At the time of writing, my own kid has just turned 3. From discussing with other parents in our situation, I believe our personal experience to have been pretty standard. A recent thread on Facebook’s Tokyo International Parents & Pals (TIPP) group discussed various approaches to raising young kids in a bilingual environment. The discussion culminated in a seminar and party  held early March in Tokyo. I noticed several patterns in the thread that I want to highlight and preserve here.

The golden rules

• Be Patient. Most kids only seems to really start speaking both languages around 4 or 5. Remember that this is not an earlier is better race. Don’t give up when your kid asks you to speak in mummy or daddy’s language or throws a tantrum.
• Be Flexible. Adapt your interaction and attitude with your kids to match age, environment and what seems to tick with them. Above all, make it fun!
• Be Gentle. Getting angry if your kids don’t understand or don’t want to interact in your language will create stress for everyone and complicate further interaction. Remember that it’s a big challenge for them too.
• Be consistent. Choose a method or routine and stick to it until you see progress and your kids have gained confidence.

The tips

• Send kids to spend holidays abroad with the grand parents at least 1 month a year. You should join too but the Japanese parent should probably stay home
• Speak to them in your language as much as possible even when they answer in Japanese. If they don’t understand, you can explain things slowly to them and guide them through the task but try not to switch to Japanese.
• Take a few hours a week to spend time with your kids without the Japanese parent. Great bonding experience and learning time.
• Avoid yes/no questions. Instead, you might want to offer a choice and have them choose the answer in your language.
• Read bedtime stories in your language everyday. Try to make it as much of an interactive activity as possible. Ask questions, highlight pictures and words, try to relate some of the story bits to real-life situations your kids came across recently.
• Replace morning TV by DVDs in your language (something they like and doesn’t make you cringe too much.)
• Avoid faking not understanding their questions in Japanese to force them to rephrase in your language. It just doesn’t seem to work. Instead, repeat their question in your language and ask them to confirm whether this is what they were asking.
• Play games. For example: have them try to repeat what your partner just said in Japanese in your language. Or try a projective technique: use a favorite stuffed animal as a proxy : “Oh, the little monkey doesn’t understand Japanese today, let’s try to speak to him in <your language>.”
• Sing to/with them. Kids are very receptive to songs in any language. Find a songs DVD in your language, notice the ones your kids seem to be most into and learn them in your spare time (download on iTunes, learn during commute) so you can sing to them (and progressively with them) during bath time, before sleep etc. They’ll have fun with you, be impressed you can sing the songs from the DVD, learn new vocabulary and also gain confidence in their pronunciation.
• Find other parents with the same language configuration and organize playgroups where the only language spoken around and to the kids is your own.
• If you are uncomfortable with the “1 parent = 1 language” technique and both parents are bilingual, you may want to try the “1 language at home (usually the minority language) / the other language outside” technique.

I hope it’s helpful. Don’t hesitate to share more tips or recommended reading in the comments.

I was previously Hooked On:

Music > More Hazards, More Heroes

Gear > Olloclip

App > My ASICS

It all started with the background image for an exhibition poster in Taipei during our week-long trip there early December with Tomomi and Naoki. The detailed photo of a lead type foundry shelf struck a cord in all of us and no one could resist adding such singular destination to the masterfully planned visit of the island prepared by our friend Leonard. This single photo sent us on a multi-day quest which ended at Ri Xing Typography (日星鑄字行), the last type foundry in Taiwan.

We visited the tiny factory building on a nondescript side street near Taipei’s main station on our last day in Taipei. The picture above is me walking through a corridor lined up with metal type cast from the purported last complete set of traditional Chinese character copper molds in the world.

The owner’s wife told us that in 2007, the now only remaining factory from the 5000 or so 40 years ago, started an effort to preserve this important piece of Taiwan’s cultural legacy and promote letterpress printing to younger generations. The Ri Xing Letterpress Rehabilitation Project is currently composed of a group of volunteers who meet regularly to prepare awareness campaigns (日星鑄字行 Rixing Type Foundry on Facebook), letterpress printing training, and font preserving activities (the main font named Kaishu 楷書 is being digitized for reproduction and distribution).

The factory (now more of a working museum) is open nearly daily and visitors are free to roam the corridors and buy the lead type casts as souvenirs for friends etc. At the beginning of our visit, we were handed a little booklet containing a preview of the different fonts available (Chinese, Roman and even Japanese Katakana and Hiragana) and spent an hour hunting all of our friends’ names and favorite Chinese characters. Individual lead type cost between NT$30~80 per piece and our gifts created a sensation when brought back to Japan.

Address: 13, Ln 97, Taiyuan Rd, Taipei City (台北市太原路97巷13號) Telephone: (02) 2556-4626

A selection of photos from Tomomi’s Flickr:

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Tiny Review (App Store)

An app currently following the 500 Startups accelerator program. It’s like an Instagram for reviews. Their tagline says it all: “3 lines + 1 picture”.

The Best

• Two-tap sign up process using Facebook.
• The app forces users to write something, anything. That’s the killer feature of this app. Too many rating apps are content with a small pic and a thumbs-up. On the contrary, this app is building a huge collection of valuable content: witty, fun to read, bite-size reviews.
• Your review must fit in three lines of text (often more like three words), written over the picture. It encourages people to think about what they are going to write, makes it impossible to write long-winding reviews, keeps it straight to the point and never boring.
• People seem to enjoy it also as an actual alternative to Instagram where they get a chance to write captions on top of their photos and often forget (and nothing bad here) to “review” anything. I don’t mind this actually!

The Rest

• Early app version I know, but the poor design is not encouraging me to stick around.
• I only have a few active friends, and no nearby activity, I am bored. The app should make it easier for me to discover new people, in new places.
• Not sure if this is an issue with the app or lack of imagination by the people I am following but I don’t feel comfortable rating anything non food related.
• Help me seed content to my account when I have just joined. When I am adding a review, make my life easier and just suggest venues close to the GPS info embedded in most of my existing pics (like Instagram does). That would save me from having to remember location names at all. Hell, just show me my recent Instagram pics (or other similar services on which I am likely to have already uploaded pics of places I would want to rate on Tiny Review) and let me copy over a few interesting ones.
• Don’t care to see my pics in my “Following” stream.
• The app launches with the Nearby tab selected, which means that you always see the same picture at the top. First UX priority should be that I always get to see a new tiny review when I launch the app, even if not written by my friends. I would rather “Nearby and Recent but not by your friends” than “Same old nearby curry house review from 3 months ago”.

Stamped (App Store)

Google-backed NYC startup. The pitch: “Stamped is a new way to recommend only what you like best — restaurants, books, movies, music and more. No noise, no strangers, just the things you and your friends love.”

The Best

• Sleek design overall and great font choice
• Lovely personalisation touche: choose the colour of your stamp of approval
• I like the fact that you are suggested a few personalities to follow (5).
• I like the integration with Amazon on books recommended by friends but the screen’s a bit hard to find.

The Rest

• Sign up form takes me back 5 years when I had to enter my name and phone number.
• Judging from the number of written reviews I have seen in my stream, people enjoy stamping and not much else.
• Integration with Google Places instead of the Foursquare locations Db makes it virtually impossible to find names of places in Japan.
• I don’t really care for the To-Do (bookmarks really) feature.
• With only a few friends using the app, I cannot see myself checking it on a regular basis. There should be a mechanism in place that would alert me when new stamps have been inked on items likely to be of interest to me even if out of my circle of friends.
• Too many ratings possible. Where to start?!
• I don’t find the limit of 100 stamps to be a motivation to rate only the best things around me.

Oink (App Store)

First project by Milk Inc., Kevin Rose’s new venture. The pitch: “Instead of just rating places, you rate the items inside.”

The Best

• It’s easy the sign up and easy to find friends already on the service.
• I like the fact that the app is about rating things inside places, not the places, because ultimately I am more likely to go to a restaurant because you recommend 1 or several items on the menu than just the restaurant.
• Really like the Creds concept. It’s a great incentive to get users to add content. Instead of just rating anything aimlessly like Stamped, Oink tries to provide a guide by letting users choose Creds to specialize in. My creds are currently Dessert, Healthy, Museums, Tokyo.
• The UI is beautiful.
• Offers a few filters for the photos you take or add. Great touch to increase impact of the app’s content.

The Rest

• Add interface feels totally backwards. It forces me to start by finding a location. Sure it suggests locations around me but what if I am oinking from inside my bed, in the evening, or the day after a visit to a great location as it often happens? Hook me into adding content by first securing the content I am trying to share (a picture of something) and then let me deal with the details of it (location etc.)
• Too many steps to add anything. Choose a location, choose from a list of things already added or add a new one, then name it and add tags, then take or add a photo. Then when you think you’re done, you can add your own ratings upon which you are invited to leave a “mini-review” or a “comment” (apparently they are different), or even add a to-do (of something you are adding?!). Is there anything this app doesn’t do.
• Like many rating apps, it forces you to remember to use the app while you are there or before you devore your food etc. The last cake pic I posted was of crumbs left on an empty plate. The cake was great though.
• I don’t care to see my oinks in my “Following” stream. I just want to see stuff from people I am following!
• Help me seed content to my account when I have just joined. When I am adding a oink, make my life easier and just suggest venues close to the GPS info embedded in most of my existing pics (like Instagram does). That would save me from having to remember location names at all.
• Why make me frame my pics in a square if the app will then recrop them in landscape?!

To wrap things up, I feel that both Oink and Stamped try too hard to make it sound like the whole world has caught “Rating Fever” with no vaccine in sight and that you’ve got no choice but to join the movement. Their elaborate UI feel like a knee-jerking contest and although dazzling at first, make me long for the simplicity of Tiny Review’s UX and Instagram.
Ultimately though, despite my likes and dislikes, I am most likely to stick with the app that will manage to catch on with the biggest number of contacts on my social graph. Oink has a clear advantage at the moment, if only my friends could start Oinking!!!

The previous Hooked On section:

Music > Tokumaru Shugo

Anime > No.6

App > Tweetbot

• let me choose the number of max pics it could post
• show only my pics or also the ones I’ve recently liked
• display the account name and link to the original photo
• not show the pics that are set to private
• let me choose the size of the photos and layout
• post a notification to Twitter or FB.

by Janchip

by Raphaelschaad

by Taro_yumiba

by Globalbabe

by Jeansnow

Welcome to a lovely corner of Gunma Prefecture for the Nakanojo Biennale (Nakabi). In its 3rd edition, the festival can be compared to the Echigo-Tsumari Triennale, Japan’s oldest and largest countryside art festival, for it borrows the same recipe: find a seldom visited corner of Japan, reopen long closed primary schools, old breweries, former factory and empty houses to display a select group of artists (Japanese-only in the case of Nakabi) for a crowd of locals and day-trip visitors from other corners of Japan and bigger cities. I visited the festival on its closing weekend early October for reasons I will mention later in this post, and had a total blast.

I want to share some of the features that make the festival a great 1~3-day trip opportunity and some of the aspects that I hope will be improved before their next edition in 2013.

The Best
The area has luckily been spared the all too usual straight, endless national road bordered by chain stores treatment. The main reason is that it is tucked in a little corner of Gunma Prefecture that you cannot actually go through for the roads end at big damns up in the mountain. Additionally, it is onsen wonderland with Kuni Onsen, Sawatari Onsen and the famous Shima Onsen areas; all of which you go through and stop by to catch some of the 160 artists showing in the festival.

Fairly compact the festival can be covered in 2 packed days of driving the roughly 80km of roads linking the 2 extremities and stopping by the 43 art locations. Most of the roads are small mountain paths limited to 40km/h that offer great opportunities for sporty driving to the seasoned tourer taking out his Lotus Elise for a cultural spin in the soft end-of-summer weather.

I spent 2 days in the area, visiting the West half on the first day on my own and the East part on day 2 with Tomomi who was joining for the day from Tokyo. A third day would have been required to visit all the locations but a quick study of the very nice and detailed Biennale guidebook allowed me discard about a quarter of the artworks that looked less appealing.

The first day I progressed slowly West to arrive in the Kuni Onsen area in the evening for a good night in a tiny and lovely onsen ryokan lost in the mountains. On day 2 Tomomi and I went straight to the Shima Onsen area and slowly worked our way back to the Nakanojo station. The Festival is really well-paced, with only between 5~10km between 2 locations and often a few artists to view at once.

Maybe it was because the festival was in its last weekend but most of the staff at each location seemed to be a local grandpa/ma types that had been recruited for days at a time. What they seemed to lack in knowledge of the artwork or curiosity in its visitors, they made up in kindness, local knowledge and tips to reach the next artwork. It also gave the festival a true local feel, just as if they’d set up the festival on their own without the help of any curator from the big city. We could sense their personal pride in the festival, full awareness of its positive impact on the area and its people.

Having visited a couple of much bigger art festivals in Japan, I was originally suspicious of the quality of the artworks I would find here despite a few great pieces introduced by Spoon & Tamago. Shame on me for imagining that such a lovely area could attract lesser curation or talent. Not only did all our visits made me regret my original doubts, the location themselves were art pieces in their own rights and Tomomi and I found ourselves often staying far longer than we’d imagined, studying every corner of the old houses, factories, and closed school frozen in time, still full of original furnitures and items much echoed by Masahiko Kiyooka’s “The cycle of things” installation in the Former Gotanda School.

The Rest

Let me now mention some of challenges I think the festival faces in the run up to the next edition:

• Promotion was nearly inexistent from what I’ve heard. The fact that no one involved in TAB had heard of the festival until about mid September is truly regrettable.
• No English description of the event or artworks on their website, booklet, road signs.
• Clearly, the East half of the festival showcased much better artworks (which I easily worked out just flipping through their booklet on the morning of the first day and confirmed on the second.) This was probably by design, for 1-day trippers but a few high profile artworks on the West would have encouraged more people to stay overnight.
• Moreover, a few higher profile Japanese or international artists would have gone a long way in helping with the festival’s promotion.
• The area is full of great photo spots. I was able to find a lot without going out of my way much, but the landscape is so stunning it would have been nice to see recommended scenery spots on the festival map.
• Lastly, I feel like there were too few opportunities for me to spend money in the area. Save for a few gift stores. I fail to see how the festival can be a viable project.

In any case, I am truly looking forward to the next edition in 2013, and so probably are the organizers who’ve announced they’ve doubled the previous attendance to 300,000. And I hope to have the opportunity to visit a few more of these lovely and unique art festivals around Japan. Next on my list is probably the Beppu Contemporary Art Festival 2012.

[More photos on Flickr]

Since the Posterous Importer plugin for self-hosted WordPress wouldn’t stop coughing on my Posterous site, I first signed up to WordPress.com (for free) and used their native and better maintained Posterous import plugin to suck all my posts and media.
Then I immediately exported all of it using the Export menu and then imported it all back into the self-hosted WordPress installation before deleting the WP.com intermediary blog.
Ta-daa!

I’ll pass on the setup necessary to keep the nice blog.aka.me sub-domain but it’s all working nicely now.

So nearly 2 years ago I did:
MT → WP → Posterous
and just now:
Posterous → WP.com → WP

* Update 1
hehehe it was kinda too easy, right?!
Turns out I am missing half my posts and comments. Duh!
Looking into other solutions.
To be continued…

* Update 2
If you notice a discrepancy between the number of posts on Posterous and WP.com, you probably have character encoding issues in some of your Posterous posts (I did, from the original MT import years ago). After fixing them, I was able to import the remaining posts. All done!

Music > De De Mouse

Anime > Level E

App > Instagram

For the 3 new ones, check aka.me‘s top page

• the pleasure to take photo on a near daily basis
• pay more attention to my surroundings in search of interesting snaps to share
• care for my friends’ pics

This is quite an amazing feat for a very simple app with limited features compared to the competition.

But they have a recently-released API that has been used to create a series of interesting web-apps and mashups. The next months will probably see the release of many more services (going beyond the simple display of photo on a grid) but I thought I’d start by listing some of the best services of the moment.

Cookie points for the person releasing a map of Tokyo’s cherry blossom path overlaid with Instagram cherry blossom pics.

Extragr.am

Gramfeed

Instagrid

InstaRamen

Inkstagram

Webstagram

Instagreat

Special mention for Printstagram which allows you to print your photos on a poster or small stickers.