What's happening in Japan right now?

Social Games in Japan

2012-01-11T20:38:00.008+09:00

I had multiple non-Japanese people asking me about social games in Japan, so I'd like to summarize some of the stuff I saw recently.

2011 was the year of social games in the Japanese game industry. According to this article on Diamond "Why Nintendo will not do social games(JP)", many game companies such as Square Enix, Bandai Namco and Konami were "rescued" by the rise of social games that were operated by mobile social network/game platform companies like DeNA(JP) and GREE(JP). On the other hand, there are companies like Nintendo that is not entering the social game business. Nintendo's CEO Mr. Iwata says "charging users by changing some number parameters and making them open some key or making something advantageous is not charging for creative efforts" and that "you might get short term revenue but cannot build long term relationships with customers" and that "Nintendo should not do such thing". On the other hand, it is true that companies like DeNA and GREE are making a successful business- if you compare Zynga and GREE, active user (used the service at least once a month) of Zynga is 227 million whereas GREE's registered user is only has 10% of that- 27 million users (update: GREE does not publicize number of active users but apparently less than 27 million- thank you for the info, @serkantoto!), but the net operating profit of Zynga 2011 was 630 million USD whereas GREE's prediction for 2011 June-2012 June is 900 million USD according to Sankei Biz. Also, their business success is not only for themselves but for various companies and industries surrounding them, and many people advises Nintendo to enter social game business as well.

For example, GREE sees its operating profits rise 300% to hit a record $910 million profits, and their sales for the final quarter of 2011 alone may be $520 million. GREE invested in a startup that creates social games called "Gumi" and has 20% stake of the company. Gumi Raised $26 million, and sold more than $50 million worth of virtual in-game coins last year. Those revenue are split with partners including carriers and platform providers like GREE- so that's how the business ecosystem works.

This is a diagram explained in Diamond's article above- left is social game business model which circulates revenue to mobile carriers and content providers (blue arrows) whereas package game business model does not have.

(source: Diamond "Why Nintendo will not do social games(JP)")

It is also true that we are starting to see troubles in online games and Consumer Affairs Agency is investigating the expensive bills(JP). Consumer Affairs Agency's press release on this issue can be found here(JP). Criticisms toward Online game companies is that they attracts users saying their games are "free", and charges later on the items. Children gets heated up by those services, some reports in the article above includes "My son who is elementary school student bought 300yen (4USD) lottery 100 times" and "My child is 5 years old, and bought an item for 100,000yen (1,300USD)", asking the platform providers to pay back the bills.

According to another article, one of the game manufacturers says 80% of the users play social games for free, and less than 20% pays. Within those who pay, some pay more than 2million yen (26k USD). Of course that doesn't happen in a day. They start by paying 50 yen, 100 yen, 500... and whey you pay 1,000yen you have no trouble paying 2,000. You might want to ask "what are they paying for?". According to Prof. Miho Nojima, "They are paying for their existence in the in-game community, to keep their friends there." The article introduces a jobless man living on social welfare, but is paying around 20,000 yen per month (2.6kUSD) to stay in this in-game community. "Not everyone can be successful or admired in the real world. Human beings wants to be admired, and are willing to pay to be admired. In the 1980's during the bubble economy, people paid for expensive brand bags to satisfy their pride. Now, that is happening inside social games." When you don't receive the word "Thank you" from anyone in the real world, they go out and "help" someone by a "click", and you get admiration, gratitude and are able to satisfy their pride, even if it means paying some money. You don't get that in package games, this only happens in social games.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employer.

Hatsune Miku Recap 2011 (+recap of my Ignite talk)

2011-11-27T20:51:00.015+09:00

Update:

This video created by Google Japan to promote Chrome is an excellent representation of the value of Hatsune Miku- I love their phrase "Everyone, Creator". (Disclaimer: I work for Google)

I have been posting and speaking a lot about Hatsune Miku in various places including this blog(2008), this blog (2010) and did Ignite at LeWeb'10.

Hatsune Miku is a Desk Top Music software and a character- it started with the "voice" and "picture" created by a company called Crypton Future Media, which generated a huge movement of DIY music, video and art phenomenon. It is one of the series of softwares called "Vocaloid".

I think the highlight of Hatsune Miku for 2011 was that it has gone international :)

Recently Hatsune Miku had been attracting attention from various countries.

LA Weekly "Hatsune Miku: Her Best Fan-Generated Videos"

Miku has also have made a very successful concert in Los Angeles- you can see the highlight video here:

Also, Vocaloid series is constantly evolving- the newest version "Vocaloid 3" which has a much human-like sound- can be listened from the link below.

鳥の詩（ Ver.IA(β) ）

Following is a recap of my Ignite speech which was one year ago (didn't have time to post this for a year...)

I started my speech by introducing Miku's concert that happened in Japan. At that time, people around the world were interested that Japanese people actually gathers to watch a virtual character to sing- this year, we have seen this happen in Los Angeles and I heard that as many as 5,000 people came to the event ;)

Video of the concert

Press articles of media around the world surprised about a concert of a virtual idol.

The most interesting thing about Hatsune Miku is how it spurred enormous amount of creativity by the users- music, pictures, animations, software, etc.

Users can upload music to various sites such as Piapro:

And some of those user generated songs won #1 of the Japanese weekly CD Sales ranking, and Vocaloid series won #2,4,6,7, 8, 10,11, 15,18 of Karaoke ranking last year.

I was looking at the data this year, and for example the Oricon Blu-ray ranking as of 2011/11/28 (data from 2011/11/14-2011/11/20) #5 was Hatsune Miku. (#1,2,4 are all Harry Potter, #3 is Pirates of the Caribbean)

Much less in Karaoke ranking compared to last year, but still #3, #19 and #21 were Hatsune Miku songs.

I played one of the most popular songs at LeWeb last year- "Miku Miku Ni Shite Ageru"

This song was remixed by many people, and the dots on this chart shows all the remixes- it actually looks like universe!

Many people started drawing illustrations -many of which you can see on Piapro

And of course various 2D animations and 3D animations.

People started creating software too- MikuMikuDance is the most popular one- user generated 3D animation creation software.

Originally it only had one character (Miku) but the different versions allowed users to add different characters, objects and backgrounds, and different models as you can see in the following videos:

MMD started to carry physical engine, and the users can control objects’ weight, friction, spinning speed, speed decay, repulsion, etc. MMD development by the original creator- Yu Higuchi has ended as of October 2011, and MMD's further development is now in the hands of the MMD community.

Then there's the 3D animation and hardware hacking part. This video of "Innocence" started the movement.

You can see this imaginary musical instrument- which stimulated the geeks around Japan to actually create it.

Awesome wall paper made by tripshots

Created that instrument with 3$ display:

Nintendo DS version:

Wii remote version:

Augmented Reality version:

As you can imagine, there are Android app version such as this one and this one :)

At Digital Contents Expo, a bunch of creators gathered to show off their instruments and did a mini live.

I believe the key to the success of Hatsune Miku was its openness- Crypton Future Media could've claimed their rights and prohibited the use of the characters- as many of the contents industry companies does- instead they decided to open up the use of the character Miku, and invited various creators to share, reuse and remix their creativity- which led to a viral effect not just by consumers, but creators, and also made consumers to become creators.

What I really like about the Hatsune Miku community is that they have love and respect with each other, they like other people's work, praise, and build on top of them for the next great thing - and the following was my final slide ;)

Photo CC by Shanissinha_

For those of you who wants to see newer vid, looks like this one is in the ranking now :)

Disclaimer- This blog is a personal blog of Fumi Yamazaki. What I write here reflects my personal opinion, and has nothing to do with my employer.

Half a year after 311

2011-09-18T01:16:00.002+09:00

Half a year has passed since the 311 incident. There was a Magnitude 9.0 earthquake, which led to tsunami, fire, landslide, and nuclear power plant accident.

311 was a chance for the media to change their attitudes- for example, NHK (National TV station of Japan) allowed a junior highschool student to livestream their news contents on Ustream, and they ended up livestreaming themselves, too. They also officially uploaded some of the video clips on YouTube which you can see here:

Many citizens shot videos of the tsunami as well- to keep these lessons in mind for the future, I will post some of those clips here:

Tsunami in Oirase

Kesennuma

Otsuchi

Minami Sanriku

Kamaishi

Sendai Airport

A ship of Maritime Safety Agency crossing the tsunami

Fukushima Power Plant explosion

Fukushima nuclear power plant after explosion

There still are people working IN that power plant to cool down and terminate the reactor... video message from them.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employer.

Climbing Mt.Fuji

2011-08-10T02:05:00.004+09:00

Last weekend I went to climb Mt.Fuji- the highest mountain in Japan for the first time in my life.

Photo CC-BY TANAKA Juuyoh (田中十洋)

It was an event called "IT Fuji". The event started around 10 years ago with a bunch of researchers with geeky gears climbing Mt.Fuji with lots of sensors and GPS, etc trying to learn how they can utilize IT in the mountains. They played on the mountain with those gadgets so much that recently they've become pretty normal mountain climbers- at least that's what I heard ;) Here are some tips from our trip:

How to get to Mt.Fuji:

Take the "Fujikyu Bus" from Shinjuku station - it takes you directly to Mt.Fuji's 3rd station (3goume) and 5th station (5 goume). Reserve your seat well in advance for early morning buses.

Climbing schedule:

Typically you leave Tokyo in the morning and arrive at 5th station, have lunch and climb up to 8th station where there are lots of lodges and huts. You can eat dinner, take a nap and leave 8th station around 23-1AM to head to the top of the mountain and watch the sunrise. Sunrise from Mt. Fuji is considered very precious and is called Goraikou(御来光) meaning honorable delivery of light. After you reach the top and watch the sunrise, you can either wander at the top - this walk is called Ohachimeguri (お鉢巡り), or you can head back down. Visiting the hot spring -Onsen (温泉) after the climb is highly recommended :D

What to bring:

-backpack, make sure you have waterproof cover (to avoid rain and dust)
-trekking shoes

-warm clothes for the top (it's freezing cold up there even during hot summer)
-light clothes for the bottom (it's hot during summer)
-heat tech T-shirts (clothes that will dry quick is desirable)
-gloves
-climbing stick
-raincoat (umbrellas won't work)
-headlamp (flashlights won't work)
-money (to buy drinks/snacks and pay for the toilets, coins are better)
-mobile phone (to communicate with your team mates. It fairly works!)
-snacks and drinks (don't bring too much since they will be heavy)
-hat/cap (to avoid sunburn)
-sunscreen (to avoid sunburn)
-medical mask (to avoid the dust)

might be good to have
-Oxygen (I didn't use it at all so I don't know if it's effective but saw lots of people using it)

It was foggy/rainy when we started climbing, but didn't rain that hard.

It was actually raining really hard when we were taking a nap at 8th station, but the sky cleared up when we started climbing at 1AM... we were lucky!

This is a typical lodge. They have sleeping bags that you can take a short nap before heading to the top.

Just before the sunrise, it became so cloudy that we almost thought we'll miss the Goraikou (sunrise)...

Then the sky started to clear up

Sunrise! 御来光！

I think it was rather good that we had some clouds since the reflections were so beautiful :D

You can see the clouds down below. The red object is Torii (鳥居) .

Appendix: One of my colleagues asked me to bring Android figure with me to Mt.Fuji and here is the evidence!

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employer.

What can you do with your brain wave?

2011-06-19T21:50:00.004+09:00

There's a lot of visualization and applications recently using brain waves.

One of the most popular ones was this one by Ariel Garten, CEO of Interaxon presented at LeWeb2010. You can watch her speech "Thought Controlled Computing" here:

Yes, we were sitting there in the audience watching her brain wave while she talks ;)

What about the Japanese usage of brain waves? There's a bunch of interesting installations, but I'll introduce a cute one here - "Necomimi" by Neurowear project. You wear cat's ear shaped device which would lay down if you are relaxed, stick up if you are concentrated.

Looks like I was concentrated when I tried it this time ;)

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employer.

Flat rate international roaming packet services

2010-11-03T16:27:00.008+09:00

For the Japanese folks, this info is a bit old. But I realized talking with non-Japanese folks that many of them didn't know this so I thought I'd write this post.

** The Problem **

Global roaming fee had been a headache for most travelers... the options were, we either:

1) give up and try to hop through wifi spots or go to internet cafes
... this was what I usually did when I was a traveler. Before that, I thought if I lose internet I might not be able to survive. Internet connection was like oxygen to me. I was totally Internet addicted, Twitter addicted. Actually I learned how to survive- I had no internet connection at all for 4 whole days trekking in Machu Picchu :)

2) get a local SIM
... I sometimes do this in U.S. when my stay is long. But it is annoying to do this in each country you go, you don't know the language and you don't know the pricing models in that country, you don't know which career is good etc... it is painful.

Update 11/3:
@miyagawa taught me an awesome wiki "Pay as you go sim with data Wiki"
See also his blog post "Hacking Japanese mobile plans for geeks (or travelers)"
Thank you for the info Miyagawa-san!

3) use the SIM from the country of origin and "behave" not to use too much packets
... this is what people usually does.

4) use the SIM from the country of origin and use it as you want to.
... this is called "パケ死 (packet death)"

** The Solution **

In order to solve this problem, Japanese mobile carriers - Softbank and NTT docomo started to provide flat rate international roaming packet services several months ago.

Info in English for Softbank's service for iPhone/iPad

Info in English for NTT docomo's service

** How did this happen? **

Masayoshi Son, CEO of mobile carrier Softbank received a mention to his Twitter account (@masason) in April to request flat rate international roaming packet service. Maybe he already had some kind of plan already before replying, but his reply was " Let's consider that". A month later, he comes back with the tweet that Softbank will actually start that service from July. Some of the tweets from the conversation:

2010-04-23

User: Can't you do anything about the ridiculously expensive international roaming cost?

Son-san: Let's consider providing flat rate international roaming packet service from countries that are possible.

出来る国から海外パケホーダイを検討してみましょう。RT @OKAMOTOAtusi: 海外ローミングの法外な価格設定だけはなんとかなりませんか。

2010-04-25

User: Son-sama, if you can make the packets I tweet overseas a flat rate, I will run to Softbank shop and switch to Softbank now!

Son-san: Will consider providing it from countries that are possible.

出来る国から検討します。RT @chisato_mzn: @masason 孫さま、海外でツイした分も一定料金にしていただけたら、今すぐショップに走ってソフトバンクに乗り換えます！

2010-05-12

User: Even if iPad is SIM locked, it would not be a problem if global roaming fee is fixed price.

Son-san: Let's do it. From major countries. Flat rate international roaming packet service.

User: Please do it with iPhone too.

Son-san: Yes.

はい。RT @eisuke0312: iPhoneでもお願いします。 RT @masasonやりましょう。主要国から。海外パケ定額。RT @hayatomo0711: iPadがSIMロックされていても、普通なら問題ないと思うんです。海外ローミングの料金さえなんとかしてしてくれたら…

2010-05-14

User: I can't use (data) outside Japan with current price setting!

Son-san: Fixed. We will start flat rate international roaming packet service from late July in major countries. Details to follow.

決定しました。海外パケ定額7月下旬に主要国開始。詳細は後日。RT @hemolelelilia: @masason 今の料金設定では海外で使えません‼

2010-06-28

Son-san: We're ready. Starting flat rate international roaming packet service from 7/21. Countries fixed. You will be released from several 10,000 yen packet costs. http://bit.ly/bHrive

出来ました。7/21から海外パケ定開始。対象国も確定。数万円のパケット代から解放。http://bit.ly/bHrive

** But wait... is this really feasible? **

Softbank needs to pay other carriers - is it really possible to do flat rate?

User: Uh, are you going to be OK? lol

Son-san: If you use too much, we will be in the red. Please don't be too hard on us.

皆さんが、ガンガン使うと当方かなり赤字。お手柔らかに。RT @terrysaito だ、
大丈夫なのか？ w RT 出来ました。7/21から海外パケ定開始。対象国も確定。
数万円のパケット代から解放。http://bit.ly/bHrive

Disclaimer:

The opinions expressed herein are my own and do not represent my employer’s views in any way. Nothing posted here should be considered official or sanctioned by my employer or any other organization I’m affiliated with.

World Cup Soccer - Go go Japan!

2010-06-27T22:38:00.007+09:00

**FIFA World Cup 2010**

FIFA World Cup Soccer Tournament is held right now in South Africa. Many Japanese soccer fans flew to watch the matches.

(photo via Twitpic of @KNNkanada)

Japan is ranked 43rd in the FIFA ranking, and it is our 4th participation in the matches. Despite all the pessimistic views before the tournament, Japan ended the group stage matches with 2-1 result (won against Cameroon and Denmark, lost against Netherlands) and made it to the knockout stage... yay!

The next match for Japan is against Paraguay, will be aired on TBS television on 6/29 23:00 Japan Time.

Update 6/30: Japan lost the match vs Paraguay (PK) but it was a very very close match. They did a really great job!

**Bidding for FIFA World Cup2022**

Japan co-hosted Worldcup 2002 with South Korea and is bidding for hosting Worldcup 2022 now.

Official website for WorldCup Bidding is here. Concept video for the bid can be seen here:

As you can see from the video, Japanese bidding team is trying to use various technologies to make the experience richer... automatic interpretation device to communicate, augmented reality (AR) devices will be provided to view information of the players etc realtime, " Freeviewpoint Vision" will capture videos in the soccer field using 200 high definition cameras, "Full Court 3D Vision" enables the viewers to watch the matches using 3D technology, etc.

They even had a PSP in their official "bid book"

This is the photo of the bidding team which I took at their report event after the official bidding. 2nd from the right you can find Professor Jun Murai- father of the Internet of Japan joining the bidding team.

OH and don't forget- Japan is the country that Yoichi Takahashi, the author of Captain Tsubasa or Flash Kicker was born, right? He joined the world cup bidding event held in Yokohama. You can see a couple of articles here and here with his photos. (I wish they'd make those photos CC licensed...!)

TEDxTokyo

2010-06-26T20:09:00.008+09:00

Last month on May 15th, I was involved in organizing an event called TEDxTokyo 2010.

What is TED?

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design, it is an invitation-only annual conference held in long beach, with amazing speakers and participants from all over the world. Originally it was a closed conference, but they started to provide their video online using Creative Commons license which helped them spread the word. They also launched a translation project with which 4,000 volunteer translators worked on over 9,000 videos to 77 languages so far, which helped non-English speakers all over the world to learn about, and learn from TED conference videos.

What is TEDx?

TED licensed their brand for free as "TEDx" so that anyone who abides to the TEDx guidelines are able to hold their own TEDx event. They can either view the past TED videos together or invite their own speakers to talk. During the past year, 1,000 TEDx events were held all over the world in 70 countries with 35 languages, and more than 50,000 people participated. It is becoming a big phenomenon. The great thing about TEDx is that people around the world are using their own creativity harmonizing with their own expertize and culture to make interesting events happen, and most of them are streamed live and/or video recorded and uploaded on YouTube.

If you go to this channel, you'll be able to find tons of interesting videos from TEDx all around the world (1,874 videos as of 6/26）.

What is TEDxTokyo?

TEDxTokyo is one of the TEDx events held in Tokyo, we held 2 TEDxTokyo events so far, one on 2009/5/22 and another on 2010/5/15 both of which were amazing and I am very proud of being in the organizing team :) I was serving as social media Japanese lead in charge of @TEDxTokyo_ja (Japanese language tweets).

We had amazing speakers- the following is speaker list from this year (link on speaker names goes to speaker profile, link on video links to the videos)

FIRST DECADE

Jake Shimabukuro, Musician and Composer
Lara Stein, Global TEDx Director, Producer, Performer
Jesper Koll, Economist, Global Financial Analyst, Investor
Jin Tatsumura, Prize-Winning Filmmaker
Drue Kataoka, Sumi-e Artist
Kentaro Toyama, Ex-Computer Scientist
Derek Silvers, How to Start a Movement (video)
Azby Brown, Architect, Artist, Author

OPEN SOURCES & SYSTEMS

Noriko Kawamura, Concert Violinist and Music Explorer
Dr. Yoshiyuki Sankai, Professor and Roboticist
Tim Berners Lee, Inventor of the World Wide Web (video)
Dr. Hiroshi Tasaka, Philosopher, Author, Global Thought Leader
Hitoshi Murayama, Theoretical Physicist and Director, Institute for
the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe
Owen Rogers, Design Thinker, Branding Artist, Entrepreneur
Hayashiya Imamaru, Traditional Vaudevillian and Grand Master of Japanese Paper Cutting

FIVE SENSES + ONE

Marco Tempest, Techno-Illusionist
Matteo Ceccarini, Painter, Illustrator and Comic Artist
Kanae Doi, International Legal Expert and Human Rights Advocate
David Hanson, Designing Life-like Social Robots (video)
Rome Kanda, Actor, Comedian and Producer
Ken Mogi, Brain Scientist, Author and Essayist
Jakob Lusensky, Musical Branding Thought Leader

CULTURAL EXPEDITION

Ginger Ana Griep-Ruiz, Cirque du Soleil’s ZED
Bob Stilger and Annie Stilger Virnig, Global Community Connectors and Developers
Karen Armstrong, TED Prize Winner – Charter for Compassion (video)
Morinosuke Kawaguchi, Technology Consultant, Subculture-driven
Innovations Expert
Kiyoyuki “Ken” Okuyama, Industrial Design Master and Mentor
Hans Reitz, Social Business Advocate and Serial Entrepreneur
Naohiko Umewaka, Noh Master, Playwright, Theater Director and Scholar

One of the great things about TEDxTokyo is that everything is operated as volunteer work. We as staffs met up at 7AM in the morning at the venue (Mirai Kan). It was a great sunny day!

Some of the performances don't need language. Amazing Ukulele performance by Jake Shimabukuro:

Performance by Cirque du Soleil:

As TEDxTokyo is in held in Japan, we had some very traditional Japanese performances by Japanese artists such as Kamikiri by Imamaru Hayashiya:

Also noh performance by Naohiko Umewaka:

Some speeches were about advanced technology of Japan, Dr. Yoshiyuki Sankai showing his HAL system which is a robot suit that enables the disabled people to stand up or walk, weak people to hold heavy loads etc.

Morinosuke Kawaguchi talks about the Japanese super-advanced toilets.

Some talked about the lost values of Japan. Dr. Hiroshi Tasaka talks about the age of "invisible capitalism".

Azby Brown talks about how the sustainable practices of the Japanese Edo era can serve as a model for the modern world.

Some talked about how Japan can contribute to the world- Kentaro Toyama talks about The Technology for Emerging Markets research group which investigates ways the world's poorer communities can harness technology to drive their socioeconomic development.

Kanae Doi shares her experiences from NPO "Human Rights Watch" on how Japan should be helping more refugees around the world.

Jakob Lusensky talks about branding using music, but the presentation was received by the audience that his insights can be applied in various areas.

Industrial designer Kiyoyuki 'Ken' Okuyama shares his thoughts on how society and space is changing and how companies/people should change the way design spaces and products to meet those changes.

Some of the speakers comes back! Techno Magician Marco Tempest's performance from TEDxTokyo2009:

This is Marco's performance from TEDxTokyo2010:

I'm getting tempted to introduce all of the speakers but this post is becoming too long already- all of the videos from TEDxTokyo can be seen here :)

The other great thing about TEDxTokyo is that it is basically invitation only, and the audience are amazing people as well. Some of the speakers this year were audiences last year, and some of the speakers from last year came again as audience this year. I think it is becoming an amazing community.

Mario Tokoro, speaker last year participates as audience this year:

Joi who couldn't join last year participated this year as an audience.

As the organizing team is volunteer work too, the video shooting and streaming team brought their equipments for free and worked for us. It was amazing.

There were amazing things happening even outside the main hall. Rinpa Eshidan was live painting the walls during the event.

If you are not familiar with Rinpa, check out this video. I'm a big fan of them.

Sponsor booth by the sponsors:

Lunch time was fascinating too. Lots of interesting people, doing interesting things.

HAL (robot suit) was walking around at the lunch venue:

Imamaru-san was doing kamikiri (paper cutting) during lunch time too:

Tesla- one of our sponsors brought a Tesla car to the venue:

Our Ustream team was working on interviews during lunch time as well:

Photo from the stage when all of the staffs and volunteers got on stage:

I would like to thank all the speakers, sponsors and partners, organizing staffs and volunteers, audiences at the venue as well as on the live stream! Also, many thanks to the social media team- Steve Nagata, Joseph Tame and Paul Papadimitriou!

BTW, I love how speeches at TED are always so inspiring and loved this Ten commandments:

Thou Shalt Not Simply Trot Out thy Usual Shtick.
Thou Shalt Dream a Great Dream, or Show Forth a Wondrous New Thing, Or Share Something
Thou Hast Never Shared Before.
Thou Shalt Reveal thy Curiosity and Thy Passion.
Thou Shalt Tell a Story.
Thou Shalt Freely Comment on the Utterances of Other Speakers for the Sake of Blessed Connection and Exquisite Controversy.
Thou Shalt Not Flaunt thine Ego. Be Thou Vulnerable. Speak of thy Failure as well as thy Success.
Thou Shalt Not Sell from the Stage: Neither thy Company, thy Goods, thy Writings, nor thy Desperate need for Funding; Lest Thou be Cast Aside into Outer Darkness.
Thou Shalt Remember all the while: Laughter is Good.
Thou Shalt Not Read thy Speech.
Thou Shalt Not Steal the Time of Them that Follow Thee.

If you are able to read Japanese, it looks like I wrote 31 posts about TEDxTokyo in Japanese here :P

Spacecraft Hayabusa's return to the Earth

2010-06-14T07:36:00.006+09:00

Last night, Japanese netizens were filled with excitement watching Japanese spacecraft "Hayabusa" return from its 7 years mission to explore asteroid "Itokawa". Hayabusa's trip was not easy- it lost communications with the earth, had various technical problems. But the Japanese scientists had overcome such difficulties and brought Hayabusa back home, which was bound to explode entering the earth's aerospace to bring back a capsule containing a sample of Itokawa and land in Australia.

If the capsule indeed carries a sample of astroid, it will be a big scientific success as it will have precious clues to understand the origin and evolution of the Solar System.

NASA's Airbone Observing Campaign website

JAXA's website on Hayabusa

BBC "Japanese Hayabusa asteroid mission comes home"
BBC "Who thought asteroids were dull, dumb rocks?"
BBC "A perfect view of the asteroid capsule's Earth return"

Spacecraft Hayabusa

（photo：JAXA Hayabusa Mission press kit）

Asteroid Itokawa

（photo：JAXA Hayabusa Mission press kit）

Although this mission demonstrates an excellent example of how Japanese scientists had overcome difficulties and achieved a world class success, none of the TV stations reported this live - yes, they were reporting world cup- and people watched live streams from Ustream and NicoNicoDouga and shared their excitement on Twitter.

This is an archive of Ustream by Wakayama University.

Screenshot of Hayabusa's re-entry and turning into firebolt

Control room was Ustreamed as well, with over 63,000 viewers

Video of the re-entry taken by NASA

As you can imagine, people were tweeting heavily about Hayabusa, and Hayabusa was tweeting too. "Hi everyone, I'm home" tweet by Hayabusa.

Hayabusa was shooting photos before its re-entry to the earth's atmosphere- see how lower part of the photo has lots of noise- it entered the earth's atmosphere before finishing the data transmission...

(c)Jaxa on Twitpic

You can see how Japanese netizens loved Hayabusa- Hayabusa cosplay of a girl with Itokawa at Make Tokyo Meeting 05.

Google Japan's doodle was Hayabusa

Someone created this "Welcome home" message for Hayabusa using Google Earth.

A figure characterizing Hayabusa is going to be on sale.

http://journal.mycom.co.jp/news/2010/06/10/059/index.html

Overview on HAYABUSA from JAXA's website:

May 9, 2003 Launched by the M-V-5 Rocket from Kagoshima Space Center.
May 27, 2003 Ion Engine operation started.
May 19, 2004 Orbit transfer using the Electric Propelled Delta-V Earth Gravity Assist
July 29, 2005 Performed the Star Tracker imaging of Itokawa.
September 12, 2005 Arrived at Itokawa. (about 20km away)
September 30, 2005 Arrived at the Home Position (about 7km away).
November 12, 2005 Released the probing robot ”Minerva”.
November 20, 2005 Performed the first touch down and release of the target marker with 880,000 autographs inside.
November 26, 2005 Performed the second touchdown.
December 8, 2005 Lost communication with the earth due to operation rupture by fuel leakage.
January 26, 2006 Resumed communication and operation.
January 18, 2007 Sample-catcher was actually transferred into the recovery capsule, and latched and sealed.
February, 2007 The ion engines ignited and operated again.
April 25, 2007 The homeward journey with an ion engine drive was started.
October 18, 2007 Finished first phase orbit maneuver toward Earth.
End of May, 2008 Reached the farthest deep space from the Earth.
February 4, 2009 Firing ion engine and starting second phase orbit maneuver to return to Earth.
November 4, 2009 Ion engine anomaly.
November 19, 2009 Resumed cruise by combining two partially working ion engines.
March 27, 2010 Finished second phase orbit maneuver toward Earth.
April to June, 2010 Trajectory Correction Maneuvers (TCMs)
June, 2010 Back to the Earth , capsule recovered.

Hatsune Miku - Update

2010-06-09T03:55:00.011+09:00

I've been writing a lot about Hatsune Miku, Vocaloid and NicoNicoDouga on this and my other blogs. I thought it might be good timing to do a recap.

Hatsune-Miku is a DTM (Desktop Music) software created by a company called Crypton Future Media(ja). It was released in 2007,and was the best selling DTM software then.(DTM software that sells 1,000 copies are supposed to be hit- Hatsune-Miku sold 30,000.) Its price is 15,000JPY.

Hatsune-Miku and the Vocaloid series (#1 was Hatsune Miku, #2 was Kagamine Rin & Len, #3 was Megurine Luca) created a completely new phenomena in Japan where people who had never created music (just listens or hums or sings in Karaoke etc) started creating original music using Hatsune-Miku. Just like what blogs did in text world, what Youtube did in video world, Hatsune-Miku opened up a possibility of "consumer generated music" market in Japan. Already 3 years have passed since its release, and the energy of the creators has not faded.

I wrote a blog post about the decline in the music industry in Japan here. One of the exceptions was Vocaloid.

"EXIT TUNES PRESENTS Vocalogenesis" (a music album created with Vocaloid software)was #1 for 5 days in a row on Oricon album daily ranking, and was #1 for the weekly sales ranking for the week of 2010/5/18～22.

This is the weekly ranking of a Karaoke company -JOYSOUND as of 2010/5/28.

Top 10 songs are:
1・3　　　　　　　　 anime
2・4・6・7・8・10　　 Vocaloid
5・9　　　　　　　　　 Commercial music

Let's take a look at top 20:
14・16・17・19　　　anime
11・15・18　　　　　Vocaloid
12・13・20　　　　　Commercial music

Vocaloid series stimulated people’s creativity- not only did people create music, but people who heard the music started to draw amazing pictures, animes, and 3DCGs etc for the music. Some even created a free software to create 3DCG (MikuMikuDance).

A video clip explaining how to use MikuMikuDance:

An example of awesome video using MMD by WakamuraP

The reason why this happened owes largely on 1) the strategy of Crypton Future Media to use a cute character image as well as to use the voice of a famous anime voice actor (rather than just creating a DTM software), 2) Crypton's policy to open up the character (Miku) for the amateur creators to make parodies. You can't imagine Disney allowing people to create parodies of Mickey Mouse, Nintendo allowing people to create parodies of Pikachu, but that's what Crypton did. And they even created a website "Piapro" (ja) where people can upload their parodies. And the CEO of Crypton (Mr. Hiroyuki Ito) LOVES those derivative works.

-screenshot of Piapro website-

People talk about remix culture and parodies and mashups all around the world these days. Like adding this music and that or that anime and the other one, right? "Remix culture" we're talking about with Hatsune Miku is totally different. It's like a universe. The following chart is just a part of it- how one music video (a dot in the center which is this video "Mikku Miku Ni Shite Ageru") got remixed to numerous videos. And as you can imagine, this is just one exampe but there's lots of popular Miku songs like this so there's many more universes :)

Data source: Network Analysis of Massively Collaborative Creation of Multimedia Contents

Also, the great thing about this remix culture is that people provides their creatives with love, and people remixes them with love and respect for the creator, and they are creating positive cycles around creativity. The fact that the character is open for remix, most music created using Miku is open (and generally creators loves it when their music is remixed, sung, played with musical instruments, made into anime or other creatives- because it increases their views too.), and further remixes are generally welcomed. You don't have to worry about copyright infringement even though you are remixing a high quality content- that's a big benefit for creators!

Asahi Newspaper has been creating a bunch of videos to introduce Hatsune Miku to their audience.

This one covers overall aspects of Hatsune Miku.

"Vocaloid Hatsune Miku, the worlds virtual diva" (Japanese but has English subtitles)

This video covers one of the AWESOME video creators "Tripshots" who creates Hatsune Miku videos.
【Hatsune Miku】video creator・Tripshots～「Nebula」 (Japanese but has English subtitles)

If you're interested in watching more of Hatsune Miku videos, here's some more :)

Jigyo Shiwake Tweets and Amakudari

2010-05-26T00:04:00.010+09:00

Last week, I wrote a blog post about Tweeting Jigyo-Shiwake".

As I was busy with various works, I was not able to stay home and watch Jigyo Shiwake the whole 4 days, but asked on Twitter for others to help out. I would like to thank everyone who helped, especially @MMHero who was devoting much of his time during the 4 days.

Personally, I think it is better to blog than tweet for this, since non-Japanese people would need explanation on technical terms and Japanese political custom (such as Amakudari etc) , but I think this was a good experiment.

I was watching many of the sessions and there was 1 thing that is common to most of the sessions, which is Amakudari.

Quote from wikipedia:

Amakudari (天下り) is the institutionalised practice where Japanese senior bureaucrats retire to high-profile positions in the private and public sectors. The practice is increasingly viewed as corrupt and a drag on unfastening the ties between private sector and state which prevent economic and political reforms.

Jigyo shiwake is about cost cutting, and when they try to do cost cutting on any public sector, the big chunk of money dangling in front of the shiwake-nin is the huge cost of Amakudari people.

I won't go into details here, but some of the Japanese "institutional practices" are as follows:

1) Public sectors in Japan are based on Seniority System (年功序列)

Japanese companies were based on seniority system till recently too, but the economic situation no longer allows such thing. You need outputs to get promoted in most Japanese corporate entities now. However, public sectors still have seniority system and the older you are, the higher your position (and salary) you get.

2) Japanese bureaucracy has "Career" people and "Non-Career" people (キャリアとノンキャリ)

"Career" are the people who passed higher level exam for the National Public Service(国家公務員試験の上級甲種またはI種), and are promised to be executives in the future. "Non-Career" people are people who passed the exam for National Public Service, but not with the higher level one. "Non-Career" will not be promoted above unit head. A Non-Career I met recently told me that she is really discriminated by the "Careers".

So when the Career people get old are ready to retire, they get plenty of retirement bonus from the agency, and the Seniority System and Career System secures them "posts" in public and private sectors with high salary, with not much work to do. That is how "Amakudari" works.

In most sessions of the shiwake I watched, shiwake-nin would ask how many board members they have, and how many of them are Amakudari, and how much their salary was. Each time the reply was given, Twitter chat on Ustream would go mad as their salaries are around 12 million - 16 million yen, when average salary of the citizens are male: 5.3 million and female: 2.7 million. "Fire those Amakudari and hire more younger people who does the actual work!" Twitter users say. Totally. Now that we are getting a clearer view of the cost of Amakudari, I am hoping that the Government Revitalization Unit will actually take action to abolish Amakudari. (Government Revitalization Unit is responsible for government reform as well as Jigyo Shiwake).

**FYI: Japanese Average Salary**

Data source: The National Tax Administration Agency (unit is 10,000 yen)

**Some pics and screenshots**

This is how the venue looks: view from behind the audience

closer view towards the shiwake-nin

view from the other side

Tons of cameras on both sides

Hand-written shiwake results on the walls.

During the last Shiwake, there were criticisms that the press were getting tables (whereas others just have chairs) and some press people left their belongings to secure their seats but weren't sitting there. This time, press had a separate room where they have tables and chairs but can only watch Ustream and Nico Nico Nama Housou, and in the actual room for the Shiwake, they only had chairs just like other people.

Screenshots from Ustream

Screenshots from NicoNama- some people couldn't answer the questions from Shiwake-nin and are asking folks sitting behind them.

Screenshot from Stickam. BTW, none of the streaming companies were paid by the government to do this live streaming, but they were allowed to put advertisements on their streams. So during the breaks, Stickam was actually putting various advertisements that they sold to their clients.

Ustream was using the poll function. This is a screenshot of the question about the facility that was getting shiwake. The options are 1) I have used the facility 2) I have NOT used the facility 3) what the heck is that?

And as you can imagine, only 6% replied they've been there, 36% said no and 59% didn't even know what that facility is. (And they are using enormous amount of money to construct and operate that facility using our tax... that sucks!!)

The next poll was which political party you plan to vote for the coming upper house election.

**Summary of English tweets**

Tweeting "Jigyo-Shiwake"

2010-05-19T20:15:00.003+09:00

Last month, I wrote a post about "Jigyo-Shiwake" in Japan. The next round of "Jigyo-Shiwake" will start tomorrow and will be held on 5/20,21, 24th and 25th.

Today, I was asked to come to the upper house to discuss the possibility of tweeting in English about Jigyo-Shiwake. Unfortunately tomorrow I am packed with interview, meetings and event and it is impossible for me to watch shiwake and tweet. I can probably go to the venue on Friday so I will try to tweet on that day.

If there is anyone who is able to watch live-streaming of Shiwake in Japanese and tweet in English, that would be awesome.

=================================

You will be able to watch live streaming here:

Room A in Ustream

Room B in Ustream

Room A in NicoNama

Room B in NicoNama

=================================

Please use hashtag: #sasshin_e for English tweets on jigyo-shiwake.

Personally, I will be tweeting from a separate account @fumitw from my usual account @fumi.

Not sure if anyone realized but they have photos from Picasa and videos from YouTube on the top page of Shiwake now :)

"Jigyo-Shiwake" in Japan

2010-04-26T15:51:00.008+09:00

In Japan, after the political change last summer, there were many changes in the political scene- for better or worse. One of those changes is "Jigyo Shiwake (budget-cutting panel)".

In the former LDP administration, budget creation and cutting was done internally in the government and there was no transparency for this process. After DPJ came to power, they created a new division called "Government Revitalization Unit(行政刷新会議[ja])" which holds Jigyo Shiwake to cut budgets from various governmental projects. Bureaucrats and project members explains to the politicians(Shiwake-nin) the importance of their projects to keep the budget, and Shiwake-nin decides whether that project will be able to keep the budget or not. This whole process is streamed live on the Internet.

The first Jigyo Shiwake was held last November, which was a huge success in terms of making the ruling party look very transparent. Taro Kono, LDP politician says in his blog[ja] "I went to watch Jigyo Shiwake. To be honest, I envy them for being able to do this."

In terms of decreasing the budget drastically, they were not successful. Projects that were discussed in this Jigyo Shiwake was only 15% of the total governmental projects and the amount they were able to cut was not large. Yet Shiwake was a great step towards government transparency which the LDP administration never had.

This time around- it started last Friday (4/24) and will continue until 4/28 (time table (PDF) [ja])

Yukio Edano, State Minister in charge of Administrative Reform who manages this Jigyo Shiwake giving the opening statement.

Renho- a popular DPJ politician and one of the Shiwake-nin.

A bureaucrat explaining why his project is necessary and needs budget. (Check the number of viewers- 17,222!)

In the former regime, this process was easy for the bureaucrats as the people they needed to explain were the people they knew which did not require much explanation. It was held in a private room where the general public was unable to know what was being discussed. After the political change, they need to go through this Shiwake process where they need to explain to the politicians who are not familiar to specific projects. Also the general public is watching the whole process from morning to night LIVE on Internet and they are chatting about this Shiwake the whole day using Twitter. They can't hide anything any more. Now, it is really important for those bureaucrats to learn how to make comprehensive explanations and presentations. Apparently some of them are not used to being asked and exposed, and were unable to reply to questions properly. The results are strict- for example JAXAi, a showcase of Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency(JAXA) is going to be closed because 10 out of 12 Shiwake-nin thought it was unnecessary after listening to the explanation by JAXA.

There were 5 official companies live-streaming this Shiwake on the Internet. (BTW, the government is NOT paying for the streaming.)

Screenshots from NicoNicoNamahousou, which had a very good quality streaming and I think they had more cameras than others (according to this article on Asahi[ja], NicoNico had 6 cameras in the venue) so they had better shots getting the Shiwake-nin, bureaucrats explaining to Shiwake-nin, and also shots with wider angle to show the atmosphere, etc.

I was also using this website called USTWRAP to watch the 2 U-stream channels (there were 2 rooms for Shiwake) simultaneously as well as watch the Twitter stream on each room.

The ministry created an excellent website[ja] that has all of the timetables, descriptions of each project, handouts, results of Shiwake, links to all of the Internet streaming channels, and Twitter stream talking about Shiwake. I was able to get all of the information necessary from this single website which is VERY rare in Japanese government websites which are usually like a maze.

Another great thing is that NicoNicoNamahousou is doing a wrap-up event each night inviting journalists to talk about the results of the Shiwake on that day.

I think this whole Shiwake process is great, and value it largely. On the other hand, it clarifies more and more of what we really need. Current Shiwake projects are more in detail. What we REALLY need for this country is a bigger and long term vision and strategy,and Shiwake should be done based on such bigger vision. Unfortunately, DPJ's Manifesto (campaign promises) does not have such vision and strategy- I am hoping such debate to be started before the upper house election this summer.

Video Archive + results of the shiwake on NicoNicoDouga[ja]

Ustream and Twitter changing politics in Japan

2010-04-12T12:11:00.003+09:00

For the long history of the Japanese media- when Japanese prime minister, ministers, local governments, police etc make press announcements, the rule was that the "press club" would take care of those press meetings. Press club consists of major newspaper publishing companies and mass media. Freelance journalists, web media, magazines, foreign media, citizen journalists etc were all excluded from those press clubs. This means that the press club and the politicians can control what would be spoken, what would be asked at the press conferences, which means that the citizen's right to know was not protected in this country- at least to a certain extent.

I wrote a lot [ja] about this old press club system and how it is changing recently on my Japanese blog. After the political change last year, the ruling party -DPJ had been pressured to keep their campaign promise to open up the press conferences.

Katsuya Okada- Minister of Foreign Affairs decided to open his press conference to a wider range of journalists, Shizuka Kamei - Minister of State for Financial Services decided to hold 2 press conferences (1 for the press club, another for other journalists including magazines, freelance, internet media etc). On 3/26, FINALLY the press conference of Prime Minister Hatoyama was opened to freelance and foreign journalists [ja] and was ustreamed.

On 3/9, Kazuhiro Haraguchi - Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications who is an active Twitter user, decided to hold his press conferences using Ustream. His announcement to hold this Ustream press conference was released only on Twitter. 1,200 people watched this 30 min long Ustream press conference which he spoke about the privatization of postal services that happened in the former Koizumi administration. After he finished his speech, he returned in front of the camera to answer directly to the comments by the viewers. The funny thing was that the PR division of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications did NOT know about this event- replying to the interview by ITMedia[ja] that they are "perplexed" and that they "do not have any information about this Ustream conference".

(screenshot from Haraguchi's 4/16 Ustream)

On 3/5, LDP politician Taro Kono did a NicoNicoNamaHousou (a Japanese Ustream-ish live video broadcasting service) of his project to review the projects by the ruling party DPJ. He not only streamed the whole process but also came back in front of the camera during the break time to give a short and concise lecture on what the theme is, what the issues are, what the conclusions are, to enhance the understanding of the viewers. Kono is an active Twitter user as well.

(screenshot from Kono's NicoNama)

Japanese political system was really conservative and seemed that nothing would change- but services such as Ustream and Twitter are really changing the way we interact with politicians.

Fumi's iPhone App

2010-01-14T15:23:00.008+09:00

Today I'm happy to announce that "Fumi's iPhone App" is available at App Store!

iPhone, Android, Facebook etc has enabled individuals to create applications for certain platforms, but now we have entered an era where individuals' CONTENTS can be apps as well, and this iPhone app is part of such experiment.

**Download**

http://itunes.apple.com/jp/app/fumis-blog/id348749921?mt=8

（You can also search on "Fumi" at App Store）

**Screenshots**

Loading the app (photo of MachuPicchu from my trip last year)

There are 4 contents on this app: this blog, my Japanese blog, my YouTube channel and my Twitter.

"Favorites" tab.

You can email articles, Tweet/send to Facebook.

I think this experiment is interesting for the following 2 reasons:

1)Changes the relationship between apps, contents and people

Basically, apps in the past were based on services. If you download Twitter client app, you will see the contents of various people's tweets. There had been aggregating services like Friendfeed, but that too, will have loads of contents from loads of people.

"Fumi's app" is an application based on me- a person. If you want to see more examples, search on "Guy Kawasaki" at app store and you can find his app. For this experiment I used my own blog, but maybe I can display something that is not created by me, but rather something I am interested in and want to show to my followers (as long as I can clear copyright issue). The important and interesting thing is that these contents and app are person-centric, and I am hoping that there will be more interesting apps being launched :)

2)Non-engineers can create apps!

I'm not an engineer nor programmer. MotherApp BlogEngine was what made it possible for me to create my iPhone app. If you enter your RSS feed URL, Twitter name, a description of your blog, two images then you can create your own native iPhone app with zero coding. MotherApp will also take care of submitting the app to Apple for approval and notifies you when it’s available for download.(I have not done this yet, but by using mobile ad, you will be able to gain ad revenue as well.) People who has interesting ideas and contents but does not have programming skills would be able to create their own apps which I think is AWESOME.

You can sign up for your own app here:

**About MotherApp**

MotherApp is a startup based in HongKong, has an office in Silicon Valley and Tokyo. The founder-Ken Law is an ex-Googler.

As various application development platforms (such as iPhone, Android, etc) increases, it would be difficult for companies to decide which platform they should focus on. They need to use SDK that each platform provides which increases complexity. MotherApp Engine enables developers to create apps using HTML, and for multiple platforms including iPhone, Android, WindowsMobile, Blackberry and Symbian with one source code.

MotherApp's mission is to create an environment where "Everyone can app".

This is how the source code looks like:

According to their blog, one of their interns created an iPhone app called "Traveler SOS" using MotherApp in just 1 week. Traveler SOS allows you to call the local emergency number in just one click- you might want to install this app if you travel a lot :)

"Music" in Japan

2009-12-29T10:16:00.004+09:00

** Musician Kazumasa Oda and Promise of Christmas **

Kazumasa Oda (小田和正) is one of my favorite Japanese musicians. Recently he was on a TV show for the 9th year of his Christmas special live concert program called "Promise of Christmas(クリスマスの約束) 2009". I'm a big fan of this program- I still have previous year's ones in my HD/DVD recorder.

Not only do I like Oda-san's music and vocal, but also the way he interacts and works with the young musicians. He's an old guy at the age of 62... but he invited young musicians in their twenties to create a new song together and join his concert to perform. He also invited other older musicians (oldest one in his sixties) to join the concert as well. They were trying to perform a 22.5 minute long medley with various musicians which was really intense because they are all very busy and yet they have to memorize so many songs and find time for rehearsals. The medley was amazing. The applause from the audience didn't stop for 4 or 5 minutes and Oda-san said it was the longest applause he had ever experienced.

** CD sales and other ranking "numbers" in Japan **

If you look at the singles sales ranking by Oricon, you can see that out of this year's top 10, 4 was by Arashi - "idols" of Johnny's Entertainment. KAT-TUN and Kan Jani ∞ are both Johnny's idols and Yusuke is originally a comedian. Where have the artists gone from the sales ranking...?

Let's look at the album sales ranking by Oricon.

It looks like we have more "musicians" here, but the problem is that half of the top 10 selling albums are so-called "best albums" which is not a collection of new songs but a collection of old hit songs.

Karaoke ranking indicates that ALL of top 10 songs that were sung at Karaoke were music that were released before 2009.

Another problem I see here is that even the best selling single CD this year sold only 656,676 pieces (please refer to the spreadsheet at the top).

Following is the list of top 50 best selling singles and as you can see, most songs are released before 2000. With the exception of "Sekai de Hitotsu dake no Hana" by SMAP in 2003, all of the songs in the top 50 selling list are released on or before 2000.

It is said that the taste of music has become varied compared to the past when everyone was listening to the same kind of music, and thus it is difficult to make mega hits.

** Music programs on TV shows **

One more thing I recognized about the music industry nowadays is that TV shows stopped featuring new songs and new artists- instead they are showing old rankings and old (and famous) musicians. In the past, there were TV programs like "Best10" and "Top10" which were featuring that weeks' best selling music, but those shows have disappeared. One of the music TV shows that survived- "Hey Hey Hey Music Champ" used to show newest music and artists a couple of years ago, but recently they started to focus on older music (they show ranking from older years, ranking with themes like Christmas songs or party songs or sad songs etc which end up showing older and famous songs). It's probably a chicken and egg problem- because they can get more people to watch the show by showing older songs than new ones, they started to focus on the older songs which would deprive new artists to be on TVs which (at least to me) seems to be creating a vicious cycle.

New artists are not seen in TVs and chances to be known by the audience decreased, therefore people don't buy new songs by new artists but buys stuff like "best albums" which is basically older songs and sings old and famous songs at karaokes.

But probably this logic applies only to the older generation which watches TVs, goes to karaoke and uses PC. Younger generation in Japan are said that they don't watch TVs, don't go to karaoke and use mobile phones.

It is said that younger people are not buying packages (except for the idol lovers who wants to show their love to the idols by purchasing their products) instead people are getting music by digital downloading, and many of them are using illegal music download / sharing system, also young people don't use PC but rather use mobile phones for their online activities.

** What kind of music young Japanese are listening to **

Let's look at data from Music.jp Chaku Uta (ringtone for mobile) Download ranking.

So these are the music that the younger people are listening to- and they do have new singers and songs like GReeeeN, JUJU and Kana Nishino. It's clearly different from what people are buying at HMV online sales ranking as follows:

OH and one more important metrics is USEN (cable broadcast) request ranking. USEN usually pops up new artists that are not yet well known.

** Decline in music sales- in Japan and US **

The decline in the sales amount and sales revenue is not only in Japan- it looks like the tendency is bigger in U.S.

Data source (JP production amount JP production value US shipment amount US shipment value via Takerunba blog)

** New music business models in Japan **

There are various new ways to inform, promote and sell music in Japan although they all still look experimental and not scalable yet.

1) Utilization of video sharing sites, allowing fans to remix and increase fan base that would pay

One is via websites especially video sharing sites such as NicoNicoDouga and YouTube. Susumu Hirasawa, an artists talks at an interview with ASCII [ja]. He focuses on internet for his promotions / sales and is increasing sales recently despite the decline of the industry as a whole. He doesn't do any of the standard promotions that other musicians do- he doesn't visit publishing companies or broadcast stations to get exposure. "I'm not well-known but I get more CD sales, more fans comes to my live performances than other musicians. I get request for live performances from overseas and you can find my name even in Pharsi Wikipedia."

People gets to know his music via sites like NicoNicoDouga and starts to create remix music and video and uploads to NicoNicoDouga again- and he doesn't delete them. He lets his fans remix. His DVDs does not have copy protection because he knows the listeners would copy it anyways. He is one of the rare musicians who knows how to interact with his fans and at the same time make a business model there.

It is very similar to what is happening in Hatsune Miku and other Vocaloid series where artists who created music using Miku would distribute MP3 files for free, and lets people create remix music/videos, does not register their music to JASRAC even after major music label debut so that the fans can still use those music for remix because they know that the reason why they became successful is because the fans made remixes and made them famous. Even if the music is available for free, fans still buys the CDs when they see them because they want to support the creators and they know the artist will not gain any revenue from the free MP3s files and yet they are making them available. When the artists start to lock up their music or withdraw the free versions and start charging them, backlash happens. This phenomena is called "kencho" meaning hatred towards business makers.

2) Collaborate with mobile websites that the young people are using

Another interesting promotion example is how Kana Nishino's song was collaborating with Cell phone novels. As I wrote in this post, teenagers nowadays reads cell phone novels a lot. The novel and Nishino's song both had long-distance love as the theme and the song became a big hit among the youngsters.

3) Animations are a great touching point with large audience

I also think it is interesting that Japanese animations that are popular worldwide might take a role in music industry too. When I was visiting Chile, I met a university student that told me she is a big fan of a Japanese singer called Hyde. She (and her friends) would have never known about Hyde or his band L'arc en Ciel if their music was not used as a theme song of a popular animation, but because of that she is now a big fan of Hyde and buys all the CDs, goodies that she can find. She can sing songs of L'arc in Japanese, she translated and made Spanish versions too. She became interested in J-POP ever since, and told me that she is going to a concert of Dir en Grey -another Japanese band- as they are visiting San Tiago for a concert tour. Should we say this is just a rare example or should we say this is tip of iceberg and there is a big potential...?

** Lack of megahit will impact Japanese culture? **

I think the lack of mega hit might impact culture to some extent- people will not have a common song that they all know and can sing together after years.

Music has a power to bind people together- I was travelling in Bolivia a couple of months ago with strangers - Slovenians, Bolivians, German, Spanish and me(Japanese). The first thing that bound us all together was when we had "Billy Jean" by Michael Jackson as BGM on a car and everyone started singing. I think the songs in the top 50 list above are sort of like that for the Japanese. But with the current situation where there is less music being sold, there is a generation gap in what music people listens to... it would be difficult to have such experience.

** Hoping for better artists and music to appear- that will last for years **

Getting back to Oda-san, I think the way he invited artists aged twenties through sixties, creating a music together and performing together with them would be a great experience for the young artists as well as the viewers of that TV program, and I am so happy he's doing that, and I am hoping that there will be more new and wonderful songs that would be a favorite of lots of people and would last for years to come :)

Entrepreneurship in Japan and Startup Weekend Tokyo

2009-12-21T15:34:00.007+09:00

Startup Weekend is a 54 hour event that a group of developers, business managers, startup enthusiasts, marketing gurus, graphic artists get together to build communities, companies and projects,etc.

It started in 2007 and has spread to over 52 cities and 12 countries and growing. For the first time in Japan, mini-Startup Weekend (2 days version) was held in Tokyo this weekend.

** Entrepreneurial Environment in Japan **

In Japan, entrepreneurial spirit is weak due to various social and cultural reasons. In general, we were educated not to stand out, many still believe working for a big company is more stable and better (I can tell because I used to work for a company with 190,000 employees, which split and I moved to 60,000 employee company, then to 30 employee company which grew to 100, then I joined to found a company and now I am freelanced. I've been facing many and various reactions.) They value "suffering" and some expect others to be "loyal" and stay in the same company until they retire. There is lack of acceptance of failure, so people try not to take risk.

All this is changing compared to several years ago, but those social / cultural aspects that are deep in people's mind still affects entrepreneurship to some extent.

According to InternationalEntrepreneurship.com, Total Japanese Entrepreneurial Activity Average (TEA) during 2001-2009 was 3.2%, which was one of the lowest rates amongst the world's leading nations. The TEA rate is the proportion of people aged 18-64 who are involved in entrepreneurial activity as a nascent entrepreneur or as an owner-manager of a new business. They continue: "Entrepreneurs (in Japan) face many difficulties when starting their own ventures. Some of these difficulties include receiving loans from banks, the pressures of deflation, weak domestic demand, and tough competition within the country."

The following chart presents TEA rates for the 43 countries surveyed in Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM)'s 2008 report.

This is a lot better than what we saw several years ago- in GEM report 2005, which reported that Japan had the lowest startup rate in the 34 countries that was surveyed- Japan marked only 1.5% whereas world average was 9.3%, US was 11.3%, and average of European nations was 5.3%... but it is still in the lower group.

- Japanese TEA -

Japan's entrepreneurship potential was discussed during Red Herring Japan 2007 conference according to an article by Globis, and Nobuyuki Idei ( former CEO of Sony) said that Japan suffers from an “ABCD” syndrome, which stands for Aging, Bureaucracy, Closed and Domestic. The article continues: "Mr.Idei went on to say that Japan must not make culture-based or language-based excuses to resist integration on the world stage. Japan must instead be a catalyst for future change, and abandon its negative self-critical nature. Japan must be less afraid to take risks and develop a vision. Without the vision, said Mr. Idei, there is no chance to get attention from investors, either inside or outside Japan."

The conference's final panel came with the following advice:

-Globalize Japanese venture capital, venture capitalists inside Japan need to travel more and learn from other countries as to how to make venture capital more successful.
-Reform the Japanese financial system. Japan is sitting on savings amounting trillions of yen which had been going overseas in search of higher yields.
-Transform the image of the entrepreneur."According to panelists, the word 'entrepreneur' still has a vague connotation in Japanese society. The image of the Japanese entrepreneur needs to be remade into someone who cares about society, and uses his or her power to advance the country through their creativity and vision."
-Change the mindset inside companies.

Another article on Japanese entrepreneurship and venture capital by Forbes:

Statistics show Japanese entrepreneurship is bleak. Although the country is the world's second-largest economy, it has generated only $3 billion a year, on average, in venture funding, for about 3,000 investment deals annually. Venture funds here typically eke out internal returns of just 4%. Even the Japanese government, which traditionally bolsters industries until they can stand on their own, has not been able to spark a more welcoming environment for Japanese startups. "Up until now, policies to support ventures have not been that successful," says Kazuhiko Toyama, chief executive of Industrial Growth Platform.

In the U.S., by comparison, startups get funding to the tune of $30 billion a year over deal volume of about 4,000 investments. Silicon Valley's venture funds and their compatriots enjoy returns three to four times higher than Japanese funds.

Startup Weekend is just one small event, but I believe it is so important to hold these kind of events especially in Japan, due to those environments.

** Startup Weekend Tokyo **

The real 54 hour version Startup Weekend Tokyo will be held in February, but as a warm-up event, 2 day ver event was held this weekend.

The real great thing about Startup Tokyo is that you don't just talk - you DO and CREATE. You form real teams with other engineers, designers, marketers etc and start coding and create business plans that would be evaluated by people like Dave McClure (VC), CEO of KDDI web communications, head of TechCrunchJapan, etc. Some team actually created iphone apps, some already got the domain and created demo sites and other websites.

Another great thing was that it was a mixture of Japanese only + English only + bilingual people, helped with a bunch of staffs who can interpret, and the event was completely bilingual.

Not only were there the workshops, but Ari Awan, CTO of Flutterscape and Ki Yoyo, CEO of Lang-8 visited to make keynote speeches.

** Dave McClure at Startup Weekend Tokyo and Half-baked dotcom **

Startup Weekend Tokyo attendees were fortunate enough to have Dave McClure - a Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur, startup investor, and blogger - visiting Japan from Silicon Valley to be present at the event. He gave a speech, stayed in the room for advice most of the time during the event, and served as a judge for the final presentation.

He emphasized the importance of projects solving a PROBLEM. Lots of people- especially engineers pitch solutions -like great technology they came up with; what they really should do is to pitch the PROBLEM, and share the problem. If the problem can be shared with the listeners it is a problem worth going ahead and solve with your solution, if not- you need to come up with a better problem. (BTW I totally agree with this... I've been interviewing various entrepreneurs and felt the exact same way. David Sifry made blog search engine Technorati because he couldn't find anything on Google when he ego-searched his name after he made a speech to see how the audience felt, Mina Trott made Movable Type because existing blog tools were just not good enough for her, Martin Varsavsky made wifi sharing service FON because he was uncomfortable travelling overseas and being unable to use wifi- or it was too expensive.)

Dave proposed to do an exercise called "Half-Baked dot Com". Everyone in the room can shout out words and when they reach 50, they break up into teams, each team picks 2 words from the list of 50 words and comes up with a name of a website using those 2 words (for example "corpse" + "Twitter" and make corpsetwitter.com, "subliminal" + "monkey" and make subliminalmonkey.com, etc.) Each team is expected to make a presentation about their website with the following:
1) tagline
2) logo
3) problem (that you are going to solve with your service)
4) business model
5) marketing plan

Therefore it is important to have a good mix of creators, designers, marketers, engineers etc for each team. The teams came up with the following 5 dotcoms:

-Realtimeaccesibility.com (dating service for handicapped people)
-Boobsfail.com (mobile app for breast-enhancement using vibrations)
-Freshyopparai.com (Yopparai means drunk. It's a NicoNicoDouga-like video-sharing site of drunk people in Tokyo. Yopparai conversation can be subtitled)
-Kusairobot.com (Kusai means stinky. It's a Roomba-like device that finds/follows stinky stuff & perfumes it away)
-Sexypropose.com (Uses Augmented Reality like Sekai Camera and suggests cool, stylish, sexy places for marriage proposals )

There are 3 key factors to this exercise:
1) Japanese people are generally shy and don't speak out, so Dave making everyone shout out words at the beginning was a good icebreaker.
2) You are given a very limited time, so it's a good exercise to think quickly and prepare for the real project after this. According to Dave, ideally Half-Baked should take 30-40min total. 10 minutes to come up with words and split to teams, 5 minutes to decide which word they'd use, 10 minutes to prepare for the presentation and 15 minutes for the presentation - is the longest it should take.
3) Members get to know each other before they start the real project.

** Time for the REAL projects! **

Each person who wanted to make a proposal came up on front and made 2 minute pitch of the problems they wanted to solve.

There were 17 people who presented, and each presenter wrote a tag line on a paper and started to pitch to each other.

Project migration during this pitching time

Then there was the voting time to decide which project will make it to the real project.

There were 5 winners- so the 5 people were to examine what resource / who they need to make this company / project happen in 2 days. Others will huddle up in each of the project to help examine and decide which project they would be contributing to.

There was a status reporting time to share where they are, what resource they lack, etc.

Further working in teams- some started coding already.

End of Day1 - status report.

It looked like all of the teams were seeing progress, but I was amazed by the Yoga App team which already created a working iPhone App that would give you a "ding" sound if you can keep your pose for 5 seconds, and a "boo" sound if you move / fall, and demoed it for us.

Day 2 starts with breakfast, some people are deadly tired :)

Working hard to prepare for the presentation that starts in the afternoon- even working while eating lunch (look at the bento on his PC!)

As for the final presentation, please check out the video recording of Ustream here:

The judges:

The winner! "team Wubble" makes smartphone apps and games for Japanese women to understand how smartphones are fun; 1st app is Mobile Yoga Fitness.

Presentation slides can be seen here:

Startup Weekend Tokyo12 20 2009 Wubble Yoga App1

View more documents from Gohsuke Takama.

A shot from the awarding ceremony- Dave joins them do the Yoga pose!

The winner of TechCrunchJapan Award! "Team Nakano" will provide People-Powered Problem Solving Platform called "Wishcovery" for everyday problems,via crowd-sourced solutions.

A shot from the awarding ceremony- Shinohara-san from TechCrunchJapan joins them with Yoga pose!

"Team Cloud Compliance" provides workflow and compliance for the Cloud. They outlined why record management solutions are necessary, why hosted compliance workflow will accelerate use of Google Docs/Apps in enterprise.

"Team themselves (no team name)" EnjoyBet provides social betting platform for making casual bets with your friends.

"team DOOCANA" Doocana is a social media news & education site, a Mashable-like website in Japanese. Presentation slides can be seen here:

It looks like they've already made web and mobile interface.

Otsukare sama deshita!

A big applause to Jonny Li the organizer, KDDI Web Communications for the venue and all the staffs:

Many thanks to Dave McClure and Chris McCann from Geeks on the Plane, also Sano-san from Cookpad:

My photos can be seen here:
Derek's awesome photos can be seen here:
Twitter search on #swtokyo

Twitter in Japan

2009-12-14T09:03:00.011+09:00

Twitter is quickly increasing its presence in Japan nowadays.

**Facts**

According to Nielson Online/NetRatings, Twitter users within Japan surpassed 2million. UU which was 520 thousand as of April increased to 1.26 million in July, 2.57 million in September, dropped to 2.07 million in October. PV was 6.64 million in April, 29.52 million in July, 63.82 million in October according to an article [ja]on IT Media.

Twitter's UU and PV in Japan (orange=1000 users, blue=1000 PV)

Celebrities such as Ryuichi Sakamoto, Yoko Ono, Kohmi Hirose [ja], Kazuyo Katsuma [ja] , etc started using Twitter.

Nikkei MJ (newspaper) announced [ja] its hit product ranking of 2009 and the winners were eco-car and cheap jeans, and Twitter won one of the awards (komusubi award).

DIME (magazine) announced [ja] its hit product ranking as well, and the winner was again 990yen jeans (10 dollar jeans), and Twitter won one of the entertainment awards.

FYI, some other award winning products from DIME is as follows:
■Business and Technology division
『LED light bulb DL-L601L』（Sharp）
『CELL REGZA TV 55X1』（Toshiba）
『Prius』（Toyota）
『Windows 7』（Microsoft）

■Entertainment division
『OLYMPUS PEN E-P1』（Olympus）
『Highball』boom（Suntory）
『Dragon Quest IX　Protectors of the Starry Sky』（Square Enix）
『Twitter』（Twitter Inc）

**Media coverage**

Twitter was covered in various national TVs recently including Fuji TV.

Various books on Twitter are sold in the bookstores.

Photo via Kawai's Tumblr

I am the co-author of one of those books - Twitter Marketing :)

**Twitter Conference**

On 12/5, a full day event called Twitter Conference (Twitter研究会) was held in Keio University SFC campus.

Presenters from various fields presented at the conference from 10AM to 6PM, ranging from instructions on Twitter APIs, Twitter bots and Twitter bot competition, examples of how universities and university students are using Twitter, etc.

Update 12/20:
As you know, Japan is a mobile society, and at Twitter Conference @fshin2000, creator of the most popular Twitter mobile web client "Movatwitter [ja]" announced that it is reaching 100 million pageview per month, and he is going to quit his company to focus on further development of Movatwitter. Movatwitter won Best Mobile Based Twitter App award at Mashable's Open Web Awards .

You can see the whole time table and the presentation slides here [ja] and the uStream archive here [ja] and archive of the tweets using #twitterconf here [ja] (although everything is in Japanese)

The audience in the venue as well as those watching the streaming was twittering so hard that we (#twitterconf) were ranked 5th place of the Trending topics of Twitter (although the scerenshot was taken a bit before that :P )

I was one of the speakers - I talked about Twitter outside Japan. I was also on the panel discussion talking about present and future of Twitter in Japan.

Twitter

View more documents from Fumi Yamazaki.

I talked a bit about Twitter and SXSW. SXSW2007 was where all the buzz started- everyone was tweeting about the sessions, parties, where to meet, interviews, etc and Twitter can be seen on the screens in the venue everywhere. A stranger came up to me when I was waiting to enter one of the parties and said "Will you let me in your umbrella? I need to Tweet!" You probably remember what happened at the keynote speech of SXSW 2008 where we all realized the power of the twittering voices of the audience. In SXSW2009, people were using Twitter too much that CNet wrote an article stating that SXSW attendees were confronting Twitter saturation.

I also spoke about how Twitter can serve for different areas / people / entities / circumstances. For example, in places like Tokyo and SF where there are lots of Twitter users, if you say you want to hold a Tweetup you'll get lots of attendees right away, but if you tweet you are "in Tokyo" such tweet will probably be ignored. On the other hand, in places like Cusco which barely has Twitter users, if you tweet you are in Cusco, then someone might call out to hold a Tweetup. Many of the politicians, celebrities and media use Twitter but at the same time, many ordinary citizens use Twiter too. Large companies can utilize Twitter for branding, PR, sales etc whereas small shops can use Twitter to make announcements to the locals.

Another topic I mentioned was how Twitter is used to convey information in emergency and to spread political messages. In China, Twitter (as well as other social media) helped to let the world know about the earthquake which helped to accelerate the donations to reach them faster. In Munbai (India), the news on the terrorist attack spread quickly via Twitter. In Moldova and Iran, the citizens are using Twitter to let the world know about their message and what is going on.

In Japan, some politicians started to use Twitter and LDP's PR dept announced [ja] that all of the LDP politicians should use Twitter, but compared to US which has more than 140 politicians who Tweet, the number is still very small. In the U.S., because there are so many politicians using Twitter, Obama administration could open such site as "Tweet you Senator" which enables the citizens to tweet to their senator just by entering their zipcode. I also expressed my expectations for the ministries and government agencies to start using Twitter- in the U.S., various agencies are using Twitter and other social media to communicate with the citizens directly.

**Competition**

There are various competitors for Twitter in Japan. The newest one is "Ameba Now [ja]" which just launched last week. The strength of Ameba is that they have existing user base (they are one of the largest blog ASP providers) and celebrities (they host many celebrity blogs and they asked those celebrities to start using Ameba Now). Mixi [ja]- the largest SNS in Japan launched Twitter cloan mixi voice, GREE [ja] - the second largest SNS in Japan did a site renewal this October and its top page looks exactly like Twitter now. Mobage-town [ja], the largest mobile gaming site launched its Twitter cloan service called Otakebi... and there's many more such as Timelog [ja], Wassr [ja], etc.

Update 12/27
Adding some more charts from Google Trends (I know it is not the best data- a bulk of Twitter's traffic comes from apps not the web, mixi and gree's traffic are mostly mobile which is not included in Google Trends' data) but as a comparison...:

Worldwide comparison of unique visitors for Facebook / MySpace / Twitter / mixi / gree is that Facebook is HUGE, MySpace is losing its users and others are all very small.

In Japan, mixi is HUGE and the others are small.

Some more breakdowns:

Twitter has twice as large unique visitor than mixi from the worldwide data- and this chart shows that mixi's Unique visitor was larger than Twitter a year ago. Lower section shows that Twitter's top usage is in U.S. and second is Japan, followed by Brasil, Indonesia and U.K.

Same chart limited the region to Japan and we can see that the unique visitors of mixi far outweighs that of Twitter which is steadily growing.

Twitter / Facebook / Myspace comparison with worldwide data. Facebook is huge, MySpace is quickly losing its visitors, Twitter still small but growing...

Twitter / Facebook / Myspace comparison with data limited to U.S. The same tendency as above, but the impact of MySpace losing its users looks bigger- it had almost the same unique visitors as Facebook a year ago and quickly dropped during the course of a year.

Twitter / Facebook / Myspace comparison with data limited to Japan. You can see the growth of Twitter which has twice as large unique visitors than Facebook.

Facebook was said to be struggling in Japan localization (they launched the Japanese version in May) but above data shows it has doubled since a year ago. According to NetRatings (article on IT Media [ja]), their unique users as of November is 1.39 million which is 4 times larger than that of a year ago.

Change of Power

2009-10-03T11:43:00.006+09:00

I'm visiting Washington D.C. now, interviewing various people here on e-government / Government2.0 / IT&web utilization by the government, etc. Why am I doing this? Because I think it is a crucial time for Japan to change, (including opening up the data / information, getting web / IT into the system, etc) and there are so many things we can learn from the U.S..

Change of Power (LDP to DPJ)

In Japan, Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) had been the ruling party for more than 50 years. Now people want change. The results of the lower house election that took place on 8/30 clearly shows that demand. LDP lost the election and Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) became the ruling party. Mr. Yukio Hatoyama, head of DPJ became the prime minister of Japan. DPJ was a party that had been insisting in making the government open and making change.

Opening Up Press Conferences

One example was opening up press conferences to freelance journalists and foreign journalists. During the LDP years, only the limited main stream media that joins the Press Club were able to join government press conferences. Press Club has a room inside the government building (for free), and hence when the government decides to hold a press conference "5 minutes from now", the press are already there. Journalists who were not in the Press Club were not allowed to join the press conferences in the first place, but even if they were allowed it would've been impossible for them to arrive in 5 minutes.

When DPJ was still the opposition party, they were opening up their press conferences to journalists who are not in the Press Club, and one of their campaign promises was to open up the press conferences to non-Press Club journalists. Believe it or not, this promise was broken on day 1. The press conference by the new Prime Minister Mr. Hatoyama was only open to the Press Club members, despite the fact that before the election, DPJ officially promised it at least 3 times (former leader Mr. Ozawa and current leader Mr. Hatoyama was asked whether they will open up the press conference when they become ruling party and they did confirm that they will). Freelance journalists and bloggers went MAD. They criticized DPJ for not keeping their campaign promises. On 9/18, Foreign Minister Mr. Okada announced that the Foreign Ministry will allow non-Press Club journalists to join the press conferences held by Foreign Minister and Vice-Foreign Minister, and on 9/29 their promise became true. Mr. Okada held a press conference letting the the freelance and foreign journalists join, and streamed it live on the Internet. Some call it a "historical day" for Japanese journalism. Other ministries -namely Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications and Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Environment are considering to follow this, although it is not officially approved or announced.

Power of Main Stream Media in the Japanese Politics

What was the reaction of the Press Club (and the main stream media companies behind this)? This article [jp] on Livedoor news states that there were lots of pressure by the MSM to Mr. Hatoyama and DPJ- management of a major newspaper company called up Mr. Hatoyama directly as well as reporters called up secretaries and politicians to keep the press conferences only to Press Clubs. They were said to be uniformly giving pressure that "if DPJ is going to be the enemy of media such as newspaper and TV stations, your government will not last long!"

I have to admit: Japanese people are known to be largely influenced by the main stream media. Before the election of 8/30, newspapers and TVs were discussing so much about DPJ's victory and there you go. Many people states that DPJ's election victory was not the victory of DPJ itself, but it was the victory of the media. And they know it. That is why their pressure has some reality and threat. We need to face the reality, but we can't turn around- we need to find a way to cope with such changes. It's not simply about the Press Club - we're thinking more about transparancy, openness, fairness and trustworthiness by keeping the campaign promises of the new government.

Fixing Public Offices Election Act

I have covered in this post about the Public Offices Election Act prohibiting Japanese politicians to use the Internet during the election period. DPJ was insisting that they will change this. This is a video (Japanese) of the Prime Minister Mr. Hatoyama saying that DPJ will enable Internet election (meaning enabling to use Internet during election period).

In fact, DPJ had submitted this fix 4 times already in the past. Now that they became the ruling party, we really expect this change to happen.

Revealing the "hidden information" from the LDP and bureaucrats

DPJ had a campaign pledge stating that they will make highways free of charge. According to this article [ja] in Asahi.com, Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism repeatedly stated in the Diet that they had NOT calculated the impact of that policy - although it was later revealed that they knew that such calculation existed as of April 2008. The Ministry announced that they did have such calculations on 9/10. The result was astonishing- the economic impact of the policy is estimated to be 2.7 trillion yen (approximately 27 billion USD) . Although I am personally against this policy and understand that LDP and various industries are really against this, it does not mean you can hide data from the public and the opposition party and get away with it. LDP and the bureaucrats had been doing that and now the nation knows - which I think is a good thing.

This article [ja] on Nikkei Business Online states that when the same political party is ruling for a long time, bureaucrats and ruling party starts to share the interest. Quote: "Bureaucrats' mistake becomes the ruling party's mistake which will affect the support rate, so they tend to hide those mistakes. Because of the change of political power, such mistakes will be revealed as well as there will be incentive to check mistakes."

Japanese Politics are said to be led by the Bureaucrats

It is said that currently Japan is not really led by politicians- it is led and run by bureaucrats. Politicians are supposded to be "lawmakers" but the people who were "really" making the laws (bills) during the LDP ages were the bureaucrats. So the bureaucrats makes the laws, and enforces it.

The good news - the bureaucrats in Japan are said to be very smart people and even if the new ruling party is not experienced and have glitches, the bureaucrats will be able to run the country without a problem. The bad news - bureaucrats knows that they are leading and running the policies, so it might be difficult for DPJ to push new policies. Well- still, they have to do it. It's their job.

The good news - as DPJ had been the opposition party and they had more time, DPJ's politicians had been making bills themselves to oppose to the former government. The better news - not only do they have the ability to draft bills, now that they became the ruling party, they'd also be able to have the bureaucrats help them make the bills! Well- maybe not so simple as that. We'll see.

Is the Change coming?

Anyways, yes we expect changes to happen in Japan. I am not in Japan right now and can't really feel the change, but read this tweet by LDP politician Kotaro Tamura: "DPJ is doing great! They don't have the Diet Backers (族議員) and the governments will be cooperative to them. Many of these things are what we proposed within LDP and was turned down by the Diet Backers and old politicians... but those old politicians are still ruling LDP... Why do we have to get tired of internal fights even before fighting against DPJ? (cry)"

Given these changes, I was thinking about what I can do. The Most Interesting New Tech Startup of 2009 in U.S. according to Anil Dash is "the government". I've been looking into the Gov 2.0 conference contents, etc and realized that there are so much we can learn from what is happening in Washington D.C., and much of these practices are not known to the Japanese public, so that's what I'm gonna try and do. After arriving in D.C., I started to learn about activities here- from FCC, Department of Agriculture, Department of Defense, Department of State and many more. I'm learning everyday, which I will try to write articles in the near future!

TokyoMango's 10 Favorite Blogs and Sites to Find Cool Japanese Things

2009-08-25T16:04:00.004+09:00

I'm sorry for not posting much recently- today I found out this blog was selected as one of
TokyoMango's 10 Favorite Blogs and Sites to Find Cool Japanese Things. It's my great honor- thanks Lisa! TokyoMango blog is here:

Other blogs and sites are:
Americurry (Food blog)
Asiajin (Japanese web services and tech culture)
Boing Boing (Directory of wonderful things ;) )
Danny Choo (Otaku culture and figurines)
Gizmodo (gadgets)
NotCot (artsy community site)
Pink Tentacle (technological breakthroughs and art)
Spoon & Tamago (art and design blog)
Yanko Design (design web site)

Tokyo Prefectural Election 2009

2009-07-14T05:20:00.005+09:00

Tokyo Prefectural Election was held on Sunday, 7/12 2009.

There are 10.6 million registered voters in Tokyo and the turnout was 54.5% (up 10.50points from last election in 2005). They were to elect the 127 Assembly members in 42 electoral districts.

The following is the election result.

This election was seen by many as a "test" for the prime minister Taro Aso and the ruling party the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). It was also a "test" to check how much support the largest opposition party Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) is going to achieve.

The result:
DPJ gained 20 seats, 54 of their 58 candidates were elected.
LDP lost 10 seats, 38 of their 58 candidates were elected.
The ruling coalition (LDP and Komeito) was unable to gain absolute majority which was 64 seats, nor was DPJ to gain absolute majority. It is the first time for LDP to lose its status as strongest party in the Metropolitan Assembly since 1965.

Does this "landslide victory" by DPJ mean people really support DPJ? Not necessarily. People were obviously dissatisfied with the ruling parties, and there weren't any alternative for the voters except for DPJ.

BTW, all of the DPJ's leaders (supreme advisors, party leader, deputy chief) are exLDP.
-Supreme advisors Tsutomu Hata (exLDP) Hirohisa Fujii(exLDP) Kozo Watanabe (exLDP)
-Party leader Yukio Hatoyama (exLDP)
-Deputy chief Ichiro Ozawa(exLDP) Azuma Koshiishi (exLDP) Naoto Kan (exLDP)

An interesting analysis about the votes by a blog "Igarashi Jin no Tensei Jingo" (Note that the numbers slightly differ from above as the above data is a comparison between "before the election and after the election" whereas the following data is a comparison between "the election result of 2005 and 2009")

DPJ　　+19　　＋1,171,000
LDP　　-10 　　-99,000
Komei 　　0 　　-64,000
Communist -5 　　+14,000
Other　　-4 　　-91,000

From the data above, you can see that a large number of votes went to DPJ- larger than what LDP lost - which can probably be explained that a large number of voters that did not go to election last time voted for DPJ. Judging from the number of the seats, LDP and communist party lost. However, actually Communist party had increased the number of votes. Communist party's votes were dispersed whereas the New Komeito had an election strategy to limit their candidates to 23 and get ALL of the 23 candidates elected despite the fact that they have lost 64,000 votes overall compared to last election. Komeito is a political party backed up by the religious organization Soka Gakkai.

What people really wants is "CHANGE", as they have distrust in politics. The next month and a half will be important for both parties to show to the nation what changes they can expect. The national election for the House of Representatives will be held on 8/30.

Mobile Usage in Japan

2009-07-07T14:00:00.006+09:00

I wrote this post last year about mobile usage in Japan here, this is a follow up post to dig in more about actual usage.

==Media access (survey result)==

To start off, let's take a look at a recent survey "Media Periodic Research 2009" conducted by the Environment Laboratory of Hakuhodo DY Media Partners and was reported by CNet Japan. The research was conducted with male/female 15-69 years of age, living in Tokyo, Osaka and Kouchi prefecture. (Tokyo and Osaka are the cities, Kouchi is rural area of Japan.) Research method was by traditional mail with the 1,919 samples.

Tokyo research report shows that the total media access (including TV, radio, newspapers and magazines, PC and mobile Internet) had the average of 5hours 24minutes per day which is slightly longer than last year despite the recent tendency of the numbers going down. It is suspected that because of the depression, people are staying at home accessing the medeia.

TV 163.5min Radio 31.1min Newspaper 26.0min Magazines 17.6min PC Internet 67.6min Mobile Internet 18.1min. As for the male in their twenties, TV was 110.9min whereas PC Internet was 116.1min- it was the first time Internet usage exceeded TV. Also notable is that the teenage female uses mobile Internet 98.4min whereas female in their twenties uses only 26.2min which shows a clear difference by the generation.

Media access hours per day （comparison by gender/age）

==Overview of Japanese Mobile Makert==

Next, let me introduce the presentation file of an overview of Japanese Mobile Makert by Mr. Gen Miyazawa presented at an event called Geeks on a Plane. Background and keypoints, quote from an article on TechCrunch.

* Japan boasts 100 million 3G users (size of the population: 127 million).
* 3G penetration rate: 96% (3.5G penetration rate: 35%).
* iPhone is doing relatively well in Japan, but it’s not killing.
* Japan’s mobile web traffic still grows faster than the PC traffic.
* Size of the mobile e-commerce market: around $1.2 billion (data from July 2008).
* Biggest players in the mobile web only-field: Mobagetown (13 million members) and GREE (10 million members).

Japanese Mobile Market Overview

View more Microsoft Word documents from Geeks on a Plane.

==How long do the children use mobile phones?==

According to a survey by Benesse Corporation (November 2008, 5th grader to 2nd year of high school, traditional mail, 8017 samples) the average length of the children using mobile phones each day is as follows.

Data source:Benesse via an article on IMPRESS

You can see how the usage jumps up when they enter high schools.

==SNS usage in Japan is largely mobile==

Japan's largest SNS is mixi[ja] with 16.83 million users, their monthly PV[ja] of mobile is more than double of that of PC as of end of March 2009.

mobile(orange) 11.1 billion PV/month
PC(pink) 4.25 billion PV/month
total 15.36billion PV/month

GREE[ja] is the second largest SNS in Japan, with 10million users and 12.18 billion PV per month. Mixi's domination of the market was so strong that they changed their strategy to focus on mobile and their PVs[ja] looks like this. Most of their PV is mobile (blue) not PC(pink).

==Mobile website users' demographics==

This is a chart that shows the ratio of "heavy users(more than once a day)" of Mobile Internet, data from an article on Markezine.

Ratio of "heavy users(more than once a day)" of Mobile Internet
(datasource: "Keitai 2009 edition" by Video Research Interactive)

More than half of the teenagers and the twenties are heavy users whereas people over 30 years have a different tendency.

Further looking into the data and extracting the people who uses Internet only via mobile is interesting(upper column). Breakdown by gender is as follows. Male teenagers and all of the female except fifties exceeds the total data(lower column). Heavy mobile users can be said to be younger generation and women in Japan.

Mobile Internet Users' demographics
(datasource: "Keitai 2009 edition" by Video Research Interactive)

This is a chart that shows "where" people are using mobile phones to check out mobile websites, from article on Markezine[ja].

Venues for Mobile Internet
(datasource: "Keitai 2009 edition" by Video Research Interactive)

"PC heavy users (blue)" refers to mobile Internet users who use PC Internet everyday, and "PC light users (red)" refers to mobile Internet users who does not use PC Internet everyday. PC site heavy users use mobile Internet outside of the house more whereas light users uses more at their houses.

In what situation do people use mobile Internet in their houses?

PC light users' usage of mobile Internet at home
(datasource: "Keitai 2009 edition" by Video Research Interactive)

The usage with higher scores are while they are "relaxing" and "before going to bed".

Then what are people doing with mobile phones outside of their houses? Research company ishare conducted a survey on their panel (internet users) at the age of 20-49 (687samples) and there was an article in CNet[ja] on this survey. Note that this survey does not include teenagers.

When asked whether they use mobile phones outside other than voice calls, 23.3％ answered often, 39.9％ answered they use it sometimes. In total 63.2％ answered they have used it, the breakdowns being 68.1％ with female which was 8.9points higher than male. The higher the age is the higher ratio of the users.

When asked what exactly they are doing, the replies were "mail"(65.9％） "watch news"（55.3％）. Female's top was "mail"（76.3％） and male was "watch news"（63.2％）. Games were scored 3rd with the higher ratio with the respondants in their twenties.

==Location Games==

As for the specific sites that are used, following is the data (a bit old- data on 08/11/12 from Nikkei IT PLUS[ja]) and mobile website with the largest PV is casual gaming site Mobage-Town which is majorly targeting the younger generation.

Recently, Location-based games for adults are getting attraction. Article on Nikkei IT Plus [ja]. For example, a free mobile game "Colony Life Plus" (Colopla) is one of them. Users of Colopla would exist in a "colony space" and create their own "town" where they build buildings and secure water and food and make the town evolve. It might sound similar to Sim City, but the difference is that in order to proceed with the game, the users has to physically MOVE.

Users pay "Pla" (in-game currency) to buy land and buildings. The more the user moves, the more "Pla" they can gain- which is calculated by GPS function.

There are around 5,000 in-game items, and there are "rare items" which only the people who went to specific places can get.

According to an article on CNet Japan[ja], there are 200,000 players of Colopla and monthly PV is 280million as of May. 70% of their users are 20-49 years of age (which is very rare for mobile game demographic in Japan). Their major revenue source is donation from the users (which is another rare case), they also have affiliate ads and sponsorships. They do not acquire users' personal information (which is very rare too)- no username, no nickname, no email address, nothing.

Another example of location game is "Keitai Kunitori Gassen" which is provided by Mapion, a map service company. CNet Japan has an article[ja] on this. Japan is divided into 600 "countries" and the users will register to each country and start conquering countries by visiting those areas (like stamp rally). The more conquers, the more status you get in-game. There are also quiz about history and if you have good scores you can get in-game currency called "koban" which enables you to buy avatar items.

Some users even visits small islands far away. There are more than 60 users who conquered all of the 600 countries.

There are 230,000 users as of June. Active rate (logged in within 1 week) is 60%. Male 60% Female 40%, 33% of the total is over 35 years of age, and only less than 4% is under 19 years old. 50% are employees, and 33% of the users lives in Tokyo. As you have to travel around the country, you need to be wealthy enough to travel around. Users seems to enjoy the game while they travel around for business.

Both Colopla and Keitai Kunitori Gassen is trying to get corporate partnerships with various companies. Colopla is partnering with traditional shops so that the users would visit them, Keitai Kunitori Gassen is partnering with JR (Japan Railways) and Gurunavi (a large gourmet site).

Honda and So-net(SONY) launched location based games as well.

==What will happen to our privacy?==

Aoyama Gakuin University announced that they will distribute iPhone 3G to all of the 550 freshmen and Sophomores majoring in Social Information. They will 1) use iPhone 3G to use mail system, groupwares and distribute documents and text materials, check attendance, conduct minitests, and distribute recordings of the lectures 2) Students in the earlier years are expected to find useful applications from App store and propose a new lifestyle 3) Students in the later years are expected to develop websites and application systems. They expect those ideas and developments will be usable with iPhone 3G and be distributed in the global market.

Source: Cnet Japan[ja]

According to an [ja] article on Sankei Newspaper, one of the aims of this project is to use the location information function and prevent them from pretending that they are attending the classes (some people ask their friends to reply to the professor on their behalf).

Hmm personally I'd rather not have anyone else know about where I am etc...

According to a blogger - Oquno[ja], when he was a highschool student, teachers handed them cellphones during school trips and they were told that the teacher were keeping track of the location data via that phone later on.

This is even more creepy. Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications is trying to start an experiment from this Autumn to avoid pandemic using GPS function of the cell phones to keep track of the users. They plan to get 2,000 monitors and log their location data on the database. If any of the monitor gets infected by disease, they will check all of the monitor's historical location data. They can check who was on the same train or bus and might have been infected of the disease and inform them by emails.

Source: Asahi.com

NTT DoCoMo has started a B2B service called "Wellness Support". NTT Docomo will collect vital data from pedometer of the cellphones and bloodpressure gauge etc of the employees when their employer registers to Welness Support service. The employees will be able to receive advice from health nurses and nutritionists.

So this means NTT DoCoMo is going to keep the logs of those personal data in their servers.

==No Mobile for children?==

There had been lots of issues around childrens' bullying using mobile phones. One example is that children writes bad things about a specific child on the "underground school site", another is "3 minute rule" which forces the children to reply to emails within 3 minutes, etc. Some of the children even committed suicide because of such bullies.

As I have written in my previous post, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology has requested elementary and junior highschools all over Japan to prohibit the children from bringing in cell phones to schools, and highschools to prohibit usage of cell phones in schools.

In Ishikawa prefecture, a local government regulations to prohibit the elementary school and junior highschool students to purchase and own cell phones has passed the local government on 6/29. The parents are obliged to make necessary efforts to keep this regulation.

On the other hand, a private school called Suma Gakuen[ja] (junior high and highschool) in Kobe City is planning to provide a "school cellphone (just like school uniforms)" to their students- starting 2010 at the earliest.

According to a survey conducted by Suma Gakuen to their students, 92% of them own mobile phones, and the school decided that "as it is natural that the children owns cellphones nowadays, it is better to teach them rules and manners rather than prohibiting them to own it." Suma Gakuen will provide children cellphones that has special settings that the children cannot access harmful sites. They will not only prohibit access to certain sites, but will add English education programs using audio and other education materials so that the mobile phone will be beneficial for school education. Usage in the schools other than classes are going to be prohibited. They say in case of emergency, they can check the email history via the server that the school sets up, and use GPS-based location system if the students and/or parents wishes to utilize.

According to a questionnaire towards the students, 39% of the students replied they need cell phones for their school life, 31% replied they don't want to use cell phones provided by the school (as they feel they will be managed by the school).

Source: AsahiNewspaper, CNet blog

Internet Usage by Politicians

2009-06-18T15:22:00.018+09:00

Using the Internet for politicians is somewhat complicated in Japan, and they are prohibited to do things like what President Obama did with his political campaign, so this post is about that topic.

Definitions

There are 2 important terms in this matter.

Political Campaign 【選挙運動】
Political Campaign is an action to persuade to vote for specific candidate for a specific election during the election period. (特定の選挙に、特定の候補者の当選をはかること又は当選させないことを目的に投票行為を勧めること。)

In Japan, the election period is 12 days before the election for the House of Representatives and 17 days for the House of Councilors. Election period is the only period that persuasion for voting is allowed. This makes a big difference with the elections in US where you spend a long long period of time for political campaigns. The reason for this limit in the period is to minimize the cost that is required for political campaigns.

-Political Activity 【政治活動】
Political Activity is all of the political activities EXCEPT Political Campaigns.
　政治上の目的をもって行われるいっさいの活動から、選挙運動にわたる行為を除いたもの。

Internet can be used for "Political Activity", so political parties and politicians has their websites and blogs.

-Liberal Democratic Party of Japan (LDP, ruling party) website
-Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) website

There are lots of blogs by politicians at ele-log[ja], and many others has their[ja] own[ja] blogs[ja]. Yahoo has a List of blogs by Members of the House of Representatives[ja] and a list of blogs by Members of the House of Councilors[ja].

However, Internet is prohibited to use for "Political Campaigns" based on Public Offices Election Act (公職選挙法） clause 142 which prohibits to "distribute documents, graphics and pictures" 「文書図画の頒布」 for the political campaigns. Updating websites, blogs and sending mail magazines are defined as one of these "documents, graphics and pictures".

There had been hot debates on this in the year 2005 when DPJ updated their website and sent mail magazine during the election period, LDP filed a complaint about it and the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) called DPJ referring to this action as a violation of Public Offices Election Act. DPJ complained in return that LDP updated their website with news articles as well, and MIC called LDP as well. You can see some of the documents here[ja] (document from DPJ to MIC questioning the action by LDP, answer from MIC to DPJ) .

In 2007, both LDP and DPJ updated their website and neither filed any complaint so I think this issue has been taken care of in a very Japanese way- keep the grey things grey.

Some politicians were updating their podcasts saying "audio is none of the "documents, graphics and pictures" so it should be OK.

When Takafumi Horie -Ex-CEO of internet company Livedoor- became a candidate for election, Livedoor (the portal site) stopped updating[ja] political articles except the news articles that were provided from other news sources.

By the way, the Act regulates not only the political parties/politicians but EVERYONE (何人も) to "distribute documents, graphics and pictures" to "persuade voting for certain candidate on certain election", so if you are a blogger and write on your blog "hey you should vote for candidate A", then strictly speaking you are violating the Public Offices Election Act, but in reality nothing would probably happen.

NicoNicoDouga

NicoNicoDouga - a popular video sharing site in Japan - has gained interesting position with the politicians.

One day, one of the users uploaded a video of the politicians debating in the diet, and the viewers started to get interested and spread the word and started commenting on the video. It is said that the users of NicoNicoDouga are youngsters, and those generation does not watch TV, are not very interested in politics so they were the clusters that the politicians were having a hard time reaching out. But in that video, what Kazuo Shii- head of the Communist Party- was saying made a lot of sense to them, and people started to listen and support him. The Communist Party started uploading more videos after that. NicoNicoDouga has become one of the avenues for the politicians to reach out to the younger generation.

So when NicoNicoDouga started a new service called "NicoNicoChannel" where users/companies/organizations can create landing pages, political parties and politicians rushed in.

Political parties' channels (LDP, DPJ and Communist party)

Politicians' channels (Mizuho Fukushima, Yoshiro Mori, and Yuriko Koike)

Also when NicoNicoDouga started another new service called "NicoNicoNamaHousou" which is a live streaming service (like Ustream), politicians started using them too. During NicoNicoNamaHousou, viewers can write comments on the screen, and if the politicians so wish they can read the comments while streaming and reply to them (not everyone wants to do that). This is NicoNama of Ichiro Ozawa (was the head of DPJ then). Today, Kazuo Shii (head of Communist Party) was on NicoNama.

(update 6/19)
Prime Minister Taro Asou's speech in Akihabara was on NicoNama too, and you can still see the video here.

Also, LDP proposed a program to invite 200 people to visit the Parliament building and their headquarter and do a NicoNama answering their questions which attracted 5000 viewers. You can see the video here.

NicoNicoDouga has another service called NicoWariEnquete which is like online survey that can be conducted with NicoNicoDouga viewers. NicoNicoDouga did a NicoWariEnquete asking the viewers what they'd like to ask the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister took his time to answer the questions that were raised and you can see his video here.

Lots of the users of NicoNicoDouga are kids and some are very rude, and I thought politicians wouldn't like that environment as they are used to being looked up to- but so far it looks like it hasn't been a problem to them.

Changing the Public Offices Election Act

There had been lots of debates about this issue, for example DPJ issued a draft for amending the Public Offices Election Act (1998/06/18
インターネット選挙を解禁する公職選挙法改正案の提出について[ja]) to enable the use of Internet during election period back in 1998, but the situation stays the same today. Quote from the draft "By reinforcing this amendment and enabling Election Campaigns on the Internet, we can realize conversation with constituents on policies. この公職選挙法改正で、インターネットのホームページでの選挙運動が可能になることによって、政策本位の有権者との対話が実現する。"

I think this one sentence that was written back in 1998 proves they understood 2 important points. 1) to have conversation with the constituents 2) those conversations should be centered on policy.

What we learned from Obama Campaign was that he was trying to gain understanding and conversation and trying to be as interactive as possible. At the "Change Government" site, people could write expectations and ideas for Obama when he becomes the president and others could vote on those ideas, the policy team were sharing new ideas where people can write feedbacks, people could submit questions which were answered by House Press Secretary. This enabled the Obama team to understand what people wants/expects, and people could understand what Obama team was up to and give them their opinions and feedbacks, and strengthened the understanding, conversation and interaction. People were able to discuss about specific policies here.

DPJ submitted another draft[ja] to amend the Public Offices Election Act and enable the usage of Internet in 2006 for the 4th time. The Act has not changed yet- as of June 2009.

Twitter

2 Japanese politicians -Mr. Seiji Ohsaka of DPJ and Mr. Gaku Hashimoto of LDP - started using Twitter recently, and are commenting about the policy issues and/or writing about the details of what's being discussed during the diet. Seiji Ohsaka tweeted[ja] yesterday about the debate among party leaders while watching it on TV including his comments in realtime.

For example, this is one of his posts while watching the party leader debate:
First sentence is reporting what the Prime Minister said, and the second sentence with brackets is his opinion.

"(Prime Minister Aso) Not all of the budget was waste
(Of course, but you need to prove it and therefore you should publicize the details) "

7/18 Update:
On 6/30, we held a workshop on "Twitter and Politics" which I was one of the panelists with LDP politician Mr. Gaku Hashimoto, IT journalist Mr. Daisuke Tsuda and Mr. Masahiko Shoji of GLOCOM. Since then, the number of politicians that uses Twitter increased[ja] to 20 (!) and a website called "Politter"[ja] which has updates of all the Twitter-politicians' tweets.

Seiji Ohsaka submitted his questions regarding Twitter and political activities to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and posted the reply he got on his blog [ja]

（ツイッターを使用して選挙運動を行うことについて）
　公職選挙法第１４２条第１項は、選挙運動のために使用する文書図面について、同条に規定する通常葉書又はビラのほかは、頒布することができないと規定しています。
　コンピューター等のディスプレイ上に表示された文字等の意識の表示は文書図画に該当するものですが、同条の規定により選挙運動のために頒布することができる文書図画ではないことから、現在、お尋ねのツイッターは選挙運動のために使用することができません。

"About the usage of Twitter- Public Offices Election Act 142-1 prohibits the distribution of documents, graphics and pictures used for Political Campaigns other than postcards and leaflets that are specified in the article. Letters displayed on the computer are considered as one of those documents/graphics/pictures, and therefore Twitter cannot be used for Political Campaigns."

Twitter (and websites and weblogs and mailmagazines etc) usage for Political Campaigns are banned in Japan, but it can be used for Political Activities, and we are able to read and enjoy the opinions, comments and thoughts of some of the politicians in real-time. I think it's a big step.

Copyright Law amendment

2009-06-14T20:40:00.004+09:00

Did you know that running a search engine index server in Japan is illegal in Japan right now (as of June 2009)?

On 6/12 the amendment bill for the Japanese copyright law passed the Diet and in January 2010, the amendments will be put into effect. You can read the whole amendment documents here [ja].

There are several clauses, but the 2 big issues are "illegal download" and "search engine cache issue".

1) DOWNLOADING illegal contents will be ILLEGAL

UPLOADING illegal contents to the internet is illegal even now (and many people including Mr. Kaneko the creator of P2P software Winny had been arrested), but the new amendment will outlaw individuals who DOWNLOAD contents if they knew it is illegal contents.

There had been lots of debate on this topic- as this issue inherently has various problems such as "How do you prove you actually knew it was illegal?" "The way internet works is that if you are viewing some website, you are actually downloading it even if you are not pressing a download button or anything." There were strong oppositions against this bill, and I wrote last year about a Japanese Internet activist group MIAU and their activities against this bill. After a long debate, the way this ended up is that although downloading illegal contents is going to be illegal, there is no punishment clause on this (and that is why the efficacy of this law is questioned). Streaming is not covered in this bill, and just looking at illegal videos on YouTube and Nico Nico Douga will not be illegal either.

Chris Salzberg had been covering this issue at Global Voices blog in the past:
Japan: Economics of the “Illegal” Download
Japan: The Illegal Download Explained, on 2-Channel

2) Search engine cache (and data backup cache, streaming cache) will be LEGAL after the bill is put into effect.

Search engine caches were considered illegal in the Japanese copyright law, as "copying copyrighted contents without permission from the copyright holder is illegal" and "search engine caches are copying copyrighted materials" (and there is no way search engine companies can get permission of each and every content they index, moreover there is no fair use in Japan). Therefore search engines in Japan such as Google and Yahoo inevitably kept their servers outside of Japan.

After next January, Japanese search engines can legally build their cache servers in Japan.

Other clauses include: selling pirated DVDs in the internet auctions knowing it is illegal product will be punished (5 years in prison or penalty under 5 million yen), electronic archives of books in the National Diet Library, a system to reuse contents whose authors are unclear, etc.

Hacker Spaces in Tokyo

2009-06-14T12:16:00.012+09:00

***The global Hacker Space movement ***

As many of you may know, there is Hacker Space Movement around the world and Tokyo is no exception :)

First off, what is a hackerspace? "Hackerspaces are community-operated physical places, where people can meet and work on their projects" according to Hackerspaces.org (information hub of hackerspaces around the world)

If you are interested in hackerspace near your city or if you are a traveler seeking to meet geeks around the world, I really recommend you take a look at the Hackerspaces list which has info on more than 200 hackerspaces around the world. If you want to start your own hackerspace, there is a great wiki with lots of documentations of various hackerspace organizers' experiences.

There is even a tour of hackerspace community visiting hackerspaces in other continents. It's called "Hackers On a Plane" for example on 6/30 - 7/7, a group of hackers from Europe will depart Frankfurt and visit Seattle, on 8/4-8/18 a group of hackers from US will depart NY and visit Europe to join PlumberCon 2009 (8/7-8/9 in Vienna) and HAR 2009 (Hacking At Random, 8/13-8/16 in Vierhouten.)

I always wanted to become a traveler ever since I was a highschool student - to travel around the world, meet and work with interesting people globally :) Using the internet I can work anywhere as long as I have my laptop with me, but I'm sure hackerspace venues and communities around the world will drastically change the way we work, create, learn and collaborate.

This is a very nice slide from a presentation of Hacker Space in KL - quote "HackerSpaces are like YMCAs for geek and nerds".

Barcamp Kl 0409 Hacker Space Kl

View more Microsoft Word documents from barcamp.my.

================================================

***HackerSpace movement in Tokyo***

Back in May, we had an event in Tokyo called Tokyo BarCamp which Mitch Altman joined and talked about HackerSpace movement which gave lots of the members inspiration for building a hackerspace in Tokyo. While listening to Mitch's presentation, someone in the audience registered the domain tokyohackerspace.com, which was made into a wiki site on that day and was registered to hackerspaces.org. It hasn't been a month yet but the team has already paid a visit to the existing hackerspace (4nchor5 La6), had a meeting and came up with a venue and proposal for running the hackerspace, made a blog and a twitter account and the next meeting is planned this Tuesday. I'm really amazed by the energy and passion of this community! Oh and the logo was designed by one of the members too. Very cool :D

This hackerspace is still under discussion and there is no venue yet, but if you are planning to come to Japan in the near future, it would be great if you can visit when it's ready, so please keep an eye on the sites before coming to Tokyo :)

================================================

***4nchor5 La6***

I joined the team visiting 4nchor5 La6, the first HackerSpace in Tokyo. There are 4 members who works in the venue as an office space, and they have a huge TV with a comfy sofa.

This is one of the members' desk.

This is the equipment rack.

This is the music room with lots of music related instruments, loads of records and even Tenorion!

They have a kitchen which is full of gadgets :D

This is a video of Daito's (one of the members) project

And he showed us the equipments that were used to make this video:

This is a video of their workshop.

Looks like they are looking for participants for their next workshop :)

You can see more photos from my visit to 4nchor5 Lab here.

If you are interested in visiting them, please contact them and here is the address and map to 4nchor5 La6.

================================================

*** Recruit Media Technology Labs ***

Recruit Media Technology Labs is a laboratory built by a publishing company called Recruit. Recruit publishes various magazines, free magazines and lots of websites such as Rikunavi [ja] (job hunting site for students), Tech Lab [ja] (technology information site), isize [ja] (portal site of Recruit) etc. The space is not necessarily a hacker space, but a cool and geeky place in the center of Tokyo (Ginza), I visited them on the day when they were finishing up the last portion of construction. I think they are an excellent venue for hackers to get together and meetup, do events and seminars.

There is an area for "pair programming" near the entrance.

This is going to be a bar area.

There is a stage and a podium up front, and 80 seats all with tables and power, wifi for the audience.

They will be ustreaming the room all the time with 2 cameras- 1 will be shooting the whole room and the other will be shooting the speaker.

2 projectors in the front, 1 screen in the side and 4 screens in the back.

There's also a section with a sofa and even wii fit :D

I'm actually hearing about another group planning on building a hacker space- Tokyo is going to be a fun place for hackers :D

Female Internet Users in Japan

2009-06-05T03:27:00.006+09:00

Video Research Interactive released a research report on websites that have higher percentage of female users with 20-34 years of age (called F1 category), and CNet Japan wrote an article on it.

Following is a post based on that data/article.

The result was no big surprise- "communication sites" "online shopping sites" and "gourmet sites" were among the top used websitesb by F1 category. I think it clearly shows those women are taking in those websites into their lifestyles (shopping, gourmet and communication).

"mixi", the social network service was #1 with more than 4million users and 27.7% of them is the F1 category.

Online shopping sites includes "Bell Maison Net" (#2), "Nissen" (#3) "Ochanoko Net" (#10) and "DHC" (#13).

Gourmet sites includes recipe site "Cookpad" (#5) and restaurant sites such as "HotPepper" (#6), Tabelog (#8) and "Gournavi" (#11).

This research was conducted on 200 supposedly top domains. Percentage of F1 category for all of the domains is 11.8%.

TokyoBarCamp

2009-05-18T20:41:00.009+09:00

On 5/16, I joined TokyoBarCamp.

The first BarCamp in Tokyo[ja] was back in February 2007, so it has been a long time...!

There were 92 participants, there were 3 separate rooms and each session was 15 minutes, and the sessions went on from 10:30 in the morning to 21:00 at night so everyone had plenty occasions to hold sessions- some even made 3 sessions. Some were speeches, some just wrote topics they were interested in, and made the session into a discussion period among the participants.

I really loved the variety of people and contents we had at this barcamp.

This is a session by Mitch Altman who happened to be visiting Japan this week, and he talked about the Hacker Space all around the world.

It was interesting watching people's behavior after the session.
Apparently, while listening to his session, many people thought we should have a hacker space here in Tokyo too, and so what happened was that:

-Saturday morning during the session, one of the audience went on and got the domain tokyohackerspace.com
-Saturday afternoon, another from the audience planned a session to plan creating a hacker space in Tokyo.
-Saturday night, Tokyohackerspace.com was made into a wiki.
-Sunday (I think?) tokyohackerspaces.com was registered to the worldwide list of hacker spaces at
hacerspaces.org (although the space doesn't exist yet!)
-Monday a visit to the existing hacker space in Tokyo was planned
-Tuesday is the actual visit.

This is a shot from "Africa and the web" session where I was able to learn a lot about African websites.

This is a new and very important website "Barrier Free Map"

This is a shot from "Japanese sake" session (we weren't able to drink sake...haha)

"Building Communities Using Photography" session.

There were sessions about US Airforce Research Lab, physical computing such as Chumby Hacking session and Arduino session, blogs, social media, lifelogging, Open Solaris session etc... the variety of the sessions were so broad and interesting.

The venue was wonderful- we were able to use the beautiful office of Sun Microsystems (thank you SUN, and making this happen- Jim and Shoji!)

And you can see folks relaxing on the floor- BarCamp style :D

Personally, I was not planning to do speeches as my PC was broken, but my friend Nob offered he would let me use his PC for the presentation, so I did a presentation on Japanese geek culture (the one I did at ETech) . (Thank you Nob!!)

BTW, the title that I was given for ETech was "Japanese Tech Culture: Demystifying 'Weird' Japanese Toys and Tools", but to me, this is not weird but it's rather "interesting" so I changed the title to "Japanese Interesting Geek Culture" for the session :)

This is my slides:

Etech09:Japanese Tech Culture - Demystifying the Japanese weird toys and tools-

View more presentations from Fumi Yamazaki.

Videos I showed in the presentations can be seen here:
Hatsune Miku "Melt"
-user generated music(full version)
3D Miku video
-user generated 3D anime video(full version)
MikuMiku Dance
-user generated 3D animation rendering software and model(full version)
Excel animation
-user generated animation video using Excel spreadsheet(full version)
Innocence
-user generated animation video that shows imaginary musical instrument(full version)
AR Innocence
-user generated Augmented Reality musical instrument(full version)
AR UmaUma
-user generated AR dance video(full version)
ARis
-AR figure which is a commercial product(full version)
DENPA
-a video of a cosplay/music/dance event

Here is the video of my presentation:

Weird Japanese Toys & Tools from YIS IT Department on Vimeo.

Then, I went to watch the Entrepreneurship session organized by Kristopher which he invited Nob and me to be on the panel so that became my second session. -I guess this is BarCamp style as well :P

Many thanks to Matthew and all the organizers and volunteers at the event, Sun Microsystems for letting us use their office, all of the sponsors including the food sponsors for all the delicious meals, and all the participants. It was absolutely a fabulous day!

Last but not least:
This was the best PC I found at TokyoBarCamp :)

Self Intro (FEW May Panel on Emerging Technology)

2009-05-17T01:30:00.003+09:00

This Thursday, I was invited to speak at an event called FEW (For Empowering Women in Japan) under the topic Emerging Technologies on a panel with Kristopher Tate and Michael Sheetal.

This is my slides that I intended to use for my self Introduction on my backgrounds and what I'm interested in right now. Unfortunately I had some PC problems and was unable to show the images and I basically just talked, so I've uploaded my slides here in case anyone is interested.

Few May Panel

View more presentations from Fumi Yamazaki.

The discussions at FEW were great- it was my first time to speak in front of women audience only, members at FEW were very friendly people and very curious as well. We had lots of good questions and interesting conversation.

Thanks to Lauren and FEW for inviting me to speak, and everyone who came to the event :)

Women in the Japanese web industry

2009-05-15T22:38:00.005+09:00

This Wednesday, I was invited to speak at an event called Tokyo 2.0 under the topic "Women in the Japanese web industry".(This is an article about Tokyo2.0 in Japan Times.)

We had Satoko Yamaguchi,the chair of Mozilla Japan, Motoko Imada from Mediagene, and Ayako Nakamura and David Shack from Six Apart presenting as well.

This is my slides:

Tokyo2.0-Women in the Web Industry in Japan

View more presentations from Fumi Yamazaki.

The steering committee of Tokyo2.0 requested me to answer the following 3 questions from my work experience (which ranges from large company with 190,000 employee -NTT- to small startup with 3 employees -Technorati Japan when we started -).

1) Why there are less women than men in the web industry?
2) What are the opportunities?
3) What are some cool examples of successful women in the web industry and what can we learn?

Basically I think the web industry has interesting jobs and opportunities for the women, but just like other industry there are glass ceilings in certain companies.

I introduced 2 successful women in the web industry.

One is Tomoko Namba, who founded DeNA and made it public. (She has the background of working for McKinsey and becoming the partner after getting MBA at Harvard Business School). She always emphasizes that you should pursue what you want to do- life was not easy for her actually, her father had a strong policy that women shouldn't be studying, and prohibited her from doing homeworks at home, he told Namba-san to come back home at 18:00 when she was a highschool student and if she doesn't come back by 19:00 he'd call the principal of the highschool, if she doesn't come back by 20:00 he'd call the police. From that environment, she struggled out to pursue the life she wanted to lead- went to university in Tokyo, started to work at McKinsey and became the partner before founding DeNA.

The other is Risa Aihara. She worked for NTT, Recruit and founded her own company AI-land. I think she is the person who really maximized the value of herself being a women. Around 10 years ago she started a women-only mailing list called "LIFE" which we talked about online shopping and Electronic Commerce. It had the real voice of the users who are actually buying online, and talking about good EC sites and recommending them to the fellow members, talking about bad EC sites and what they want to be fixed etc. It was full of treasure for men who were unable to see what was was really wanted in the online shops from the users' perspective, and we ended up publishing 2 books from the logs of the mailing list. She went on to create websites that collected women's voices such as a gourmet site[ja] that collects women's opinion on restaurants, and Hon-cafe which has women's voices on books. She then started creating websites that are targeted for different segments of women such as Otoriyose.net[ja] which helps women to gather information about getting gourmet deliveries, Recipe Blog[ja] with recipe, Asajikan.jp[ja] a website focused on morning, Kosodate Style[ja] which is focused on mothers raising the children. I think we can learn from her that women and their "tastes" and "preferences" itself can be a great value.

I hope there will be more women coming in the Japanese web industry!

You can see the video of my talk recorded here:

Many thanks to Andrew, Rob and the steering committee of Tokyo2.0 for inviting me to speak, Mitcho for his amazing summary of my speech, and everyone who came to the event :)

APIs in Japanese web industry

2009-05-13T02:07:00.005+09:00

Japanese web industry is said to be like Galápagos island - closed inside the isolated market and develops in a unique way. There are various reasons for this- for example the language barrier, cultural aspect, etc.

However, there were many companies trying to open up (whether or not those facts are known outside of Japan...), and events such as "Mashup Award[ja]" had helped to promote various companies' APIs to the developers, and let them create services and websites using those APIs. There were 4 rounds of Mashup Award contests in the past, you can see the full list of APIs provided for the event here[ja]. For the contest that was held last year, 132 APIs from 44 companies were available to use- including various search APIs, map APIs, etc. You can see the winners of the last contest here[ja].

Recently, there were 2 major players joining this "opening" tendency.

1)mixi

mixi[ja] is the largest social network service in Japan with 16million users, was invitation only-service for a long time, and was basically a closed community, a closed service without any APIs.

Mixi created "mixi Platform" which consists of Mixi Appli, Mixi Connect (OAuth) and Mixi OpenID.

**Mixi Platform**

a)Mixi Appli

-Allows the developers to develop applications on mixi, based on Open Social.

-Turned to open beta (from closed beta) last month, and is planed to launch officially in August.

-There are5 APIs:

Person & Friends API (social graph, profile info)
Community API (community info)
Activities API (Mymixi (friend) info)
Persistence API (data persistency)
gadgets. io API (collaboration with other Web services)

b)Mixi Connect

-Allows services, applications and devices other than mixi to access data of mixi via API using OAuth.

c)Mixi OpenID

-Allows 3rd party websites to use user data of mixi for login authentication.

Using Mixi Appli, developers will be able to make revenue through

1)Ad revenue

-0.01yen/PV from application via mixi's ad program. Developers can include individual ads in the application page if they don't want to join mixi's ad program.

2)charge users via mixi using mixi's charging system

-80% of the revenue will be distributed to the developers, mixi will take 20% commission.
-mixi Payment API will be available to use, developers can link to sites outside mixi to use their own charging system as well.

3)mixi fund

-mixi will invest on developers who will develop mixi appli. They will either loan money or buy the mixi appli from the developers, and Community Factory[ja] received the first investment.

2) Yahoo! Auction

Yahoo! Auction[ja] is the largest online auction site in Japan. SDK and Sample code can be downloaded here[ja]. They have 9 APIs public so far:

Display product list
Auction search
Display category information
Display list of products in the bid
Display detail information of the product
Display bidding history
Display all of the bidding histories
Display Q&A contents
Display evaluation

On their blog, they wrote "For example, by using 1, 3 and 5, you can make a Yahoo!Auction clone service. Please give it a try!" - amazing.

Yahoo! Japan has already launched various other APIs including search API[ja] (web search, image search, video search and related word search), map API[ja](javascript, flash, and local search), various text analysis APIs[ja], shopping APIs[ja], news API[ja], QA site API [ja], category API[ja], certification API[ja], and music API[ja].

Yes we still have the language barriers, but we're changing gradually :)

Akihabara Incident and its aftermath

2009-05-10T23:37:00.003+09:00

I wrote on this post that many people are trying to cheer up the town of Akihabara.

I think most of you know what happened, but writing a post just to recap on what happened and what happened as an aftermath of the Akihabara massacre incident.

*** What happened in Akihabara last year***

The Akihabara massacre was an incident of mass murder that took place on Sunday, June 8, 2008 in Akihabara , Tokyo.

At 12:33 p.m. JST, a man hit a crowd with a truck, eventually killing three people and injuring two; he then stabbed at least 12 people using a dagger killing four people and injuring eight. The Tokyo Police arrested Tomohiro Katō , 25, on suspicion of attempted murder. He later told: "I was tired of life. I came to Akihabara to kill people, it didn't matter who they were."

More on the incident:
"Stabbing rampage in Akihabara [Tokyo]: 7 people killed" on Japan Probe
"Japan: Bloggers on Akihabara knife rampage" on Global Voices
"Tomohiro Kato - Akihabara Killer" on Japan Probe

***Ustream, photos, amateur journalism and morality***

People who were in Akihabara watching the incident took various reactions including shooting photos with their cell phone cameras and distributing them, some of them went on and started a live streaming using ustream. This attracted attention and drew lots of debate about the morality of journalism.

This blogger who happened to be in Akihabara reported on his blog[ja] about what he saw with handwritten maps.

A man who ran to help the injured people wrote a detailed diary on mixi about what he experienced (copied on Hatena anonymous diary[ja]):

This is a set of photos posted on Flickr from the venue of the incident.

This is a blogpost[ja] of a blogger who was ustreaming the incident. He thought only people who knows him will watch but the stream was found out by 2channelers and the viewers increased to 2000, and as the viewers increased, he says he felt an excitement just like journalists. "Police asked me if I was happy shooting the misfortunate people." - he writes in his blog. Many questioned the morality of his action whereas others accepted this as journalism. What he was streaming was majorly policemen, etc and not the injured people / dead people btw.

This is a blogpost[ja] of another blogger who was ustreaming the incident. "Crowd of people, police cars, red things spilling on the road... what's all this after an hour that I passed by before going into the cafe??" He kept shooting and had 2000+ viewers as well. "I was ustreaming... just like I was streaming inside the cafe I was in before the incident. I never thought I was doing anything immoral..."

Why are they accused of being immoral whereas the mass media (especially the TV crews) were shooting the injured people, the suspect etc that the amateur ustreamers avoided to shoot?

In this article[ja] Chiki Ogiue says "Akihabara is the largest media city in Japan, and people walking around here are becoming 'physically media'. Then mass media comes and creates media scrum. Bloggers then shoots those media scrums. There weren't any clear difference between media and curious onlookers. There was just a mixture of 'people who are viewed' and 'people are viewing'."

This video from G8 summit demonstrator's arrest shows that mixture of dozens of cameras both mass media and individuals trying to capture the scene...

In a radio program called "LIFE"[ja], IT journalist Daisuke Tsuda says that live streaming by individuals should not be considered as the same as mass media. Quote, "I believe in the positive power of the internet. However when I heard about the ustreaming of the incident, I instantly felt disgust." "Mass media has social roles to report to the public as it is expected by the people who wants to see it. Individuals (such as the people who did the ustreaming) don't have that social responsibility. Being considerate about and understanding the fact that the people might be hurt by their action... I can't imagine that the people who streamed had understood that responsibility before they did it." " Personal internet streaming is a part of lifelog which is in a different layer from journalistic reporting."

Hiroyuki Fujishiro, an ex-newspaper reporter and a blogger writes[ja] "A photo of a starving Sudanese toddler stalked by a vulture which won the Pulitzer Prize raised lots of accusation of the cameraman for not helping the girl and instead shooting a photograph. When you're in the actual venue, it's not easy to make a clear line of justice and social meanings." "Some people may say mass media has the social responsibility to report to the public (but individuals don't.) However popular blogs by individuals has millions of readership. Isn't this 'reporting to the public'? " He concludes " Expressions always have possibilities to hurt others. In this era when anyone can have media, there is no meaning to ask which information is "just" or not. We should realize the reality that anyone already HAS media and think about how to make it better."

Michiko Nagai, a reporter of CNet Japan writes on her personal blog[ja] "Camera is a gun. Nonetheless I will shoot it towards people." She writes that above mentioned photo of a starving Sudanese toddler stalked by a vulture by Kevin Carter gave her such a big impact that changed her life. "Cameras are often mistaken with rifles at battlefields and lots of cameramen gets shot in the battlefields. I think it is the same with the people who gets the photos taken too. If I am hurting the people each time I take a photo of someone, the only thing I can do is to shoot photos as much as possible that makes people happy or moved." She concludes, "I'd like to say just 2 things. 1) If you are shooting a camera towards others, be prepared to take responsibility about it. 2) Even if you are not mass media- if you are going to criticize others as a media, be prepared to take responsibility about it."

Then there was this incident[ja] that Haruko Momoi, a famous anime voice actor experienced when she went to Akihabara after the incident- to pray for the victims and to give flowers to them. She asked the press surrounding the flower table not to shoot her photos. But as soon as she placed the flower, cameras started shooting her photo. Lots of flashes surrounded her. She repeatedly asked not to take photos of her in a loud voice, but the mass media just kept shooting photos.

A blogger ululun writes on his blog[ja] " [people talks about morality of ustreaming and shooting photos of the Akihabara incident, but] wasn't journalism inherently an act that invades into the lives of the people they don't even know, shoot with their cameras and show it on TVs, newspapers and radios?" He takes an example of an incident that the bus was put on fire and a cameraman who happened to be near the bus started shooting, but he learned later that one of the victims was his sister and he was so shocked that he left his job. There's only one difference here- whether you're in the cluster of victims (like being a relative) or just an outsider. A journalist Toshinao Sasaki takes up this post in his blog[ja] and continues: "If the people who were shooting photos in Akihabara felt that they could've been one of the victims and felt the same pain - then they're one of 'them'." However, "most reporters in the mass media tries to avoid being 'one of them' as they are facing incidents everyday and reporting becomes a routine work for them." That is probably why mass media kept shooting Haruko Momoi's photos as an outsider without understanding her pain.

***Murder Announcement on BBS***

Before committing the murder, Kato wrote around 3,000 posts on a BBS[ja] how he feels hostile about the society, how he feels lonely, his plan to mass-murder, etc. He was told that he was going to be fired- and that hurt his mentality too. This wiki[ja] has a copy of all of the posts.

On the day of the incident, he starts writing his posts at 5:21 AM saying "I will kill people in Akihabara. I will tackle with a car and if I can't use car any more, I will use my knife. Goodbye everyone."
11:45 "Arrived at Akihabara." "Today the roads are free of vehicle right?
0:10 "Time to do it"

... and the incident happened at 0:30.

***Yokoku-in, Yokoku-out, Yokoku-off***

After this incident, the government announced that they will make a system to detect murder announcement on websites using several million USD.

On 6/12, an engineer called Satoru Yano[ja] stood up and made a website in just 2 hours called "Yokoku-in[ja]" to detect murder announcements on websites, with several hundred USD instead of million. The service searches on BBS (2 channel) with specific keywords such as "murder announcement" "kill" "bombard" etc, and lists those threads on the top page, it also searches on social bookmarks and blogs using various APIs to capture those information.

Then an engineer called Hamachiya created a joke site called "Yokoku-out (returning error as of 5/11)[ja]" which is a BBS that enables you to announce murders. The letters posted on Yokoku-out will be changed to pictures so that search engines, Yokoku-in nor the system that is going to be developed by the government using several million USD will not be able to capture the words.

Then another engineer called shohoji created another joke site called "Yokoku-off[ja]" which is a BBS that makes all of the murder announcements into jokes.

***Police in action for murder announcements***

Enough with the jokes- but the police was serious. They started arresting people using Yokoku.in. This article[ja] on IT Media (IT news site) in July last year reports that Yano-san had been reporting 3 incidents per day to the police.

The problems are- that even if you write jokes, you might get arrested. For example an 18 year old boy who wrote on 2Channel that he will "reailze what happened in Akihabara" and that he will go to Nagoya station to till people." It's actually not "kill（殺す）" but a similar letter （投）which means throw instead of kill. 76 policemen (really???) were sent to Nagoya staion during the weekend to secure the safety of the station and the boy was arrested on charges for police activity intervention.

Similarly, a 32 year old man wrote that he will go and kill people at Ueno station of Saikyo-line (which does not exist and was a joke) but got arrested.

Another incident was that a 23 year old man was arrested for writing that he will "burn and kill 小女子". The word can be read as "elementary school girl" but at the same time as "kounago- a small fish". Prosecutors demanded the penalty of 1.5 years in prison for this.

Such vicious cycle of people announcing murder as a joke and people telling the police, police arresting them -and snowballing those cycles- apparently was not healthy. It is said that as of November 2008, there were 20 cases of arrest that was triggered by Yokoku.in, and people started bashing the service for accelerating murder announcements.

One blogger (who already deleted her entire blog) wrote on her blog that she will commit suicide which she wasn't really serious about. However, because of that post, police came to her house to investigate. "Are they saying if you're going to die, shut up, don't blog about it and die quietly?" she expressed her anger. She continues that "they should send good doctors or counselers when they see those murder announcements or suicide announcements... not the police".

***The reason the incident happened/labor issue***

In addition to being completely lonely and not having girlfriends, Kato was told that he is going to be fired from the company he worked for which impacted him mentally.

This blogger[ja] says his father works for the same company as Kato which was a subsidiary of Toyota, and that the company was operated in kanban-style and even the workers were treated in kanban-style. "Oil price surge was hitting the automobile industry heavily and 3/4 or all of the part-timers were going to be laid off in that company." Quote: "People who are not treated as human will not treat others as human."

Right after the Akihabara incident, labor minister Youichi Masuzoe proposed to abolish 'daily based dispatched labor[ja]'" saying "jobs being unstable is not a desirable state." Hm okay... but abolishing those daily dispatched labors should not mean they will be kicked out of the labor market, there should be an alternative plan thought out.

Work-sharing (to have the laborers share their work- each working less with lower salary to decrease the number of people getting fired) has started in various companies, "Toyota, Mazda, Toshiba and Fujitsu have all taken up some kind of work-sharing" according to JapanTimes.

During the yearend of 2008, the Japanese mass media was reporting heavily about the problem of dispatched workers. Dispatched workers are workers who are hired by employment agencies and are sent to companies. It is said that many of them are sent to factories and are engaged in heavy labor with cheap salaries. As they are not hired directly by the companies, they have a higher risk of being fired. Because of the bad economy, companies started firing the dispatched workers, and some of those workers did not have houses to live in (they lived in cheap dormitories of the factories) they were out in the cold, had no job and no where to live. A temporary shelter called "haken mura (dispatched workers' village)" was created in Hibiya park during the yearend to provide temporary housing and meal service for those homeless/jobless people.

***Aftermath of Akihabara incident***

No knives over 5.5cm please:

After the Akihabara incident, a bill was passed to ban the posession of knives with blades on both sides (like dagger knife) longer than 5.5cm. If you have them, you will need to export them outside Japan or dispose it by 7/5, 2009. There were people questioned by police for carrying knives in Akihabara. Better not carry anything suspicious with you.

Otaku hunting:

Looks like some media tried to blame animes as the cause of Kato's murder as you can see on this blog post by Japan Probe: "Fuji TV focuses on Akihabara killer’s love of anime". However in Japan lots of people loves animes and you can't imagine all of them becoming a potential murderer. Takuro Morimoto writes in his column[ja] "I think the reason why Kato commited murder was not because he was Akiba-kei, but because he could NOT become Akiba-kei." "If Kato could've [become sociable enough to] join the Akiba-kei community, he probably wouldn't have done such a crime." He continues. "Kato is guilty not only because he killed and hurt many people, but also because he broke the reputation of the Akiba-kei people who were living seriously and cheerfully with their love for 2D world (like manga and anime etc), and deprived them of their oasis- the town of Akihabara."

Lack of pedestrians/performers paradise:

Akihabara was famous for their weekends being vehicle free (meaning no cars can enter the main streets) and was a paradise for performers, singers, cosplayers, etc, but the "vehicle free Akihabara" had been abolished ever since the Akihabara incident for nearly a year now.

This Sunday, vehicle free Akihabara revived just for one day- due to Kanda Matsuri festival. Members of Hacker's Cafe sat down in the middle of the road with a smile and started hacking. The letters at the top of the photo means "Viva internet!"

I hope some day in the near future, the happy vehicle-free pedestrian/performer paradise of Akihabara comes back to life.

Business Models of Social Media in Japan

2009-05-10T22:29:00.012+09:00

I found this blog post "Comparing the business models of Mixi，Mobage-town，GREE，and NicoNicoDouga [ja]" by Mr. Toru Saito interesting and am writing this post inspired by his.

This is a translation of his chart, which includes some assumption on GREE's ratio of avatar sales vs fixed fee.

(data of mixi: 2008/3 DeNA:2008/3 GREE:2008/6 NicoNicoDouga:2008/9)

mixi [ja], the largest SNS of Japan depends 93% of their revenue on advertisement.

Mobage-town [ja], the leading mobile SNS/game site attracts users by free games, stimulates them to get game items and avatars which needs virtual money (Moba Gold), and in order to gain Moba Gold the users visits EC site which leads to revenue via avatars and affiliates. Avatars consists almost a half of the total revenue.

GREE [ja] started as PC SNS but lost the market to mixi, became successful by shifting to mobile SNS. They resemble a lot to Mobage-town. The biggest difference was that Mobage-town initially did not charge their users(they started doing this but is still a low ratio within the total sales), GREE does (GREE Plus for mobile, GREE premium for PC users) which makes them additional revenue source.

NicoNicoDouga [ja] is the ~~largest~~ third largest, but hottest video sharing site in Japan. Their "premium users" are increasing drastically recently, and the fixed fee from premium users has become 2/3 of their revenue. They are still on the red due to heavy network cost, etc.

The chart at the top only gives the ratio of the sales - adding another chart I made to show the sales volume to give you a sense of the business size as well.

On 5/1, DeNA announced their financial report of their Fiscal Year 2009 [ja].

This is the chart showing Mobage-town's sales, membership and PVs which you can see the ratio of sales has changed from last year, membership is growing steadily but PVs are not really growing for the last year or so till this March when it suddenly popped up.

For those of you who wants to see some more info on the latest DeNA fiscal report:
Ads on Mobage-town and game-related sales surged and their quarterly sales exceeded 10 billion yen(approximately 100million USD) for the first time. DeNA is going to focus on charging the games for the next quarter, considering the current state of advertising market in Japan.

Annual sales of the whole company was 37.67 billion yen(up 26%), business profit 15.8billion yen (up 25％). Annual sales of Mobage-town was 19.61 billion yen (up 27%). They made a minimum guaranteed exclusive ad sales contract with D2 Communication and Cyber Communications (CCI) which helped to surge their ad sales (Direct ads 78% / Tie up ads 12% / Ads on search results 10%)

Monthly PV as of of March,2009 is 18.7billion PVs. Item charge within the games within Mobage-town is 100 million yen per month as of March.

Kanda Matsuri

2009-05-10T16:07:00.005+09:00

Yesterday I joined Kanda Matsuri, one of the 3 largest festivals in Japan.

This is a picture of one of the mikoshis I took yesterday.

Kanda Matsuri has its origin from a long long time ago, it became a large festival during the edo era. In 1600, Ieyasu Tokugawa asked Kanda Myojin temple to pray for victory when he was about to fight against Kagekatsu Uesugi, and also when he fought against Mitsunari Ishida at Sekigahara battle. Then, on 9/15 - the very day of Kanda Festival - , Ieyasu won the battle and was able to rein the whole country. Ieyasu was very grateful for the Kanda Myojin and made a big donation to make the Kanda Matsuri big and successful. Even after that, Kanda Matsuri meant a lot to the Edo Bakufu(feudal regime of Japan established by Tokugawa Ieyasu), from 1617, Edo Bakufu funded some of the cost to create/repair the mikoshis, and from 1688 Kanda Matsuri was allowed to enter the Edo Castle which enabled the Shoguns to watch them.

Kanda Matsuri's schedule for this year is as follows:
5/7 sacred music performance to welcome the god
5/8 gods enter each mikoshi
5/9 mikoshi will be carried around Kanda, Nihonbashi, Oote, Marunouchi and Akihabara area in Tokyo
5/10 Mikoshi goes back into the temple
5/14 tea ceremony and noh performance
5/15 reitaisai festival

Yesterday was one of the highlights as the mikoshis were carried around the town. Because Kanda Myojin is ujigami (temple that protects the area) of Akihabara, the old and traditional festival was somewhat blended with various IT/moe aspects. For example they had live streaming of the event and official blog for the event, my favorite was this live mikoshi map that shows you where the mikoshi is. This picture of a girl shows you where the mikoshi is.

Here are some photos from the festival. I like the old-meets-new and analogue-meets-digital sort of mixture from these photos from Akihabara :)

At Kanda Myojin temple, there were various dance performances and music performances taking place.

A wonderful mikoshi placed in Kanda Myojin.

First, the troops on the horse arrived. One of the troops ran up the hill and made an announcement in ancient Japanese style, and ran down to let all other troops up. It was a wonderful performance!

Then all of the mikoshis started coming into Kanda Myojin.

This is a mikoshi of a devil and a mikoshi of a catfish.

In this website, you can see the same creatures' mikoshi drawn in an old picture of Kanda Matsuri.

Some of the traditional mikoshis.

Shishimai mikoshi.

In case you don't know what shishimai is, this is a photo of shishimai performance. You cover your head with a mask of a tiger and dance to traditional Japanese music.

There were lots of children sticking their head in the mouth of Shishimai...

Tengu mikoshi (Tengu is ancient Japanese imaginary monster with long nose.)- this was created by university students.

Chicken Mikoshi

Elephant Mikoshi-indian style.

This year, a new mikoshi joined the parade. It is a mikoshi of a famous anime character Keroro Gunso. This is the first time anime character's mikoshi is made for Kanda Matsuri. This mikoshi was made in an effort to cheer up Akihabara that has been impacted by the slaughter incident last June.

BTW, I was able to see Akiba Mikoshi, which was created last month also to cheer up the town of Akihabara.

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Akiba Mikoshi did not perform in the real Kanda Matsuri, but you can see the video from last month here:

The "commons" in Japan

2009-04-18T22:13:00.017+09:00

Many of you might know what Creative Commons is. Japanese UGC-related companies looked at it and tweaked the license to create their own "commons" or licenses.

** Creative Commons**

First off, Creative Commons. Quote from Creative Commons website:

"Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright. We provide free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof."

==4 parameters of Creative Commons==

1) Attribution
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work — and derivative works based upon it — but only if they give credit the way you request.

2) Share Alike
You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.

3)Noncommercial
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work — and derivative works based upon it — but for noncommercial purposes only.

4)No Derivative Works
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.

==6 basic licenses of Creative Commons==

1)Attribution
This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered, in terms of what others can do with your works licensed under Attribution.

2)Attribution Share Alike
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use.

3)Attribution No Derivatives
This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.

4)Attribution Non-Commercial
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

5)Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. Others can download and redistribute your work just like the by-nc-nd license, but they can also translate, make remixes, and produce new stories based on your work. All new work based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also be non-commercial in nature.

6)Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives
This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, allowing redistribution. This license is often called the “free advertising” license because it allows others to download your works and share them with others as long as they mention you and link back to you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.

* Creative Commons basically will not make a database or hold contents, it only provides licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work. I get this question so many times but you don't need to ask Creative Commons to license your work under CC license, you just need to go for it.

* Once given, Creative Commons licenses are irrevocable.

** NicoNiCommons [ja] **

NicoNiCommons is a new set of copyright rules similar to Creative Commons, but is made by Niwango, a company that operates NicoNicoDouga [ja], the largest video sharing site in Japan. It is also an archive of contents that the creators are willing to provide to be reused and remixed by others. Contents include photos, illustrations, logos, music, sound, videos, etc.

Creators (or content owner) upload their contents to NicoNiCommons' server via Smilevideo (a server that NicoNicoDouga users use to upload their videos) so that other users can download those contents. Each content will get unique ID number (Commons ID), and the users who remixed those content will note the ID of the original content when they upload the remixed content. This is how the remix tree looks:

==Parameters of NicoNiCommons==

1)Commercial Use
A)You can use this content for commercial usage for free
B)You can use this content only for non-commercial usage
C)You need a separate permission in order to use it for commercial usage

2)Where this content can be used
A)Only for NicoNiCommons compliant sites
B)All over internet

* Content owners of NicoNiCommons can change the license of their contents after one week has passed since uploading the content. Change of license will not affect the remixed content that were published before the change of license.

* NicoNiCommons is directly connected with the content database and the creator name in that database.

* NicoNiCommons is created in the premise of getting remixed, so "Non-derivative" license does not exist in NicoNiCommons.

Some contents of Osamu Tezuka - was an extremely famous and popular cartoon artist - is in NicoNiCommons.

Contents of Gakuppoido - DTM (Desktop Music) software of a singer (Gackt) - is in NicoNiCommons as well.

** Pixiv Commons **

pixiv [ja] is the biggest illustration sharing site in Japan, with 600million PV per month. They announced pixiv Commons 1.0 last year, and are working on the specs.

==Parameters of pixiv Commons==

Pixiv Commons has 3 basic parameters:

1) Can republish
-Users can republish the work to other websites and weblogs. No derivative work can be made out of it.

2) Can reuse
-Users can use the original work as a source and create other works such as videos (and upload it to video sharing sites such as NicoNicoDouga and YouTube), produce T-shrits, name cards and slideshows etc.

3) Can recreate
-Users can use the original work's character or world setting and create other contents such as illustrations, videos, figures etc out of it.

They have several optional parameters:

1) Attribution
-need attribution yes/no

2) Contact when used
-need to contact the creator after use / do not need to contact

3) Where this content can be used
-pixiv Commons compliant websites only / no restriction

4) R-18(adult contents)
-allow adult content / prohibit adult content

* pixiv commons stands on the premise only for non-commercial use. If the user wants to use the work for commercial purpose, they need to contact the creator for permission.

** Piapro [ja] License **

Piapro, a website operated by Crypton Future Media is another example of user generated contents. Piapro is basically set up for VOCALOID characters. Vocaloid is a DTM(desktop music) software which has characters such as Hatsune Miku [ja], Kagamine Rin/Len [ja], Megurine Luka [ja], etc. Basically Piapro licenses comply to the vocaloid's Terms Of Service, so it needs to be non-commercial usage, also erotic expressions using the VOCALOID characters are prohibited.

==Parameters of Piapro license==

1) Attribution
-need attribution yes/no

2) Derivative work
-whether users can create derivative work/no

* Piapro allows only non-commercial usage.

* Piapro decided not to go with CC license as they wanted the users to have a selection of attribution (currently all of the CC licenses require attribution) and also they wanted to set a rule such as morality of the contents, etc.

* Crypton released Piapro's license usage data, although the data is a bit old. 2007/12/3～2008/1/28(total 12,991)

* note that all of the contents are for non-commercial usage at Piapro.

When Creative Commons changed their license from ver1.0 to ver2.0, they made attribution default. This was because 97-98% of the creators selected attribution.

From the above mentioned stats, only 23.3% of the Piapro creators required attribution. We do not know the reason for this yet- maybe it is cultural issue, maybe it is because "will not require attribution" was the default setting.

** Cyber Special District [ja] **

The Japanese government has the right to create various "special districts" such as "farming special district", "recycle special district", "medical special district" etc, and is currently planning a "cyber special district" to be launched in 2009. Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications has secured a budget of 700million yen (or 7million USD) for this project.

Cyber Special District will be "a closed and safe community inside the cyber world with real name users who agreed to certain conditions". The purposes include:
1. integration of the net and real world
2. privacy of communication and personal information
3. content distribution
4. utilization of IT in the public services

Specifically, they are going to try and set rules for copyright, medical and education areas using this Cyber Special District.

Description of the "copyright" section says:
Experiment an environment within the Cyber Special District where the users who holds the copyright and rewarding right shall be able to create and archive creatives as commons, and the users can use or create derivative work free of charge.

Empowering the creators

2009-04-18T12:05:00.018+09:00

There are lots of amazing creators in Japan, and many of them are in the UGC (User Generated Content) world anonymously, and unpaid.

On the other hand there are lots of efforts taking place here how to payback or empower the creators in some way. Making the creators happy will eventually make everybody else happy too as they will be creating even more contents if they get motivated.

There are discussions about what makes the creators motivated - Is it money(per content)? Is it reputation? Is is simply applause? Is it promotion? Is it getting them a job? -

**pixiv**

Many companies/services have tried to compensate by money or points that can be converted to money or giftcard etc. Recent efforts by pixiv is one of them.

pixiv [ja] is the biggest illustration sharing site in Japan, with 600million PV per month.

On 4/1, they started a "premium" service to charge 525yen(5USD)/month, and a point service "pixiv point". Users can give those points to their favorite illustrator as a present. (This is called "goodP"). If you are a "pixiv premium" member, you get 2,000 points per month which can only be used for goodP as of today(4/18,2009).

Pixiv allowed to convert it to Amazon gift card when they started this service on 4/1, but decided to abolish this function in 10 days. They have not publicized the reason for this, but it is said that allowing this monetary conversion increased creators trying to get "easy money" by publishing pictures of copyrighted materials. Pixiv is planning to make future enhancements so that the users will be able to use the points for their new functions and paid services, or exchange it with pixiv original goodies that they plan to sell in the future).

**NicoNicoDouga**

NicoNicoDouga [ja] is the largest video sharing site in Japan. (I wrote a long post about NicoNicoDouga on my NicoNicoDouga Blog and a list of videos so I'll avoid going into details here.)

NicoNicoDouga takes a different approach from pixiv. They will NOT compensate to the users with money or points, instead they started a service called NicoNi-Koukoku [ja] Koukoku means Advertisements.

NicoNicoDouga already had their premium service, and NicoNi-Koukoku is a service that allows the premium users to help promote their favorite video within NicoNicoDouga. Creators of the video will probably get more viewership by getting this ad, but they will never be able to receive monetary compensation even if they have a big viewership.

Quote from IT Media's interview with Hiroyuki [ja] , board of Niwango:

"People who pays for Niconi-Koukoku likes the work created by the creator, but all the money goes to NicoNicoDouga not to the creator. I agree to some point that it is like NicoNicoDouga is taking the money away. However, if the creators get the money directly, they will start creating videos that have higher possibility of getting money and that will not motivate them to create good works."

He continiues.

"Creating a high quality video takes a lot of time and effort. Getting several hundred -thousand yen (several dollars-less than 100 dollars) will not recoup that cost, so even if we paid the NicoNi-koukoku points to the creators, it might not be a motivation. We want to think of a better way to motivate the creators."

This is how NicoNi-Koukoku looks:
On the tag page, videos that attracted some ads will be highlighted in blue (upper left), videos that attracted more ads will be highlighted in yellow (upper right) so that it will attract more attention compared to videos that have not attracted any ad (bottom).

**Loftwork**

Loftwork [ja] is a company that matches creators and companies.

In the past when large companies wanted a creative, standard way of doing that was to go to agencies and ask them to come up with a list of creators and they get to pick. Unless the creators are known to the agencies, it was difficult for them to get into the creative work of Japanese large companies. However, good creators are good at creating, but they are generally not very good at selling themselves. It was hard for young and good creators to get jobs. Loftwork is a company that matches companies that wants to work with those young, unique and creative creators. They currently have 11,743 creators registered as of 4/18, 2009. Categories of the artists ranges as follows: Illustration, Web&Flash, Graphic Design, Editing&Writing, Photograph, Movie, Music, Fine Arts, Architecture, Planning&Direction, Programing.

Here are some examples of their artworks:

CC-BY-NC-ND BY Choro

CC-BY-NC-ND BY ガタヤマ堂

CC-BY-NC-ND BY ウサギグラフィック

CC-BY-NC-ND BY みつきひな

CC-BY-ND BY TAKA

They have a bunch of job offers [ja] on their sites for the creators (especially because of the current economic recession, it makes sense for client companies to go through Loftwork than paying a lot of margins to the agencies). Clients can either post their job offer like the link above, or they can check out Loftwork's website and select the creator they like from the public portfolio of the creators. Because Loftwork has more than 10,000 creators, they can create lots of designs quickly- for example they made 3,600 different designs for cellphone decoration mails (decomail) for USEN/Livedoor. Their clients include KDDI/au, MySpace, mixi, NEC, etc.

**C-team**

C-team [ja] is a service that allows creators to register themselves to get involved in creating ad banners and ad creatives. They call it "crowd-sourced ads". C-team is operated by Recruit. Currently they have 8,024 registered creators as of 4/18, 2009.

When traditional creative agencies created banners, this was the process: 1)The director of the website will tell the image of the banner they want to the agency 2)Designers of the agency creates several samples 3)Director of the website selects one banner that makes it to the website. All the decisions of which banner makes it into the website depended on the director's preference.

The way C-team works is that the members of C-team creates lots of banner ads a the beginning (like 200 banners), gets the screening, and all the banners that made it through the screening will be displayed on the website. C-team uses a special optimization technology to increase the number of times banners with good click rates get displayed. (And they say it's not just about click rates but other tweeks such as rotating the ads etc) According to a blog post by Kensu [ja], CEO of Rocketstart [ja] and is involved in the development of C-team website, they say the ad efficiency increased 150-500%, average 200% up compared to the traditional way.

If you pass the screening and get into the banners that gets displayed on the website, you will gain 500 points (equivalent to 500 yen or 5 USD). Then you get additional points for being ranked in the CTR(Click Through Rate) ranking: #1 gets 50,000pts, #2 gets 20,000pts and #3-#5 gets 10,000pts which can be converted to cash, e-cash and various other point services.

Hacker's Cafe Fes

2009-04-16T01:58:00.026+09:00

** What is Hacker's Cafe? **

Hacker's Cafe [ja] is a community of geek/hackers in Japan.

Basically their activity is to meet up in some cafe which allows you to use power plugs in Akihabara and hang out and code. They also have a Skype chat group to chat.

One example of their projects is a web server that has wheels and can be controled via iPhone [ja].

Photo courtesy of Akio0911

You can see a video of the server actually running:

Another project is hand-made Augmented Reality (AR) glasses which look like this:

Photo courtesy of Akio0911

AR is a technology which makes it possible to view virtual objects overlaid on the real world if you put on special AR glasses (or view via camera).

Here is a picture of my friend looking at a white sheet of paper with simple black marks,

But the vision she is getting is a virtual girl floating in the cafe we were in.

Using this AR technology, Hacker's cafe folks held an event back in August 2008 called "Cyber Star Rally [ja]". They put virtual stars all around Tokyo, which is only visible when you are wearing AR glasses. Members rode on a bicycle to wander around and grab those cyber stars.

Photo CC-BY Yuiseki

** Hacker's Cafe Fes **

On 3/28, Hacker's Cafe organized an event called Hacker's Cafe Fes in Harajuku Design Festa Gallery.

I went to the venue at 10AM when they were scheduled to start, and found 2 guys sitting in an old-style Japanese tatami room working on their computers.

"Hi. Where are the exhibits and displays and everything?" I asked, and their replies were "We're displaying ourselves :D"

"Hmm okay, you're displaying your selves.. and what do you actually do?" I asked again. "We are coding."

I went into the room, sat down on the tatami just like them, opened my computer, made myself cozy and started to work. We had power, we had a very weak but working wifi, and a space and some company we can talk to.

After a while there were more and more members coming in.

Coding on the floor:

Coding inside the little storage room:

And yes they have power in there too

Coding wearing a Darth Vader costume:

Some went out of the building to wander around and code outside.

One of the highlights of the fes probably was the "Real-world Hatena Star [ja]" created by Showyou.

Just to give you a background:
Hatena is a company that provides a group of web services such as blogs, photo sharing site, social bookmark etc. Hatena Star is a service that allows the Hatena users to add "stars"(which is like Digg) to contents they like within Hatena. Popular blog posts, nice photos, interesting comment on social book mark will attract lots of Hatena stars.

"Real-World Hatena Star" will add a Hatena star to a specific content if you put RFID tag close to RFID reader.

On the left you can see the code, on the right you can see a photo that is getting Hatena stars via this system.

Companies that organize conferences can probably play around with this system and do interesting stuff :)

There were more and more people coming in towards the evening, and in the end, the room of 6jou (10m2) was packed with 17 people and I decided to leave the room so that others can have more space.

The power outlets ended up like this:

Some more geeky stuff I found at the fes:

MS/Mac decorated fried chicken...

Darth Vader rice balls...

BW, the venue (Harajuku Design Festa Gallery) was great- they have artworks everywhere including the entrance

corridors

stairs

bath

sink

toilet

Deflation and Fixed-amount Cash

2009-04-14T02:16:00.004+09:00

With the worldwide economic depression, Japanese market is showing the tendency of deflation.

AEON, a supermarket has announced that they will lower the price of 5000 of their commodities. ItoYokado, rival supermarket of AEON owned by Seven&I has decreased the price of 2600 of their items too.

I am writing this post based on an article on Nikkan Gendai and was republished on Netallica [ja] which gives you an idea of the companies that are coping with this deflation.

McDonald's(hamburger), Yoshinoya (beef rice bowl), Zensho (beef rice bowl, Sukiya), Osho (chinese dumpling), Hi Day Hidaka (ramen noodles) are all low price / fast food restaurants.

First Retailing (Uniqlo) and Shimamura are both low price clothings, and ABC mart is low price show shop, and Nitori is low price furniture store.

Nisshin and Toyo Suisan are both famous for cup-ramens (1$ ramen that you can eat if you pour in hot water and stir after 3 minutes...)

So basically these companies are related to people trying to avoid spending.

Trying to make the citizens spend more, the Japanese government passed the bill to send out“fixed-amount cash (Teigaku Kyufu-kin)”to the Japanese citizens. I've got the letter from the local government office for the qualification too, so I should be receiving the benefit soon.... I hope :)

Who would qualify:
1. All Japanese persons recorded in a basic resident register.
2. All non-Japanese persons registered in foreign resident register. (except the person who are staying in Japan with the status of a temporary visitor or illegally.)

Amount:
12,000 yen per person
(20,000 yen for people over 65 years old or less than 18 years of age on 2/1, 2009.)

Many companies started to sell products with 12,000yen recently- 12,000yen hotel room, 12,000yen restaurant dinner course, 12,000yen tickets etc.

Cherry blossom season in Japan!

2009-04-14T02:04:00.002+09:00

End of March-beginning of April is the cherry blossom season in Japan.
People goes to "Ohanami"(cherry blossom watching) -hang out under the cherry trees drinking beer and enjoy the beautiful flower and conversation.

This year I was lucky enough to capture some photos of cherry blossoms in Tokyo and Kyoto so that I can share with you :D

Somei Yoshino near my house:

Shidare-zakura

Randen is a train that connects Arashiyama area and Kyoto area,
and there is an arch of cherry trees which the train goes through...

The garden of Kodaiji temple and shidare zakura

Touji temple and cherry tree

A shot in the garden of Daikakuji temple.

Heian-Jingu shrine and the cherry trees.

Cherry blossoms are beautiful night and day. Here are some of the night shots.

Gion area, temple and cherry blossom.

Nijojo, old castle in Kyoto with Cherry blossoms and full moon...

Another shot in Nijojo, this cherry tree has its reflection on the pond.

Kodaiji temple cherry tree with lightings:

Tetsugaku-no-Michi, or Philosophers' Walk in Kyoto is famous for cherry blossoms,
and when I visited last week it was in full bloom and on weekend the cherry flowers were starting to fall off.

But to my amaze, this is what we saw...
A river absolutely covered in pink with the flowers!

Closer look of the river:

Duck family in the river with cherry flowers at Tetsugaku-no-Michi...

Hmm, maybe I should make a "Ohanami-guide" website :D

Internet penetration in Japan

2009-04-13T11:30:00.002+09:00

Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication announced Japanese internet penetration report [ja], and according to that data internet users in Japan is estimated to be 90,910,000 as of January, penetration rate is estimated to be 75.3%.

**access based on devices**

**access based on age**

**access based on revenue**
over 20million yen ---86.9%
below 2million yen ---50.5%

**accesss based on network**
Broadband(FTTH/DSL/CATV) 73.4%
Narrowband 24.9%
* FTTH is 39.0% of the whole access lines and is growing rapidly.

**household terminals**

**Corporate internet usage**

Update: Kadokawa-YouTube alliance

2009-01-06T00:45:00.002+09:00

I wrote this post last July:
Kadokawa * YouTube alliance

There are 2 updates on this:

1) Kadokawa announced that the advertisement revenue from YouTube became 10,000,000yen(100,000USD) per month [ja]

Further quote from AnimeAnime.jp:

"Views of the videos increased since they started giving "official badge" to user created videos in June, 2008. Total views of the videos during the period 2008/9-2008/11 is over 50,000,000times. However, in terms of ad revenue, the increase seems to have been due to the launch of inVideoAd in October, 2008.

It is said that most video services are having difficulty with monetization, but Kadokawa has shown a good example of how involving user created videos helps their total views and ad revenues."

2) Other companies are following Kadokawa

According to this blog post, this blogger uploaded a video (opening video of an animation called Shikabane-hime) to YouTube without permission from the original content holder. He received an email from YouTube that the video is infringing the rights of the rights holder (Funimation Entertainment), but that Funimation Entertainment is not claiming for take down, and also that there will be ads displayed on this video.

Funimation has their YouTube channel here, and has video contents of certain animations including Shikabane-Hime with English subtitles, however they have area restrictions and we cannot view this from Japan. The blogger's video that got the permission this time on other hand has no area restriction.

It looks like Funimation has not yet stepped into allowing user generated MAD animations... at least not yet.

I think monetization of video contents / user generated contents is a very interesting issue to keep an eye on.

Japanese iPhone app developers visiting SF

2009-01-05T21:05:00.006+09:00

In Japan, iPhone developers are creating various interesting iPhone apps. However, because of the language barrier etc, it is very difficult for us to promote outside Japan.

Taking the opportunity of Mac World Expo held in San Francisco,
we will be organizing an event for the Japanese iPhone developers to demo their apps in English.

Here is a sneakpeak video of some of the demos:

Please join the event if you are a one of the press or a blogger, and if you'd like to know what is the hottest topic right now in Japan, as Nobuyuki Hayashi (aka Nobi), one of the most famous Mac/iPhone journalists from Japan will be briefing and taking questions about iPhone market in Japan. You will also be able to meet ten of the top iPhone developers from Japan.

********************************************************************************

Six Apart presents: Japanese iPhone app developer meeting with bloggers & press

WHEN: JAN 7th, 6.30pm
WHERE:To be disclosed to the registered participants only, 10min walk from Moscone

REGISTRATION REQUIRED:
http://www.mobileinjapan.com/page/macworld-expo-japan-iphone-app

PARTICIPATING DEVELOPERS:

Conit (Samurai Chess), GClue(iKoto, iGeisha), HI CORPORATION (Mascot Capsule), J’s Avenue (Realtime 3D animation library), JYProduct (FingerPiano), PokeDía (PokeDía), Royal Gadget, SUNSOFT (Mahjong Solitaire), UEI (aka Zeptotools, showing ZeptoPad 2.0, ZeptoLiner, iShodo).

********************************************************************************

Unfortunately I am unable to go to SF in person, but am helping organizing the event from Tokyo.

The New Context Conference 2008

2008-10-23T05:00:00.005+09:00

We are holding The New Context Conference 2008 again this year, and it's admission free!

Please check out the website, register and be there to meet all the cool folks! This year's theme is "Open Business Network - Backbone of the internet venture business –".

*****Basic Info*****

Dates: November 5th and 6th, 2008
Venue: Ebisu Garden Hall/Room, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo

*****11/5 Program*****

==10:00-11:00 Keynote by Reid Hoffman==

“How LinkedIn and Facebook are developing Open Business Network”

Reid is the founder of business network service "LinkedIn" as well as an investor of "Facebook".

==11:15-12:30 “The new business dynamic content distribution brings”==

Jean-Marie Hullot, founder of fotonauts
Eric Young, CEO of iKnow
Mitsuhiro Takemura, professor of Sapporo City University
Tetsuya Mizuguchi, game creator, producer of Genki Rockets

==13:30-15:00 “Electronic commerce across the border”==

Matt Flannery, founder of Kiva
Teruhide Sato, CEO of Netprice
Hitoshi Ushiku, CEO of e-context

==15:30-17:00 “Silicon Valley Connect in Tokyo”==

Ellen Levy, VP of LinkedIn
Jiro Kokuryo, professor at Keio University
Mikiyasu Yasuda, COO of Kakaku.com

*****11/6 Program*****

==10:00-11:00 Keynote by Tsuyoshi Natsuno==

“The future of mobile internet and video streaming service”

Natsuno-san was one of the core members creating business models for NTT Docomo's i-mode service. He is currently a professor at Keio University as well as advisor at Dwango.

==11:00-12:30 “Mash-up as a key for the rapid progress of internet consumer service”==

Tsuyoshi Natsuno, advisor of Dwango
Andrew “bunnie” Huang, CTO of Chumby
Loic Le Meur, founder of Seesmic
Lisa Sounio, founder of Dopplr

==13:30-15:00 “The future of advertisement with Open Network”==

Spencer Hyman, COO of Last.fm
Marko Ahtisaari, responsible for the brand and design of Blyk
Hiroyuki Watanabe, Nikkei BP

==15:30-17:00 “What’s the next big thing?”==
Joi and other speakers

Blog Action Day 2008

2008-10-15T21:22:00.006+09:00

I am joining Blog Action Day 2008.

Today, 10/15 is called "Blog Action Day", when bloggers around the world unite to discuss a single issue - poverty.

If you are not familiar with what it is, please visit Blog Action Day 2008 website, and join the event.

There are 3 ways for you to participate:
1) Publish: write about poverty on your blog, and your thoughts on solutions.
2) Donate: Donate to a micro-finance loan or charity.
3) Promote: Spread the word!

1) Thinking about poverty in Japan (as "what's happening in Japan" is the core theme of this blog)

When we use the word "poverty", we usually refer to developing countries where there are starvation, homeless people, etc.

This is the Human Development Index chart, and you can see that Japan is one of the most developed nation in the world.

* This chart is licensed under public domain

I have seen a TV program that shows how convenience stores throws away food that is still able to eat- but has exceeded the use-by-date (shoumi kigen, in Japanese). I have heard some people goes to trash cans to find those trash foods... Japanese people are generally very far from poverty and starvation.

However, there still is poverty problem in Japan- called "the working poor problem".

There was a vicious circle in the Japanese companies when they were in a depression - they tried to lower the HR expenses, they started to decrease full-time employment and increased part-time workers with low salary and intense labor.

This data is a bit old, but you can see how lower-range salary workers are increasing whereas higher-range salary workers are decreasing.

With such environment as a background, some people came to be called "working poor" - they are working hard, but not gaining enough salary to maintain their (or their families') lives, and "working poor" has become a social concern, with TV programs created and books published about the issue.

"Poverty" is a problem in developing countries, "working poor" is said to be a phenomenon in developed countries not only in Japan... Korea, US, UK has similar problems, where cost of sustaining lives is relatively high.

So I've talked about people who are working but poor. As you know there are people who can't find jobs and not working hence poor. Another social problem in Japan is people who abandoned to make efforts to work. They are called NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) , Hikikomori (not coming out of the house) or Jitaku-keibi-in (Guardian of my house- ironically referring to themselves not going out of their houses, and claiming that they are guarding their house). Some of them are watching the internet the whole day, watching BBS such as 2 channel or watching video sharing sites such as Nico Nico Douga.

Although I agree that most of these people are "consumers" and merely consuming the contents. But because they are watching the net the whole day, and because they have so much time to kill, some of those people becomes "creators" and start creating astonishing things- contents, programs, etc. I am hoping that some day, we can make a system where we can help them monetize those creations.

Japanese society has created people who are not very good at communicating with others, and those people have a lot of difficulty working at normal companies. Nevertheless, some of them has talents that the "company employees" rarely have, and I am greatly interested in those talents. They are not properly evaluated by the public now... but I am hoping someday, we can make a system where we can cultivate those talents and help them gain reward out of those talents and works. I think websites like Nico Nico Douga helps to cultivate those talents.

2) KIVA- a way you can help people

I am a member of a service called KIVA, which is also supporting "Blog Action Day".

It's actually a great system where you can go to the website and register, search on entrepreneurs in developing countries who are looking for people to loan so that they can start/grow their business and make their dreams come true. You can search by gender, sector, region etc.

There are many virtues about KIVA, but one of them is that 100% of the money you give goes to the entrepreneur that you selected to support. There are many programs out there in the world such as "foster parent" program etc, but basically those organizations take a bunch of money for their operation and give what is left to the people. KIVA is good because you get to select who you are supporting, you can give 100% of the money to the person you want to support.

Another great thing about KIVA is that you can start loaning from 25 USD per loan. Also, as you do not have to pay monthly fee or anything, you can lend when you have some money, you have no obligation when you don't.

I have supported a 51 year old woman in Nigeria who has been selling drinks for a long time but learned to produce Nylon within the past 2 years and want to sell more drinks and Nylon production. Gosh, she learned how to create Nylon while running her store selling drinks... I think that's great!

I have supported a cameraman in Ghana who has been a general photographer for 10 years and shoots videos too, and wants to expand his photo studio. I love shooting photos and videos too, and it is my pleasure to support him.

I have supported a Mexican woman who started a business because she had to support herself and her family after her husband's death... Look at her crafts- they are so cute, and I am hoping she can buy more materials to make more crafts.

I have supported a butcher in Togo- you should really see this photo of the huge meat!

I have supported 2 women's group of farmers in Samoa- this and this. Those photos with the bright sun and the group of women with strong expressions in their faces made me imagine about the vegetables they grow... I hope I can visit them one day to taste the products they grew :D

Anyone can have their own reason to pick who they support... but KIVA gives us a great opportunity to do so, and I am a great fan of this service. Although I am not rich and am not able to give a lot of money, I feel I am helping their lives. Getting emails for their repayments makes me happy as I know those people are making progress :D

3) So last but not least, this is the Blog Action Day 2008 promotion video!

Blog Action Day 2008 Poverty from Blog Action Day on Vimeo.

Is Japan the #1 broadband country?

2008-10-08T05:09:00.010+09:00

BBC news reported that "Japan tops world broadband study "

Basically it's an article about the quality of the broadband network, not penetration etc.

It is based on a 42-nation study carried out by a team of MBA students from the Said Business School at the University of Oxford and the University of Oviedo's Department of Applied Economics and sponsored by Cisco Systems.

They (researchers) said Japan's early commitment to investing in broadband made it the only country prepared to deliver the necessary quality for next-generation web applications over the next three to five years.

This is the actual ranking:

There is another article from last year's worldwide broadband speedtests:

Japan has an average speed of 93Mbps according to the OECD, but this falls to 10.6Mbps according to speedtest.net, which could be indicative of the fact that fibre is concentrated in the towns and cities.

Cable broadband is quite strong in Japan but the biggest market is in fibre to the home.

This has proved so popular with consumers that DSL is actually in decline. Companies are so advanced with fibre delivery that they are beginning to find DSL surplus to requirements.

The speeds fibre provides means applications such as sharing video files are standard.

Fibre also dramatically improves upload speeds, making it much more suitable for web 2.0 communication, with individuals contributing back to the internet with pictures and videos.

Okay, quality is quality. What about the penetration? You may ask.

So here we go- BROADBAND INTERNET STATISTICS TOP WORLD COUNTRIES WITH HIGHEST INTERNET BROADBAND SUBSCRIBERS IN 2007, data by OECD

Here you see Japan in the 3rd place with 27,152,349 subscriberes as of June 2007. (their data is a bit old)

On 2008/9/17, Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications reported [ja] Japanese subscription of broadband services are 29,341,909. You can see some more detailed numbers of each service (FTTH, DSL,CATV, FWA).

and BROADBAND INTERNET STATISTICS TOP WORLD COUNTRIES WITH HIGHEST BROADBAND PENETRATION RATE IN 2007

Japan is not even in top20 here.
#1 is Bermuda, they only have a population of 64,574, of which 23,600 are broadband subscribers which leads them to have 36.5 % penetration rate.

This is really contrary to China, which was ranked 2nd in the subscription ranking but not in the top 20, they have 48,500,000 subscribers, but have a population of 1,317,431,495 which makes their penetration as low as 3.7 %.

It looks like this report brought a lot of debate, this article being one of them. OECD Broadband Report Questioned - US Broadband Penetration Grows to 81.8% Among Active Internet Users - May 2007 Bandwidth Report

The post mentions that The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) suggests that adding speed and price to the equation would show a more complete picture of a nation's broadband rankings.

So, this is the report using ITIF suggestoin creating overall broadband score based on penetration (subscribers per household), speed (average speed) and price (price per month for 1 mbps, fastest technology).

According to this ranking, Korea is #1 with 15.73points, Japan is #2 with 14.99points.