following the quake is that if you want detailed, insightful informed commentary about Japan, big news media is no longer the place to get it. In a world where news has become about speed of delivery more than analysis, the quality of Japan reporting is awful at the best of times, but was almost criminally bad during the disaster here. The people with deep knowledge about Japan, who took the time to arrange their thoughts, provide full explanations, research and sources for their analysis were all bloggers, who I discovered through Twitter.

The key thing I learned about Twitter is that you don't find great information sources on it simply by following bloggers either. The key thing is that you follow a lot of people with similar interests to yourself. The group then acts as a massive news filter, with everyone going through the blogs and news they follow, posting content that is interesting, with the most interesting content getting picked up and forwarded by others. Essentially, Twitter became the most reliable crowdsourcing tool for getting information on topics I am interested in, and indeed, that for a time my life and safety relied upon.

This very much changed how I look at Twitter, and how I use it. Since the quake, I have tried to be more like the many excellent "Tweeters" that act as a reliable filter of information about Japan, or other topics of interest, that consistently pulls up good content worth reading and resharing. As such, I really use Twitter now using two tools, in two very different ways.

1. Twitter as a DJ Booth. With the app "Smartr", I can look at my Twitter feed on my iPhone, essentially as a reader made up of articles posted in links by people in my Twitter Stream. It basically lets you browse the content everyone else is posting, and decide what to pick up and read, and forward, more efficiently than any other tool I have found. In addition to this, I also have a Google RSS Reader full of feeds of Japan Bloggers, and Japanese and English blogs on topics I love that I use to share information that I think is cool. In essence, I now approach Twitter a lot like how I used to approach DJing. Some great DJing advice I once got was to specialize. It's okay to like lots of different topics, but you get gigs when people associate you with a niche or style of music that they can think of being what they want at an event or on a radio show. Likewise on Twitter, although I could post more on topics like rugby, New Zealand politics, astronomy, and other things I like, I like to focus on pulling up the best Japan related user generated content, and Japan related tech news I can find. And like when DJing, the buzz comes from finding topic not yet discovered by people who follow you, that they like, or that becomes the trigger for great conversations.

2. Twitter as a Partyline. Hootsuite remains the best Twitter tool, simply because of how it lets you track what people are posting on Twitter better than any other web app I know. The ability to join in conversations with people with similar tastes and interests is something I really enjoy. Twitter is hard to get into in comparison to Facebook, because when you start out, you don't know what to say, who to follow, or who anyone else is. But once you find people that share your interests, and who like what you have to say, Twitter kills Facebook. Where Facebook conversations tend to fade out once you discover what your old high school buddies are doing now, Twitter is like a big room of people, where with the right list of people to follow, you can walk in and have a great conversation almost any time. If you are into Japan related information, and looking for a way to start out on Twitter, feel free to start by checking out my list of "homies" on Twitter, which are a list of the most consistently interesting and entertaining Japan related Tweeters I know.

An honorable mention for Google Plus by the way. The site promises so much, but still only delivers about 20% of its potential. For example, its Picasa integration instantly makes it now the best SNS for hobby photography, ahead of Flickr, in my book. The promise of similar integration with Blogger, and YouTube is what keeps me using Google services. Another great feature of the site is the way it makes it easy to have easy to follow linear discussions about topics posted - meaning that even with fewer followers, you often get a lot more feedback and better discussions on Google Plus. The main drawbacks however remain that it is not clear if, when or how wider integration with other Google services is coming, and the fact that the general non-public approach of the site (via circles) and real name requirement makes it challenging to find strangers with common interests, and to talk freely on topics of personal interest, at least in comparison to Twitter. I'll look forward to seeing where it goes with interest.

Why I Started a Tumblr

With issues of SNS "clutter" and lack of time generally, adding another SNS seems a counter intuitive solution. However, fact remains that I have often found myself wanting to dig back and find an interesting article I found in Smartr and retweeted, or a YouTube video that I favorited, and found such content to be hard to dig up again. Also there is the issue with Twitter generally that your audience is limited to who is online, and interested in reading your post at the time you post it. I don't repost tweets generally, but it means a lot of the really cool content I want to show off and save for myself falls through the cracks.

To address this, I have set up a Tumblr account as a repository of all the cool stuff I find, and create myself on the web. I have used the brilliant IFTTT.com site to direct my own photos, blogs and videos, as well as the photos, blogs, news and videos that I like and favorite onto a mini-blog that presents all the content in an attractive, easy to access manner that people who are interested can look through for what I have curated as what I see as the best of the web. By nature, my Tumblr will update with stuff throughout the day, and so that is why I chose to use that, and not this blog, which I will keep purely as my own created content and try to post a couple of times a week on.

After a lot of tinkering around, I have my Tumblr blog where I really like it now, and am happy to announce it. Take a look, and if you like it and don't mind the more regular updates on that blog, feel free to subscribe.

Let me know in the comments what you think of the side-blog, and any comments or thoughts you have on my approaches to vlogging, blogging and tweeting above.

Peace

Chilling With YouTube Staff and Celebrities

2011-09-29T21:32:00.001+09:00

Howdy,

So in the first part of my vlogging on YouTube series, I thought I might share with you a bit of the YouTube x Geo Creator Day in Tokyo, where I was invited to give my advice to Japanese non-vloggers on the merits of starting to video blog, and specifically about the dos and dont's of using music online.

YouTube x Geo Creator Day - My Session on Starting Video Blogging

I did my session with the lovely Kumigar, who talked about her interest in vlogging and how she has found it enriching. When I talked about the merits of video blogging, I basically emphasized:

- I find video blogging an easy to use creative outlet that I can enjoy outside of my normal work life

- I find the interactions and connections I have made with other video bloggers and other creative people, such as musicians and artists, that I have had through YouTube has been a very rewarding part of video making for me.

- The comments and feedback you get in comments to videos, and support you get for helping other people is good for the soul. Good karma. It enriches your life.

The two main points I drove home at the end, bearing in mind that the audience were non-video based creators was:

1. YouTube is the most watched user/generator based site in Japan. Everybody in Japan with an Internet connection knows YouTube and watches it.

2. Although the viewing rate of Japanese on YouTube is very high, the participation rate is extremely low. This means, if you do get into video blogging, it is much easier to make an impact quickly through video than through other, more crowded forms of media, such as written blogs. I also pointed out that in my own case, I had made some false starts at written blogging before I started video blogging, that petered out probably due to lack of views and feedback. The audience I have on YouTube has done a lot to stir interest in this blog, and my Twitter, and has made other forms of net media participation more enjoyable for me. So I think trying video blogs makes a lot of sense, even if your primary focus remains in other media, just to help stand out and draw attention to the content you create elsewhere.

Chatting With YouTube Staff

As a speaker, the day also allowed me to grab some brief moments with YouTube staff. I appreciate being invited to these events, and do my best to get the most out of the privilege without falling into the easy trap of lecturing staff members about what YouTube can do better. I am glad however, that I got some brief chats and slipped in some suggestions/feedback on some aspects of YouTube that I hope will get some sort of hearing.

1. Making YouTube Work Better for Collaborations

This is the main point I wanted to communicate, having learned a lot from doing frequent collab videos lately, and noticing that collaborative video making was a key element of what YouTube is trying to encourage in its creator NextUp program.

As a creator, there are really two big issues with collaboration videos. These are that there are very few tools to facilitate remote collaboration, which is how most video collabs on YouTube are made - which is to say, most video collaborations I have done involve by necessity participants sharing videos by uploading an unlisted video and asking the editor to rip the video from the site, which technically, is a TOS violation. Another problem is the fact that all the editing burden falls on one person, an issue that I hope will be addressed in future with increasingly sophisticated cloud based video editing tools/services.

The biggest issue I have found however is that of reward to collaboration participants. In the end of the day, even if 10 people make a video, only one person uploads it - all 10 can upload it, but then you are dividing your views by 10, and killing any chance of the video making it onto rankings that get it promoted on the YouTube site. Of course, other participants will often tweet and message others about the video, and the video can have annotation features directing viewers to the channels of participant creators. But in the end, if the video gets one million views, only one of the creators gets the credit for that, even though the video is as much the work of the other participants, who get no views for it. The other issue is that for all the tweeting and facebooking in the world, chances are that many of the subscribers of the other participants will simply miss the video - its great to get new subscribers from other channels, but you make videos to share with people who want to watch your videos.

My request/recommendation, is to find a way to enable collaboration videos to be owned by multiple owners. That is to say, a single video can be shared with the subscribers of all participants, and viewcounts/etc are credited to multiple channels. I can understand how this presents many issues - not least of all the probable need to make changes that may just not be doable to YouTube's back end, the issue of monetization (does one person get paid, or is it split, and what about non-partner members - I think monetization should be just for the benefit of one recipient), and the potential for spamming (which is why I think the video should only be shared with vetted permission and verification of participation of creators, not a way of enabling viral video botnets). On Two and a Half Oyajis, Vic and I still get comments "where was the last video?" when we put up new vids on each of our channels. Our episodes should be visible on both channels, we shouldn't have to back and forth. Just my two cents. What do you think?

2. Crowdsourcing of Captions

I've raised this one before, but the topic of captions came up with another staff member, and so I made my old requests again - namely that caption creators be rewarded for their extra effort by making the caption text search indexed to increase the chances of discovery of videos that are captioned, and more importantly the need to enable crowd sourcing of captions for YouTube videos. I was asked (as I often am) what software I use for captioning, to which I pointed out - Subtitle Workshop. The appeal of Subtitle Workshop for me is that it gives you a lot of keyboard controls that lets you caption uninterrupted without having to remove your hands from the keyboard. Mouse based caption interfaces are just unworkable, and unfortunately, this was a major part of YouTube's own attempt at making a captioning tool online.

The YouTube person I talked to pointed out there is a nice new cloud based captioning tool Universal Subtitles that looks like a step in the right direction, with good keyboard controls. It still however lacks adjustable playback speed that Subtitle Workshop has, and the fact that it is not baked into YouTube means that you still need to rip the video if it belongs to someone else, in order to make captions for them - a violation of the YouTube TOS. As we discussed, captioning is a feature YouTube is trying to advance on the site, but the fact is that it remains very difficult and time consuming to do, and most video creators don't have any interest in going to the extra effort for no reward.

However, a lot of people do appreciate the value of captions, and multilingual subtitles, and happily go to the trouble of making them for other people on videos that they like. I do this occasionally for Japanese video creators on YouTube, and there is an entire site called DotSub.com dedicated to crowdsourced creation of subtitles on videos.

I've said this before, but I raised it again - YouTube needs to bake in a full featured captioning tool to its suite of web apps, and allow video owners to enable crowdsourced subtitling of posted videos, to make them more accessible to YouTube viewers. It makes a lot of sense to me, and it should make sense to YouTube Japan staff, who want Japanese to have access to more foreign content, and for Japanese content to be more accessible to the world.

3. YamatoAmi

One thing I have always been impressed with about YouTube staff is that they know EVERYONE who makes videos. And I mean EVERYONE. Even people with just 2 or 3 subscribers. In Japan, this used to be a small group of people, but now there are tens of thousands, and yet they all still manage to keep up, which is reassuring in terms of, it means deserving prospects for partnership are quickly discovered and offered.

Knowing this, I suggested the partner manager check out the YamatoAmi channel, mainly because I know that person is into animated videos on YouTube, and because being a UK channel, it is not on the radar of YouTube Japan staff. From what I understand, Ami is set up in the UK, and it is more practical to go for partnership there, but I hope that the Japan staff can find the time to point out her channel to the UK staff if there is an opportunity, because I think that is a channel that should get offered partnership early on, especially given the quality and extra work needed for those vids.

There are plenty of other suggestions anyone could make - Cakesbomb and Jhill Life recently did just that but I just kept my suggestions to easy points to raise, but it was nice to be able to briefly raise ideas that I can give informed suggestions on, and know I am being listened to.

Chilling With YouTube Celebrities

The Creator Day itself was great fun. There seems to be a consensus that I would concur with that the video making related sessions were primarily aimed at non-video makers, and so probably weren't so interesting to existing YouTubers that weren't speakers. However, I did find the geographic tool based discussions very interesting, and did my own best to make my own session as interesting as possible for those there. Backstage, it was great fun having long discussions with other creators, such as Kumigar, Egawauemon, ISO8, SQUASHFilms, JetDaisuke, Haijiq, Megwin, and many others. It was a fun day, and I'm looking forward to the next YouTube event, which I may very well set up myself... :)

Peace

How To Fix The Rugby World Cup

2011-09-22T12:32:00.001+09:00

FINALS 2009, a photo by lisadragon on Flickr.

I'm very much enjoying this world cup so far - it's great to see so many nations that we never get to see playing rugby, playing and competing so well against the top tier nations. It always feels like such a shame to me that rugby in these "tier 2" and lower nations only gets showcased once every four years, and their campaigns are marked by some brave narrow losses, unfair schedules leading to burnout, and oblivion for four years as they struggle to qualify for the next world cup.

The IRB seems to think that qualification alone is support enough for rugby nations outside of the top 10 or so nations considered to have a chance at reaching the final 8 teams. I think the crowd turnouts and popularity, as well as the performance of lower ranked teams in this World Cup as in the past shows that future World Cups need to look more seriously at treating lower ranked countries with respect, and offering incentives to reward them for their efforts, to help promote the game in developing rugby markets. In order to do this, I think that the structure of the Rugby World Cup needs to be fundamentally changed:
(Click here for the easy to read mobile version of this blog)

1. Change the Number of Teams For Fairer Scheduling

Rugby: Belait 10s, a photo by lisadragon on Flickr.

Currently, the World Cup is made up of 20 teams, with four pools of five teams, the top two teams in each pool advancing to the playoff stage. The tournament is structured so that the top 8 countries generally have an all but guaranteed route to the playoffs, save the possibility of an upset loss by one of the lower ranked top 8 countries to a team trying to break into those ranks. As in Pool A of this tournament, this generally means you have pools made up of two teams certain to advance, and three other teams whose World Cup aspirations are often limited to winning against each other.

The 'odd' number of teams also means that you can't simply have all teams playing each weekend with equal break time. The schedules force pools to make up for the odd numbers with midweek games set on schedules that often end up taking a heavy toll on the already low ranked teams forced into unreasonable backup times between games, while higher ranked teams are given cushy more evenly spaced rests, which only serves to exacerbate the disadvantages that lower ranked teams already face.

The question is, is this a tournament for the top 8 nations to play each other with lower ranked nations as extras, or is it a festival of rugby as a global game? It should be the latter. The solution to the scheduling issue is to give all teams equal scheduling treatment, which is best achieved by having 'even' numbers of teams. I think this is best achieved by increasing the number of teams to 24 and having four pools of six teams, each pool playing 3 games each weekend (12 games per round instead of 10).

2. Set Up a "Bowl Trophy"

Rugby: Belait 10s, a photo by lisadragon on Flickr.

It's just part of the nature of rugby, where professionalism is monopolized by a few countries, that a small number of countries tend to dominate. This aspect makes the pool matches a little boring and predictable, and is why the best pool matches are often between the lesser known and more desperate to compete tier 2 nations. I believe they deserve more incentive for their labour. I think the best way to do this is to have a parallel midweek playoff "bowl" tournament for the third and fourth placed teams from each six team pool. This would create a far less predictable and more hotly contested parallel competition, that could be staged in smaller stadiums used for pool matches that miss out on playoff games. It would be great to see Japan, Tonga, Georgia and so on all getting to play their hearts out for a trophy, and would showcase the sport just as well, and promote the sport more broadly than successive England/France/Australia/South Africa/NZ finals.

3. Grant the Bowl Winner Automatic Qualification to the Next World Cup

Rugby Under the Snow 2, a photo by Alberto Ferrante on Flickr.

And just to make it worth more than a trophy for the tier 2 teams making the tier 2 playoff Bowl Competition, how about letting the winner qualify automatically for the next World Cup? Given the competition to qualify among such nations, that happens out of the satellite television limelight, I think this would be the best incentive for competing nations to take their tournament as seriously as if they entered the top tier playoffs. It would be a recipe for exciting rugby that would showcase the game better and more broadly.

As what is likely to be the first Tier 2 host of the world cup in 2019, I really hope reforms like these can be brought in by the time Japan's World Cup comes along. The IRB should be doing more to promote the game as a truly global sport, in the way it does with sevens. A few extra teams, some extra games, and fairer treatment of lower ranked teams are what the RWC desperately needs.

Peace

Quick Guide To Enjoying The Rugby World Cup

2011-09-08T20:59:00.000+09:00

So, the Rugby World Cup starts tomorrow, and will be shown live in Japan on Jsports via cable and satellite. Rugby is a great sport, and this is the showpiece of the game, so as a Kiwi, a player, a referee, and a mad rugby fan, here's a primer for people who don't know much about rugby but want a grasp of the basics, and to know which games to watch and which games to follow.

The Rules

Rugby's greatest handicap is that it has complicated rules. The rules are designed to ensure that the game is played in an entertaining and free flowing way, but it is pointed out that quite often when the whistle goes, not even the players understand what the call is. My suggestion is not to try to understand the infinite technicalities of the sport, but just to get the principles:
- The objective is to reach the other end of the field, to either touch down for a try (5 points, plus 2 for kick conversion) or to kick a goal (3 points).
- The can be carried or kicked forward, and passed ONLY backwards. A throw forward or dropping the ball will result in a scrum reset to the team without the ball.
- When a player is tackled, there is usually a pile up of people on the ground (ruck). There are dozens of rules about the ruck, but the idea is that once bodies are on the ground, players have to allow the ball to come out for play to continue.

That's really it. Referees are encouraged to play advantage even where fouls and mistakes are committed, and ideally, the game is a combination of exciting open running and passing, and intense physical confrontation around rucks and tackles, with as many spectacular tries as possible.

No Protection, High Excitement

While players can wear certain types of protective body kit, the kit players wear does nothing to protect players from impact injuries (like gridiron kit does), other than in the case of mouth guards. Players sometimes wear soft protective caps, that look like they are there to protect you from getting concussed. I've been concussed wearing one of those headcaps a number of times. They are soft and offer no impact protection at all, their purpose is to work like wrestler's ear protectors basically, which can get damaged and turned into cauliflower ears in the scrum. Some players also wear shoulder pads, but again, this is no protection from breaking a collarbone - it simply is again mainly for the scrum, to prevent grazing and injuries from rubbing shoulder to shoulder pushing in the scrum.

As such, rugby is high impact, but not quite the spine shattering impact of American football. It is more about grabbing and throwing - like judo or wrestling, although the Pacific Island nations are known for tackling like American footballers, which make them feared opponents.

Different nations are thought of as having different strengths. England, South Africa, and Argentina are usually thought of as having strong forwards that can grind down opponents, and goal kickers that can gather points and eke out wins over opponents. France, New Zealand and Australia, as well as the Pacific Island Nations tend to be more characterized by flashy interpassing and running play, and a preference for scoring tries over kicking goals. Being from New Zealand, I of course prefer this kind of rugby, and I think it makes for a much more exciting spectacle.

Samoa, Fiji and Tonga are the wildcard nations - the Pacific Island nations are the Harlem Globetrotters of global rugby, with some of the biggest, fastest, most physical, and least inhibited players in world rugby. Often let down in the end by their lack of discipline, they play rugby that is pure entertainment and worth looking out for.

Japan has long been a "minnow" country with a strong amateur and school/university base that has never translated to being competitive internationally. However, efforts to build up a professional competition, and a base of resident foreign players that qualify for Japan under residency rules mean that bit by bit, Japan has risen to now be competitive with the second tier of countries, such as Scotland, Italy, Canada, and the Pacific Island countries - always waiting to produce an upset against one of the top nations.

World Cup - Teams and Games to Watch

The world cup is made up of four pools of five teams each, the top two of which will advance to quarterfinals, then semis and then a final.

Unfortunately, there still remains a pretty clear gap between the world's top nations, and the second and lower tiers of rugby nations, which makes qualifying for the playoffs a formality in some cases. However, there are some grey areas and some great match ups to look out for.

Pool A - New Zealand, France, Japan, Tonga, Canada

New Zealand and France are both consistently in the top four nations in the world, and it seems unlikely that Japan, Tonga or Canada would be able to topple either of these countries to be one of the two qualifying quarterfinalist countries. However, France is notoriously inconsistent and who knows, they may just slip up against a determined opponent if they don't show up in game mode.

The New Zealand game against France will be the highlight of all the pool matches. France played NZ in the first ever world cup final in NZ, which NZ won, but no country has a better record against New Zealand in New Zealand than France - and France has eliminated NZ from World Cups in 1999 and 2007, so it is fair to say that France is a team that New Zealand doesn't like to play.

For the remaining nations, unless any of them can beat France, this tournament will be a three way contest to try to get two wins against each other. Tonga, Japan, and Canada are all very evenly matched, with Japan probably the strongest on form, but with Tonga often stepping up to impress in the World Cup, especially in New Zealand where thousands of resident Tongans, and fans of New Zealand based players will probably give them a huge boost. Tonga is known for particularly physical rugby, while Japan has a good all around game. Tonga versus Japan should be a must see

Best games:
NZ vs France Saturday September 24 at 17:10 on Jsports 3
Japan vs Tonga Wednesday September 21 at 16:00 on Jsports 1

Pool B - England, Argentina, Scotland, Romania, Georgia

Frankly speaking, Pool B is probably the least interesting of all the pools, with England and Argentina clearly ahead of second and third tier Scotland, Romania and Georgia.

England should lead the group, but Argentina has a proud history of upset wins against England and France, and are one of the second tier countries really capable of shaking up the competition.

Best Game:
Argentina vs England - Saturday September 10 at 14:30 on Jpsorts 1

Pool C - Australia, Ireland, Italy, USA, Russia

Again, not going on much with this pool, with Australia and Ireland likely to go through, unless USA or Italy can perhaps upset Ireland - as seems highly unlikely.

Russia are competing in their first World Cup and are unlikely to be too competitive, but may give the USA a run for its money. However, presuming that the USA has prepared well for the World Cup, it will be gunning for tier 2 country Italy, and it will be interesting to see whether it can upset the Europeans

Best Games:
Australia vs Ireland - Saturday September 17, at 17:10 on Jsports 3
USA vs Italy - Tuesday September 27 at 17:10 on Jsports 1

Pool D - South Africa, Wales, Fiji, Samoa, Namibia

In terms of unpredictability of which team will advance, Pool D is the most exciting pool to watch. South Africa should cruise to lead the group, and minnows Namibia should struggle in all their games. However, the number 2 quarter final qualifying spot should be hotly contested between exciting and in-form tier two nations Wales, Fiji and Samoa.

Prior to becoming the current All Blacks coach, Graeme Henry coached Wales and brought about a renaissance in the sport there where Wales transformed into a strong well rounded team that competes strongly now and gets wins against top ranked European countries like England and France. They would usually be presumed to be the likely second place holder, but Fiji and Samoa are both powerhouse tier two countries, each of which will be strongly supported by large expat communities in New Zealand, along with New Zealand fans of the many talented Fijian and Samoan players that play in teams in NZ. Any one of these three teams can make it through the pool stages, and each of the games promises to be exciting and physical

Best Games:
Wales vs Samoa - Sunday September 18 at 12:10 on Jsports 3
Fiji vs Samoa - Sunday September 25 at 11:10 on Jsports 1
Wales vs Fiji - Sunday October 2 at 13:40 on Jsports 1

Who Will Win

Based on the draw, it is likely that the final will be have either Australia, England or France on one side, and Argentina, South Africa or New Zealand on the other. Of these nations, only Argentina has never made it to a World Cup final, and form is hard to judge as teams have been experimenting with squad selection all of this year.

New Zealand has two long traditions in rugby. One of being the most successful rugby team in the world, almost consistently ranked number 1, as it is a the moment. The other is of "choking" and losing in playoff matches in the World Cup - with fans, usually arrogantly, presuming that New Zealand will be in the final at least. I think we've learned not to presume now. Other nations study and prepare to peak at the right time to beat New Zealand in the World Cup. If it happens again, it happens. But at home, and with careful preparation, the safe money would still be on New Zealand playing up to its status of top rugby nation, and winning the World Cup on home soil, as it did back in 1987.

Japan's goal should be to increase its tally of World Cup wins. In a way, I wish Japan played France toward the end of the pools, to let it focus on Tonga and Canada first, and then think about how to upset France (something it nearly achieved eight years ago). However, it is likely that it will save players in the big clashes with NZ and France to avoid injuries, which unfortunately is likely to add to the slaughter that is likely to happen when NZ plays Japan on Friday the 16th at 16:30. Still, Japan has come a long way over the years, and a repeat of the 144 point drubbing NZ gave Japan in 1995 seems unlikely this time around.

Why You Should Watch

Rugby is a great sport. It is a team sport, but is at the same time demanding on players to have a broad set of individual skills and to be able to make in-play decisions on their own. It has fluidity and open running, but is also brutally physical at the same time. Physically, the sport is close to a medieval form of hand to hand combat. The best part of the game however is that for all the rivalry, physicality, and injury and blood that goes along with the games, it is also a game of mateship, not just among teammates but between teams. Even in the middle of a game, players will go from punching each other in the face one minute, to hand shaking and pats on the back, even occasional joking around with one another in the heat of the game. And all players will still handshake and swap jerseys at the end of the game.

In his first speech as Japanese PM, Yoshihiko Noda recently used an odd phrase, even for Japanese people, when he was appointed PM. He said he wanted to call "no-side" for in-fighting within the Democratic Party currently in power. The term is a Japanese-English rugby phrase, and represents the idea that when the whistle goes to end a match, no matter what went on during the game, everyone from both sides swaps jerseys, shakes hands, and drinks beer together afterwards. The theme of respect is still visible on the pitch also, where whining to the referee and faking injuries have become a standard part of soccer, players generally remain stoic about at times gory injuries, and referees in rugby are still shown a great deal of respect by players with dissent harshly penalized.

It's a great sport with a great ethos. And the very best rugby in the world starts September 9 - so tune in, or get to your nearest pub with a big screen, and check some games out.