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Ways to communicate remotely when drunk

I'm usually pretty negative about English speakers relying on the phone to communicate with Japanese colleagues. It would seem Ryoji Chubachi , president of Sony may be trying to drop a hint on this to Sir Howard Stringer, Sony Chief Executive, too. According to the Financial Times Mudlark column last week, Chubachi said "there are three main ways to communicate - to meet in person, by video conference or phone. But the last is the worst - I am drunk at night [in Tokyo] when Howard calls me in the morning [from New York]." Chubachi was laughing when he said this.

No remote working for Koreans and Japanese

An article in Business Week points out how very few Japanese and Koreans have company laptops or are able to use them to work from home, in contrast to other countries such as the US and UK.

The premium placed on face time in the office (apart from sales people, who are expected to be out of the office during working hours, I would add) means that workers worry that leaving before the boss, even if they are going to work from home makes them look like slackers. Trust is dependent on people sitting close by each other, able to see and hear what the other is doing.

As a result, there is little in place to control, measure and check people who do try to use laptops or work from home. Hence what appears to have been the leaping to assumptions and wrongful accusation of a Chinese engineer at a Japanese car parts company.

Japan blogs most

I agree with all the reasons given in the Japan Times as to why blogs in Japanese outstrip blogs in English and Chinese in number. And I also agree with Terrie's Take that it is a kind of therapy, in the absence of acceptance of counselling in Japan. I would also say that it is an indication of a nation of enthusiasts. Japanese people get very passionate about food, for example, so will blog about restaurants, growing vegetables, cooking etc far more than the Brits or Americans.

I also wonder if the survey they refer to includes mobile phone blogs, on sites such as Mahou no Island. That would certainly bump the figures up for Japan, also South Korea.

Japanese number portability

If you needed any further evidence on how much Japanese people use their phones for e-mail (not texting), then the survey from September 2006 from Nikkei Business (subscription required) should convince. Despite number portability being introduced, only 18.2% of the 1011 respondents are considering switching providers, and the main reason (45%) given is that switching will change their e-mail address. The second most popular reason (just over 40%) is that the friends and family are with the same provider, and a close third is that they are satisfied with their current provider's service. Of those that are considering switching, KDDI (au) is the provider that most (61.1%) are thinking of switching to.

Japanese blogs and social networking

54.3% of 820 Japanese respondents to a September 2006 Nikkei Business survey (subscription required) say they read blogs. 68.8% read individual diary style blogs, just under 60% read news/business blogs, just under 20% travel blogs, 15% or so read restaurant or cooking blogs (I have commented before that this is a particularly popular blog topic in Japan), 10 % read health/diet blogs and just under 10% read blogs on internet shopping. 75% do not use social networking sites, 17.8% do and 6.7% are registered on one but never use it.

Japanese mobile culture

Big debate in the comments after Russell Beattie's posting on a survey he'd just seen about Japanese mobile phone usage. I hesitate to add my few yen especially as I have been so focused recently on Japanese business communications and culture in general rather than mobile industry-specific research. The root of the disagreements seems to be a different understanding of culture.

I agree with Russell that some of the 'won't work here' attitudes in the West towards anything coming from Japan is rooted in an almost racist view of the Japanese as being a bit weird. This isn't the same as saying there are some aspects of Japanese culture which may need to be taken into account when predicting how far Western markets may follow the Japanese market. Culture is not about genetic differences but about the values you were brought up with.

At the same time, the other commenters who talk about cultural differences in terms of the amount of downtime Japanese have for using their phones for data when they are commuting on trains, or about how many Japanese first experience the internet from their mobile phones, are really talking about market differences.

There are some true cultural differences that are pointed out in amongst all the comments. For example, the strong social norm in Japan that you do not use your phone for voice calls on the train or even in cafes. This is part of the cultural value of being more group oriented than individualist. Japanese do not want to cause 'meiwaku' (annoyance) to others.

So, this is pretty much what Lars, Gen Kanai and Russell himself have pointed out in the comments. I would add one further cultural aspect which I think has helped the Japanese mobile market develop and I believe is hindering the European mobile markets, which is the way that Japanese industries collaborate up and down the supply chain in exchanging ideas and tacit understanding of how the industry should develop. It is not obvious whether it is a content provider, an operator or a handset maker who generates a new idea for a feature or site, because roles are kept vague and information is exchanged much more openly - other commentators have called this the Japanese mobile phone industry ecosystem. I have seen this kind of tacit understanding and blurred roles in other industries in Japan. There isn't the attitude of 'mine, all mine' that you get from some operators in the West.

Blogs and the Japanese search for identity

I can't link to this article by Kobashi Naohiko in the Nikkei Business Express on Japanese blogs because it's subscription only, plus it's in Japanese, so I will paraphrase/translate.

Apparently the Japanese Ministry for Internal Affairs and Communications has just issued a report from its Study Group on Information Frontier (sic) on blogs. According to the report, there are around 3.35 million cumulative blog users in Japan as of the end of March 2005, of which 950,000 add a new entry at least once a month. They estimate there will be 7.82 million bloggers and 2.96 million regular updaters by the end of March 2007.

Apparently the rate of updating of a blog is closely related to how strong the element of 'community' is in the 'service' the blog provides. Kobashi comments that just as in the US some bloggers have become recognised as journalists in the last election, so the number of Japanese blogs that are more than just a diary and have some kind of strategy behind them is increasing. However he thinks there might be a difference between the community orientation of Japanese blogs and the journalistic orientation of American blogs - although he also says this might be just a question of stages of development and adoption. He suspects there is a cultural difference at the heart of this.

Kobashi refers to a psychological study where people are asked to finish a sentence which begins 'I am...'. Appparently Asians tend to finish it with a statement about their role in society, such as 'I am a mother' whereas Westerners tend to finish the sentence with a statement about their personality such as 'I am kind'. He thinks this kind of tendency in Asia explains why Japanese bloggers are spurred on to post new entries by comments left by readers or trackbacks. Western blogs are a place to present yourself, whereas Japanese blogs are about building relations to their surroundings, and by doing so, the blogger finds his or her own identity. He finished up by stating that 'finding yourself' is much needed in today's Japan. I suppose by that he is referring to the younger generation in Japan, who do not have the certainty of lifetime employment in a major company. There is a high and hidden level of unemployment in the under 30s, and many are getting by as freeters - doing temporary work, without much idea of what they might do in the long term.

I agree to some extent with his thesis, but I also think Western bloggers are just as motivated by getting comments and trackbacks (for myself, I would welcome comments, but unfortunately have had to disable my comment function due to spam and then the spam remover I had installed now not working due to some sort of technical problem with my host, sigh.). But maybe for Westerners it might be more about status and a need to be admired rather than wanting to feel part of a community.

Cultural influences on mobile data services

A paper that exactly deals with my area of interest - A Qualitative Cross-National Study of Cultural Influences on Mobile Data Service Design by Boreum Choi, Inseong Lee, Jinwoo Kim and Yunsuk Jeon, of Yonsei University in Korea and University of Helsinki (link to pdf). Summarised by Mark Frauenfelder on TheFeature.

First interesting statement:
"It should also be noted that, as use of mobile data services has spread globally,cultural factors have had a stronger effect on their use than on the use of traditional stationary Internet applications. This is because mobile devices are designed to interface with wireless networks that operate only in local areas, whereas devices that access the stationary Internet are globally uniform."

I suppose a PC is a PC wherever you go but I'm still pondering on this one. Is it the device that dictates the use of mobile data services? The interface is something else surely. Or should one regard them as a whole? And Sharp and other Japanese mobile device manufacturers are trying to come up with devices that can be used globally. Is this just a neutral way of saying that mobile applications are more culturally specific because Microsoft Windows has not achieved world domination in mobile applications (yet)? Or are they trying to say that the devices are designed with the local content on local wireless networks in mind - which is true up till now - although Vodafone are trying to be global in network, device and interface . I found that in Japan it was a bit of everything - everyone in the supply chain (browser suppliers, handset manufacturers, operators, content and application providers) worked together, so it was rather difficult to say who influenced who or determined what.

I like the term they have borrowed that technologies and online services are 'cultural amplifiers'.

The authors provide some useful summaries of other research. Apparently in a comparative survey of Chinese and American software developers, the Chinese developers performed better within an iconic or pictorial mode whereas their American counterparts were more successful in an alphanumerical mode. Which would tie in with their cultures being characterised as high context and low context respectively. Similarly, another survey showed that German mobile phone users prioritized clearly written and comprehensive user manuals whereas Chinese users cared more about the quality of pictorial information.

Some other research on website design showed that high uncertainty avoidance countries prefer restricted options and simple controls, while low uncertainty avoidance countries prefer multiple options and complex controls.

They interviewed 24 people in Korea, Japan and Finland, eight from each country, which they admit is rather few. The Japanese were a mix of students and housewives whereas the Koreans also included some business people. The Finns were mostly students with one housewife and one systems engineer. They identified 52 attributes of mobile data services and related them to Hofstede's four cultural dimensions. They asked the interviewees to download ringtones and play them, download and play a game, reserve a movie ticket and read sports news.

Overall one attribute was mentioned by all participants, which was 'minimal steps or keystrokes', in order to save time. I guess this is why the researchers concluded that all the participants are monochronic rather than polychronic. The researchers wrongly say that Edward T. Hall classifies Europeans as polychronic and Asian as monochronic. Hall actually distinguishes between Northern Europeans (monochronic) and Southern Europeans (polychronic). Asians are usually considered as being more polychronic. Hall says Japanese are polychronic at work, when they are taking group relations into account, but monochronic outside of work. So you would expect the Finnish to be monochronic and also that the Japanese, who were not at work as they were students and housewives, to be more monochronic. Koreans are usually classified as polychronic, so it is interesting that they are not when using mobile data services.

The researchers also found that Korean and Japanese participants had a greater tendency than the Finnish to avoid the ambiguous and reject unusual ideas, which confirms the Hofstede finding that Japanese and Koreans have high uncertainty avoidance compared to the Finnish. Japanese and Korean participants preferred to have secondary and unhyped information about site content whereas Finnish participants thought such information was useless, including rankings.

I found it surprising that the Japanese participants came out as individualistic along with the Finnish. They say this is because although the Japanese participants preferred a wide variety of options for content (eg difficulty level for games, chord for ringtone, seat selection for movies) due to uncertainty avoidance they did not like a wide variety of content - lots of games, movie theaters, ringtones to choose from because it interfered with individualistic goals. I am not at all sure this is an indicator of individualism. You might say that being an individualist means wanting a variety to choose from, because you believe your tastes cannot be met by a limited choice? I wonder whether this kind of judgement is not coloured by the Korean researchers own collectivist tendencies?

The high context versus low context conclusions seem a lot more unarguable. The Japanese and Korean participants preferred to have an iconic menu style and a variety of font colours and sizes, whereas the Finns disliked this, preferring a mono colour, text oriented screen.

Voice mail a form of mobile communication?

Some food for thought from a CNET interview with Keiichi Enoki, Executive Vice President at NTT DoCoMo, regarding how i-mode has been adopted in the US.

I have been guilty of wondering whether the slow up take of wireless internet services in North America isn't due to the fact that Americans go everywhere by car, whereas Japanese (and to some extent Europeans) spend more time on public transport, where they can do some time-killing surfing or texting. As Enoki rightly points out, that is a very Tokyo-centric view of Japan. If you go outside of Tokyo, everyone drives. He says 50% of Japanese households have two cars. Which also supports something that Hofstede said at his talk which I had doubts about at the time. Japan is classified as a very masculine culture in Hofstede's analysis, and he said during the talk that one of the indicators of a masculine culture is a high percentage of two car households, one for the man, one for the woman. I (despite having lived outside of Tokyo) had doubts that this was true for Japan, but, it would seem it is.

Enoki also says that North America is behind in wireless uptake because of their resistance to governments dictating standardization (unlike Japan and Europe). He also argues that because voice mail is very developed in the US, (and virtually non-existent in Japan), Americans have become accustomed to using voice mail as a type of mobile communication, so presumably felt less urgency in using mobile calls and texting. This point also links, it seems to me, with his analysis that the US operators mostly thought about the business market when developing wireless services and handsets, whereas DoCoMo and others focused on the consumer market.

Neta

The article in TheFeature by Howard Rheingold reminds me of how important neta is in establishing credibility in Japanese society - and that I must incorporate this point into my training. He talks about the research (pdf file link) done by Keisuke Okabe of Keio University into how Japanese people use the photos they take on their mobile phones as a social currency - taking pictures of something they can then show their friends - a cute dog, an interesting urban landscape detail, something they cooked, a trick played on a drunk friend, their new haircut.

'Social currency' is my loose way to translate neta - in my dictionary it is translated as 'material' as in for a novel or a news article. It mentions the American slang expression 'dope', as in 'get the dope on something'. Other meanings given are 'proof', 'trick' or even ingredients for food. Social currency is important in any society but I wish that there was more appreciation by Japanese working with Europeans that Europeans might have useful neta and conversely perhaps Europeans should be more forthcoming about the neta that they have to their Japanese colleagues. It would help build trust and respect.

Walk like a Dane

Michael Maloney, the actor maybe best known for his role in the film Truly Madly Deeply, was interviewed in the Financial Times last Friday. Again, subscription only, sorry.

He was publicising the Yukio Ninagawa production of Hamlet, which started at the weekend at the Barbican, London, with Michael Maloney in the title role. In the interview he gives some useful illustrations of the different approaches to rehearsing between Ninagawa and the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), which will be useful to me in my explanations of the different teaching styles in Japan and Europe.

Maloney says that at the RSC "you might sit for up to two weeks round the table and analyse every word. But Ninagawa asked us to start doing the play on day four, after three read-throughs. Learn the lines; do it; run it... That's the Japanese tradition."

Ninagawa did not give specific directions on how he saw the text but instead revealed his thoughts through the careful use of concrete details, such as the set and costumes. "You know exactly where to go when you've said something." Maloney says. "If you're high status you go up the back so everyone can watch you disappear. If you've done something terrible or you're in a state of flux you go out of a lower door." "When I'm mad I wear something close to a martial arts costume. Very large trousers, if not skirts, which make you move in a certain way." Asked if this prescriptive approach constricts the actor he says that on the contrary, "it removes your self-consciousness."

As I have mentioned before, Japanese teaching, and it would seem directing, is more inductive than deductive - working from experiences and cases. Whereas Western teaching is more deductive - coming up with a theory first and then providing examples. Hence the RSC spending days on analysing the text first. I asked my husband about this, as he used to be at the RSC and now directs plenty of productions as a teacher of drama. He said such endless analysing was typical of the RSC and that he often prefers the Ninagawa method - "sometimes you just know that something has to be done in a particular way and you can't explain why. You get the actors to do it and they understand instinctively too."

The example I often use in training is of being apprenticed to a sushi chef. You spend years shadowing the sushi master, only being allowed to sweep floors and wash up and when you do finally get to make sushi, you are expected to have learnt how by absorption - 'minitsukeru' is the Japanese expression for this kind of learning, which literally means 'stick on the flesh' - learning from the outside in rather than from the inside out.

Maloney also says he warmed to the level of courtesy and respect. "Ninagawa taught me how to behave." But he does remember one moment during the rehearsals for King Lear, when they were on the stage with full lighting, but out of the corner of his eye he could see Ninagawa take off his shoes and walk all the way across the arm-rests of the chairs, screaming with frustration. Again, hubby says "I know that feeling. Tech rehearsals are the worst." Maloney reckons that calm Japanese exteriors can disguise passion: "If you could rip off the mask, you'd find they're Italian underneath!"

Ninagawa's Macbeth

Corporate IM in Japan

A recent comment on this blog asks if there are any statistics on usage of Instant Messaging by nationality and age group. I've had a look for Japanese statistics and found the following two articles (in Japanese I'm afraid).

One dated 28th March 2003 is entitled "Is this the Big Year for corporate instant messaging in Japan?", which implies it hasn't been much used up until 2003. It quotes an Internetcom and Infoplant survey of 300 people who use IM in the workplace (50/50 male/female). By age they were 34% in their 20s, 44% in their 30s, 18% in their 40s, 3% in their 50s and 1% in their 60s. When asked if IM usage was allowed in the workplace, 66% said it was not officially allowed (but hadn't been forbidden either), but getting the software and working out how to use it was up to the individual user. 27% said that a usage policy was decided for some or all of the company. 7% said it was forbidden.

62% said 'hardly anyone uses IM at work' or 'only 25% of employees use it at work'. Comments pointed to a generational digital divide or that the image of IM is that it is just for chatting or private use. Most people saw it as a substitute for e-mail or a phone call and 30% had not used it for anything but a one-to-one communication. However a significant percentage could imagine that in the future it could be used for file exchange, multiperson chat and calendaring.

A more recent survey from March 2004 found that around a quarter of people who had IM at work only used IM to contact work colleagues and another quarter of people only used IM to contact private friends. In total 45% used corporate IM to contact private friends.

As for other nationalities, I have not seen any research yet, but will post it as soon as I do.

I read Spinoza every day...*

I may have inadvertently sounded like a 'linguistic determinist' with a previous post noting some research which concluded that one's native language has influence on one's perception of events. Linguistic determinism explained as 'the controversial hypothesis that the language available to humans defines our thoughts' does seem a bit too absolute to me too and if the admirable Prof Norm says "it continues to perplex me that anyone at all does subscribe to the hypothesis of linguistic determinism" and PooterGeek** backs him up then I had clearly better watch my step.

We have all experienced what we thought was a unique and original feeling or idea, only to find someone else had already captured it in a new word or words. Just because we don't have a word for an emotion in our native language, it doesn't mean we can't feel it. A good joke on this here, from Eric the Unread.

But... I always explain in my seminars how the Japanese language often misses out subjects in sentences, especially 'I', and leaves the verb to the end so that you can get a good idea of the listener's reaction and change tack mid-sentence accordingly, and how this is related to the Japanese need for consensus and being self effacing. Also how Japanese written language is pictorial, and therefore Japanese people are quick to grasp graphical representations or concepts and the emotions behind them. These explanations seem to help people tremendously in understanding how to communicate better with their Japanese colleagues.

And my former boss, Mr Makihara, was determined to make English the corporate language at Mitsubishi Corporation because he thought the structure of English would force people to be less vague in expressing their thoughts and take more responsibility for their proposals.

I don't mean by this that Japanese people cannot have ideas that are not available in their language. I suppose I am saying that the language available to you influences your behaviour, rather than what's going on inside your head. Or is the language formed by society's behavioural norms? Again, I'm not a specialist and no doubt those that are will roll their eyes at my stumbles around this subject.

* From Stephen Sondheim's Pacific Overtures, "A Bowler Hat".

**whom I keep thinking I must have met - I was at Oxford 1985-1988 same time-ish as him as far as I can work out, plus I was going out with someone at the same college as him for a good chunk of that time. Eyes met blearily over a bacon sandwich at the JCR Sunday brunch perhaps?

Japanese mobile phone culture and urban life

Thanks to Tom, notes from Chris Heathcote/Anti-Mega from ISEA2004 in Helsinki (12th Symposium on Electronic Arts), from Machiko Kusahara of Waseda University's keynote speech on "Japanese Mobile Phone Culture and Urban Life". Chris Heathcote comments that it was "more of a 'show n tell' than a thesis". This is pretty normal for a Japanese presentation. Europeans expect presentations to be 'convince me of your argument', which is something that Japanese and Americans are not so used to doing.

Net balls

Ah sport and the interweb, bringing nations together in happy harmony...

A quote from an article in the New York Times on China's angry reaction to being defeated by Japan in the Asian Cup football tournament:

China's fast-growing Internet is the main forum for this anger. Lu Yunfei, 29, runs Patriots Alliance Web, a nationalist Web site that boasts 76,000 registered members and 100,000 daily visitors. Last year, Mr. Lu's group rallied online opposition that helped kill a deal for a Japanese group to build a bullet train from Shanghai to Beijing. The group has also turned a territorial dispute between China and Japan over the tiny Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea into a rallying cry of Chinese patriotism.

I read elsewhere that Japanese fans in China had adopted the Millwall slogan of 'nobody likes us and we don't care"...

Children playing football outside the walls of Beijing's Forbidden City.

Cultures of music piracy

I hope the US and European record industry takes note of this important article,(link is to a pdf) by MIT Assistant Professor in Japanese Cultural Studies Ian Condry. He contrasts the two approaches of the record industries in the US and Japan, respectively the world's largest and second largest music markets, to file sharing and piracy.

Whereas the US (and by association European) record industry seems bent on prosecuting its own customers, presumably with the intent of somehow creating an atmosphere where young people will come to realise that file sharing is wrong, and will stop doing it, the Japanese record industry is seeking ways to rebuild customer loyalty rather than demanding customer obedience. As Condry says, imagine the following conversation:

Student A: "I got the new KRS-1 album. It's great.'
Student B: 'Cool. Could I borrow it some time? I'd like to hear it.'
Student A: 'No, I think we need to protect the copyrights of artists, record companies and publishers. Please go and buy the CD yourself.'
Student B: 'Loser.'

As he says 'music falls into that category of things that you are normally obligated to share with your dorm mates, family and friends.' I would have to agree, as a member of the (old crock) generation that was warned that 'home taping is killing music', and nonetheless lovingly crafted and was given lovingly crafted compilation tapes as tokens of friendship and more.

He points out that sales of CDs in both countries have been falling in the past few years but that in Japan this cannot be laid at the door of p2p networks, as Japanese people are not great users of p2p. A lack of broadband connectivity, a preference for connecting to the internet via mobile phone etc all play a part in this of course but (and this is where this article gets really ground breaking for us interculturalists) "the contrast is less one of 'Japanese culture' being different from 'American culture' but that American and Japanese fans share many attitudes, while the response of the Japanese business community differs markedly from those in the US." Japanese record companies recognise that CD rental shops are here to stay, so instead they try to analyse CD rentals to understand fans better.

In other words sometimes culture is "not necessarily guided by geographical area, but rather by the ways people are positioned in social, business and technological networks." This has been noted before of course - usually in relation to the way that the type of people that attend the kind of international business school I went to have more in common with each other than they have with more deprived social classes in their own countries.

Japanese music consumers are also copying and sharing music non-commercially, but they do it by renting CDs from rental stores for the equivalent of a couple of dollars, and then ripping them. Again, oldie that I am, I remember doing this in the 1980s when I lived in Japan (with records) - I even found a record rental shop that would actually tape the record for you until they got nervous and stopped doing it.

The reasons Japanese young people give for doing this are very similar to the reasons given by American 'pirates', namely that they feel the record companies are ripping them off (prices of CDs have increased by 7.2% 1999-2001 and are even more expensive in Japan), that too many bands are 'manufactured', and too many CDs have only one or two good tracks on them.

When asked under what circumstances they would pay for music, American students interviewed by Condry said they would pay for indie artists, or artists from their hometown or major groups with a solid track record of good albums, or genres of music that have stood the test of time and are not adequately supported by major record companies (jazz, classical). And of course there is the completist, fan instinct to own everything in tangible form produced by a particular artist (David Bowie and Talking Heads for me, Robyn Hitchcock for my husband). Japanese consumers have displayed similar preferences - Condry notes the way that Okinawan band Mongol 800 became a word-of-mouth success.

So Condry's recommendation to the music industry is to find new ways of connecting with and developing fans, if they want them to part with their money (non-stop touring is not recommended for health reasons ;-)) That it is all about the love, man. If music is just a commodity, consumers will get it as cheaply as they can. And that fans worldwide are ethical too - downloading is OK, but downloading and selling is not, even if these ethics are not fully consistent nor fully represent the music business.

(Thanks to Smartmobs who in turn got it from The MIT Technology Review)

Nubile, mobile and criminal

Following on from yesterday's posting on teenage use of mobile phones because they derive their identities from being part of a group, it turns out that criminal teens are even more avid mobile phone users than average teenagers - in Japan. Needing to keep the gang up-to-date on criminal plans?

And in Norway those teens who use their mobile phones the most lose their virginity the earliest and have sex more frequently than teenagers who use their phones less.

And American teens still prefer instant messaging to SMS - from their PCs at home. Another indicator of a major cause of obesity across the pond I would say. At least European teens are out and about (or having sex) while they text, thus burning off calories.

(Thanks to Techdirt)

Food moblogs

I said a couple of weeks' ago that I would try to pick up a few Japanese blogs. I will highlight the food blogs this time. This is partly to develop what I was arguing in the previous entry, that MMS take up may be slow at first, because when people start taking cameraphone pictures, they take photos that they want to share face to face - of children, boyfriends etc. Then they start taking photos of less personal things and these do get sent by MMS (maps, clothes) - or in this case, food.

Similarly, there's been discussions about the 'dying off' of moblogs, but as you can see from the examples below, if the moblog concentrates on a specific topic of burning interest to others, then the moblogger keeps moblogging. And yes, Japanese people are on the whole obsessed by food. Hence the new Casio 3.2 megapixel cameraphone A5406CA for KDDI's Au service that has a special 'food' setting along with portrait, night, scenery, twilight and fireworks.

Japanese food blogs/moblogs:
Gourmand's antenna
A disinterested record of everything eaten
Dainty food and plain food gastronomy
Tokyo gourmet blog
French dainty food village
Lunch diary - Tokyo's Ebisu and Ichigaya area
Selfish gene
Junk Food Mania
Ruifood
The Kobayashi family lunchboxes
Concentrating on food
Supper at Deko's house
Non solo Italiano
kurukuru food
Snail Blog
Yamaken's eat till you drop on a business trip diary

Asparagus is in season at the moment, so, from the last blog above, something he ate in a Tokyo restaurant:

There was another beautiful blog kept by someone who was running a guesthouse in the countryside, showing photos of the vegetables he or she got out of the garden, and what they cooked with it, but I can't find it again.

Later - I found it again. It's called 'In awe of Dash Village'. Actually I misremembered - the blogger used to be a guesthouse owner, but is now growing vegetables on their balcony and cooking for themselves. The reason for the strange title is that Japanese TV station NTV seem to be running some kind of reality TV series like Iron Age Village or Edwardian house or whatever, called Dash Village, where people are living in traditional Japanese houses, and farming for a living.

Wireless Watch Japan

Daniel Scuka of Wireless Watch Japan has done an excellent report on the latest wireless developments in Japan, following his recent trip there. As Daniel used to live in Japan and knows all the key companies, what he says is far more in-depth and hands-on then most reports out there about Japan.

Points that stood out for me:
1) People are paying for and companies are making big money out of chaku-uta - the next generation of ringtones which are of CD quality, from the original music, so more royalties to the master right holders (the record companies). Which shows how recent surveys showing that people are not willing to pay for mobile music are misleading.
2) Mobile e-mail (not SMS) is still the killer app - especially popular is the ability to put emoji (emoticons) into e-mails. I'm not sure whether this feature is one that will be so popular in Europe, as this is a cultural difference to do with wanting to express feelings non-verbally.
3) Cameraphones being used in creative ways that have nothing to do with European operator defined ideas of MMS etc. One man who was a ramen noodle fanatic takes photos of every bowl of noodles he has. OK this might be to do with Japanese tendencies towards being 'otaku' (obsessive) about particular things, but in Europe we have our anoraks, geeks and nerds too. It's true that in Japan being 'otaku' about food is pretty widespread. I intend to post an entry soon about Japanese food blogs.

Japanese blogs

I have been lazy about reading Japanese blogs in Japanese. I read Gen Kanai's and Joi Itoh's blogs, which are written in English and mostly link to English language material. I also read blogs written in English by expats in Japan such as the beautiful looking and award-winning Antipixel, Mediatinker and Cerebral Soup.

And now there seems to be some controversy over an article on The Feature which talks about the low uptake of moblogging even in Japan. I've said before that we Anglophones should be very careful about inventing a term, defining it and then assuming that it is the universal term and definition, allowing us to judge whether non-Anglophone cultures 'do it' or are any good at it.

This point came up again at The Royal Institute of International Affairs Japan Group meeting yesterday in London, where someone pointed to a recent survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit, which ranked the UK second in terms of 'e-readiness' and Japan 25th. 'E-readiness' is, according to the EIU, "a collection of factors that indicate how amenable a market is to Internet-based opportunities." As far as I can work out, Japan is placed rather low despite high uptakes of 3G, broadband, local loop unbundling etc - because it scored badly on 'consumer and business adoption' (presumably the low penetration rate of PCs - but what about the fact that people can and do access e-mail, the Web and do e-commerce from their mobile phones?) and 'supporting e-services' (meaning consulting and IT services). Well I guess this criterion has been included because the survey is sponsored by IBM, who want to drop a big hint at Japanese companies and the Japanese government who have traditionally preferred to do things in-house, rather employ consultants...

There is no doubt that a lot of Japanese people are blogging, and have been doing something like blogging from their mobile phones since 1999, when i-mode was launched. It may be that 'moblog' software as has been developed in the US and Europe does not exist in the same way, but being a very visual culture, Japanese bloggers have found ways to incorporate all kinds of images, some from cameraphones, into their websites. For example, this site, Magic Island, hosts over 3 million 'home pages', attracting 900 million page views a month, largely created and viewed via mobile phones.

So over the next few days I will introduce some Japanese blogs, written in Japanese, by Japanese people, that I have randomly picked up and started reading on a regular basis. I'll translate some of their self description and any entry that catches my eye. Here's the first:

a wild flower. "I am a working woman. A mother. One strike against me [Japanese expression for having one failed marriage]. A woman. As such, here are my various feelings... Being a woman is fun..."
Entry for April 27 "I walked home with my son in a pitch black street. Holding hands. His small round hand was warm. 'A shooting star!' he called out, but Mama didn't see it. 'If you see a shooting star you can make a wish.' 'I didn't know that, so I didn't make a wish.' 'Yes, well...' 'If there hadn't been traffic lights and buildings and cars I could have run and caught it.' He's so sweet! [Japanese emoticon for parent silly with pride which I can't reproduce in MovableType grrr] I hope he can somehow put off becoming a difficult adolescent."
Other postings are on the subject of makeup, the Pill, tomatoes, buying male underwear, semi-naked mannequins and Lush (the UK soap shop now in Japan).

I suppose some might find this saccharine and insubstantial. I rather like it.

Ikariya Chosuke dies

We moved to Japan, to a city in the north called Sendai, when I was six years' old. The bullet train did not go as far as Sendai in those days, and there were very few foreigners living there, apart from some missionary families and families who taught (as mine did) at the local universities.

I went to a Japanese kindergarten and then a Japanese school, as there were no international schools. This meant I learnt Japanese as one learns a first language - by repeating what other people said, in the contexts they said it in, without consciously understanding the vocabulary or grammar. There was one nun (it was a Catholic school) who could speak English, who would help me once a week with any questions I had, and the Japanese alphabet, counting and days of the week.

The other person who helped me was Ikariya Chosuke, who died at the age of 72 on the 20th March. He led a comedy troupe called The Drifters, who had a very silly variety programme on TV on Saturday nights from 1969 to 1985, called Hachijidayo, Zeninshugo!"("It's Eight O'Clock! Let's Get Together!") It was extremely scatalogical, but my parents, thankfully, realised that being able to laugh at jokes in another language, no matter how crude, was helping my confidence, so they would let me stay up to watch it.

Ikariya's death has provoked a wave of nostalgia from Japanese people of my generation who remember repeating The Drifters' catchphrases in the playground. I could still probably sing the whole opening song word perfect given the chance. Apparently the programme took over 50% of the viewing audience in 1973, putting it in the top 50 most watched programmes of all time in Japan. So it was a very effective way of me being able to find some common ground with my classmates - vital for settling down in a new culture.

Watching my toddler son learn to speak and read has shown me how even the youngest children are drawn to books about bodily functions. He loves Maurice Sendak's 'Some Swell Pup', even though it's got way too many words for him, because of the graphic weeing and pooing of the little puppy. Which reminds me, I really should get him this book, 'Everyone Poops', which, no coincidence perhaps, is by a Japanese author.

Last in translation

I realise I have posted about the film 'Lost in Translation' extensively before, and it is slightly off-topic, being intercultural but nothing to do with information and communications technologies. Nonetheless, this article by Leilla Matsui (a freelance writer living in Japan who was involved in the film) is something I have to link to (thanks to Blogalization for alerting me to it), as she is so right, especially in saying:

" The subtle interplay of glance and gesture makes Coppola's film a tribute to great Japanese filmmakers like Yasujiro Ozu (often referred to as "the most Japanese filmmaker") whose meticulously crafted films about seemingly little things make  'Lost in Translation' more a Japanese film than a film about Japan -- a point her detractors here seemed to have overlooked. "

and also argues the film is quite the opposite of the usual racist films depicting Westerners in 'other' cultures:

"The locals who the film's protagonists encounter in everyday life are, ultimately, indifferent to the presence of these American visitors -- a refreshing and radical departure from the typical Eurocentric view which places Westerners at the centre of everyone else's universe. "

The film does not open in Japan until April/May, so few Japanese have seen it so far. I found some reviews on blogs from Japanese people who either live in North America/Europe or were visiting and saw the film. Here are some excerpts from what they say (my translation):

From the comments section of this blog
"It has quite a light touch [untranslatable Japanese word - assari - also means crisp, clean] and had a nice feeling about it. There was no sex or violence and the main actress was pretty cute. The storyline was more like an inconsequential travel journal and was even a bit sluggish. If it had been more 'crash bang wallop' I suppose it would have been a straightforward American movie. The depiction of Japan was nothing out of the ordinary - amusement arcades, pachinko parlours, red lantern bars etc - the sort of places foreigners like. But it is different from the usual films where Japan is the stage because the story is about two Americans. Not much dialogue for an American movie, I thought. Even though there wasn't much of a plot, I managed to stay awake. Perhaps because the main actress fitted the atmosphere of the film so well.
(Yozo Suzuki)

Looking at all the comments on the internet, people seem to be split between "it was boring" and "no this bit was great". People are also saying that you enjoy it because you're Japanese or you can't enjoy it because you're Japanese.
(t-hide)

I had big expectations because the reviews had been so good and it was winning prizes for its script but I was surprised to be so completely wrong in my expectations. There wasn't a single interesting incident and the story hardly develops at all. I suppose it was just another Hollywood movie, but half the film was in Japanese and there were no subtitles, so perhaps this gave it a fresh feeling to Americans.

(kiki)

I went to see it with a friend. It was great. I recommend it...but I think I enjoyed it because I was Japanese, surely people from other countries won't find it all interesting. Especially as there are no subtitles in English... and all sorts of insider-type insights...

(keita)

Yes, novels on mobile phones

When I spoke at the VoxPolitics event on blogging last summer, I made a reference to Japanese people reading and writing novels on their mobile phones, which was greeted with derision by one of the Angry Young Men taking notes via Hydra. Well naa naa naa.

Suppressing that emotion

Joi Itoh notices this New York Times article picked up on Gen Kanai's blog and wonders if there is any link between the lack of expressed emotion in Finnish and Japanese societies and the fact that both countries have been such enthusiastic adopters of mobile phones.

Obviously one point, made in the comments, is that mobile phones allow people to contact each other in a very intimate-seeming way without showing emotion face to face. Although as another commenter notes, it may also be related to the fact the both societies are highly literate, so comfortable with communicating by text.

From the cross cultural consulting work I did last year for a Japanese engineer working in Finland, I would say the Finnish emotional suppression comes across as more cold and dour than that of the Japanese - there is a distinct lack of smiles and the elaborate rituals of hospitality and politeness that you would find as a newcomer to Japan and it makes Japanese people feel very uncomfortable initially.

Learning from Japan... or not

Some contrasting news stories on the wireless front:

Vodafone/Bango note that in Japan 70% of wireless data traffic goes off-net, ie outside the portals of NTT DoCoMo's i-mode and its rivals and (hurrah!) are actively going to promote off-net searching from Vodafone Live! Does this mean they'll stop charging more per kB to view non-Vodafone Live! sites though? And will off-net mean, as it does in Japan, mostly 'adult' and 'dating' sites?

Oh no, scrap that, we have nothing to learn from Japan, says Portuguese operator Optimus, we are a more fragmented market. (Japan more fragmented than Portugal? Huh?)

Well, if you don't copy our model, we may have to 'gently persuade' you says NTT DoCoMo, eyeing MMO2 again.

Translating loss

After being refused entry to the cinema with my friend Polly because her 6 month old baby was deemed in danger of corruption from a 15 certificate film, I went to see "Lost in Translation" with the hubby instead. This did not prevent me from falling in love with Bill Murray (again) and I was also pretty taken with the film.

I agree with the main review and most of the comments here on Chanpon.org, an online group I belong to of bicultural "Japan plus one other culture" people. It was good to see Mimi Ito's review as I wanted to get a Japanese person's perspective. As she says, Lost in Translation isn't really about Japan but I would say that the plot - unconsummated love accepted in a fatalistic way - is very Japanese.

To add to the comments on Chanpon and elsewhere that there were moments, the prostitute scene in particular, which stereotyped Japanese pronunciation and behaviour to the point of being insulting, I also thought that it was unlikely Japanese people would really blabber on in Japanese to a non-Japanese as portrayed several times in the film. In particular I would imagine the hospital receptionist would try his hardest to communicate in whatever English he could muster. The ad director might also have tried some English beyond "it's Suntory time" in directing Bill Murray, although he may have felt it would be beneath his dignity to lose face speaking bad English. You would have expected the translator to make a much better attempt at translating what the ad director said than she did, but perhaps she was not a professional interpreter. But then if any of this had happened, it wouldn't be "Lost in Translation" would it?

PS Here is a translation of the ad directing scene.

PPS Asian Media Watch have launched a campaign to stop Lost in Translation getting any Oscars. Weary sigh.

PPPS Just wanted to point out that the writer of the Guardian review (which made so many in the UK take on the idee recue that the film is racist), Kiku Day, is not actually Japanese. She lived in Japan for ten years and I would guess decided to change her first name to Kiku (chrysanthemum) on the strength of this. (Later correction - it turns out my guess was wrong - she tells me she is "a Danish national, but my mother is Japanese, my father American Caucasian, both changed their nationalities to Danish and Swedish. I am born in Harajuku, Tokyo, Japan. I lived there til the age of 6, and then moved to Denmark
where I spent the rest of my childhood, teenage years until I moved to Japan, where I lived for 10 years. I have since then lived in Switzerland, UK and now USA.")
I stick to my guns (although she beats me on 10 years to my 9 in Japan) that the film makes more fun of the lost, clueless, inept Americans than it does the Japanese, and in any case the film is not really 'about' Japan.

PPPPS Big long debate in the comments section of Joi Ito's blog here.

The phone keeps ringing...

Takeshi Natsuno, managing director and founder of i-mode for NTTDoCoMo spoke at the Mobile Music Forum yesterday at Midem in Cannes. As well as yet another plea for all parts of the wireless supply chain to work together cooperatively (handset manufacturers, operators, content providers, software providers) and stop thinking one player can rule the world (Vodafone take note), he asserted that there were less differences in user behaviour with regard to mobile content and services across countries and regions than had been expected. As I and others have been saying repeatedly - Japanese consumers are not a weird exception to be ignored in global product development and marketing.

Paying for research

There seems to be a great deal of difference in people's willingness to pay for outsourced data and research, depending on their cultural background.

It is well known that employees in German companies value their own status as 'experts' and therefore when presented with an issue requiring data, will go off and do their own research in some depth in order to reach an informed decision.

What I hadn't realised was that it is therefore very difficult to find any generally available sector wide databases in Germany. Each company does their own research and does not value publicly shared data. This may in part be due to Germany being a low context nation. High context cultures are much more likely to share information inside and outside a company. But other companies from low context cultures such as the US and the UK seem willing to outsource and pay large sums of money for research. This may have something to do with their monochronic 'time is money' attitudes, although Germans are also quite monochronic. British and Americans are less concerned with guarding their status as experts too, perhaps.

Japanese companies are different again, in that they have plenty of industry association databases and shared information to draw on for overall data, but are not prepared to pay very much for this. They also tend not to commission expensive in-depth analyses, believing that it is their role as business people to get close enough to customers, suppliers and other people in their networks to be able to get their own in-depth gut feel about what is going on. Obviously this is part of being in a high context culture too. Japanese employees also tend to be generalists rather than specialists, and regularly move across functions and market sectors within a company.

The high/low context dimension and the polychronic/monochronic dimension therefore do not on their own explain willingnesses to pay for different levels of data and research.

It may be that the time orientation dimension also has to be factored in. Germans weight the past more in decision making, so feel it is necessary to back up decisions with analyses of, for example, the past 5 years of sales. The Americans are very future oriented, so don't want to spend too much time looking at past data but are keen to bring in outside analyst views on what past data might predict about the future. The Japanese are present and future oriented, but pay little attention to the past in making decisions, so they want to know what is going on right now, but as external data will always be a little behind, they want to back it up with their own immediate impressions from talking to other people in their industry.

Each approach has its problems it seems to me. I remember when I had just taken over the sales of particular building material in Japan, and suddenly a key customer turned round and said they did not want to purchase any more from us because we were too expensive. It was completely unexpected to the team leader and my predecessor, but after I went back and pulled out all the files from previous years and put together the data in spreadsheet (which noone had done before!), the gradual decline in sales became very apparent - the customer had been losing interest for some time.

Similarly, if the various players in a sector do not have some kind of easy and cheap mechanism for sharing information and getting a general view on how the industry is moving, it is difficult to build the kind of mutually supportive ecosystem that enabled, for example, the Japanese wireless data market to develop.

Conference call hell

I posted an article on my official consulting website explaining why videoconferencing doesn't work between different cultures. The same can be said for conference calls, much favoured by US multinationals. A Japanese manager pointed out to me last week that not only do high context cultures dislike them because they can't see the other person's body language, but also that even people from more low context cultures can wreck their efficacy. He said conference calls at his US/German chemicals company regularly grind to a halt when a German participant disagrees on a very narrow point in his area of expertise, then goes off on this tangent at great length, totally throwing the US HQ boss, who only has a thin overall grasp of all the issues.

PowerPoint - not just evil but also monocultural (3)

I had more confirmation last week of my assertion that PowerPoint doesn't work in high context cultures from a Japanese manager in a German/US chemicals company. He said he views PowerPoint presentations as "smokescreens" and always feels that the presenter is trying to deceive him in some way.

Crucified Santa

I have lost count the number of times people have told me or I have read the story of the crucified Santa in a Japanese department store window. Snopes, as always, is the voice of sanity on this, deciding, on balance, that the story is untrue, and has its roots in our xenophobic fears that "these foreigners can't be trusted with our religion and our traditions," especially as the earliest sighting of this story dates to the mid 1980s, when the Japanese Economic Miracle and consequent Japan bashing was at its height.

Natsukashii

Check out the queue (Quicktime video - over 30MB, starts playing after about 9MB downloaded) for the new Apple store in Ginza, Tokyo. (Link from Joi Ito.) Apparently Apple were giving away a few thousand T-shirts but even so, that's quite a queue. It's the kind of thing that makes first time foreign visitors to Tokyo say "what recession?!"

Makes me nostalgic (natsukashii) for Tokyo and brings back memories of when I was working at Mitsubishi Corp in Tokyo in 1992, and for some reason one of our lines of business was sales of Powerbooks. It didn't do very well I seem to remember, but I did buy a very basic Powerbook at close to wholesale price. I've still got it somewhere. And then I got myself a 14.4kbps modem I think, and started participating in newsgroups, about sumo, Monty Python - all done via the ISP's cache, rather than directly reading or posting to them. It seemed very exciting at the time.

Other random observations on seeing that video:

In order not to ruin the austere grey clean lines of the Apple building, they shunted all the garish floral decorations that you send to new businesses if you're a supplier in Japan to the other side of the pavement.

The queue is of course mostly trendy young men, but a gratifying number of ordinary looking older people, women and even some young children.

Hurrah for mobile phones and the Japanese mobile internet - the only way to keep sane in queues like that I'd have thought!

It looks like crosscultural IT marketing success for Apple, even if Mitsubishi's initial forays were not very promising.

Face letters

I've been meaning to post about the Japanese use of emoticons (called kaomoji in Japanese = face letters) - mostly in e-mails. They use them far more than we do in the UK and I suspect the rest of Europe and North America. One that particularly caught my eye was this:

m(_\\_)m

I think it's supposed to represent a balding man (just two strands of hair) bowing on his knees (the context was a grovelling apology), head to the ground, with the m's representing his hands.

Now I've found a whole website devoted to them. You can get smiling faces here, sweating faces here (to denote embarrassment or effort), crying faces here, gesturing (yawns, bows) here, expressive faces here (pain, winking etc) and miscellaneous (mostly animals) here.

It's a wonderful example of how a high context culture tries to find ways to communicate body language and feelings in a low context medium.

Virtual privacy

I'm not a big fan of the theory that what works for the mobile phone markets in Japan and South Korea won't succeed in Europe because of nebulous 'cultural differences', but a (not so recent - but recently mentioned by Joi Ito) report for Motorola (warning: link leads to 1.3MB 45 page pdf being fired up) by Dr Sadie Plant pointed to one cultural factor that I will admit is important - mobile phones are a "useful tool in strategies for managing the competing demands of traditional family and individual identity."

Plant mentioned a British Asian young woman using her phone to mediate familial power in the arrangement of a potential marriage. If she likes the suitor she will give him her mobile number, otherwise, he will be confined to the more traditional fixed line phone. It is definitely the case in Japan (not sure about South Korea) that young people, who mostly live with their parents, use their mobile phones as a way of creating a virtual space or virtual privacy around themselves and to socialise with their friends when they can't invite them home.

PowerPoint is evil (2)

Some British research scientists from a client of mine (Large German Chemicals Company) who work with their Japanese counterparts on R&D, confirmed on Friday my previous assertion that PowerPoint doesn't work with high context cultures like Japan. Past attempts to wow their colleagues with snazzy presentations were greeted with indifference verging on hostility, and when they visit Japanese customers who actually make projectors, like Epson, they have to order the projector for the meeting room well in advance, because there are so few of them in the office. They have found the best solution is to reformat the slide presentation as a report, and circulate it to participants before the meeting takes place.

Mobile phones - how Europe really differs from Japan

Daniel Scuka, a Canadian who started a newsletter called Wireless Watch Japan and lived in Japan for many years is now in Germany and has just written a very useful article on the differences between the Japanese and European mobile markets. He says "the culture of mobile usage is probably not radically different between the two areas" but what has really struck him is the difference in pricing between mobile mail/messaging in Europe and Japan and the affect this is having on stunting the growth of third party content and mobile marketing in Europe. He also points to my perennial grouse - the way European operators try to keep their systems closed and not let anyone else get much of a share of the revenues from data services.

Attitudes to phones - cultural differences or market development stages?

AT Kearney very generously allow free downloads of their annual Mobinet study on international trends in mobile usage, done in conjunction with Cambridge University's business school, the Judge Institute of Managemement. This year's Mobinet 6 came out in June but has recently been picked up by a bored or desperate journalist as 'Breaking News' on RCR Wireless. Which in turn led to it being picked up by the always excellent TheFeature

The survey asks 5,600 mobile phone users in 15 countries about their attitudes towards mobile phones, and finds that Americans are concerned about privacy, security and complexity, Europeans about cost and technology and and the Japanese about keypad usability, content and speed of acccess.

So, is this a cultural difference or simply due to the differing stages of maturity of these markets?

Cross cultural studies (see Edward T. Hall and Mildred Reed Hall's 'Understanding Cultural Differences' for example) highlight the value that Americans place on personal privacy, but certain Europeans (the Germans for example) have been shown to have even stronger senses of privacy -"a culture in which it is a breach of privacy to open someone else's refrigerator". Perhaps what is more at stake for Americans is their belief in uninfringable rights.

Europeans are regarded as too diverse in cultural terms by intercultural theorists to be able to make any very sophisticated comment about the conclusion that Europeans are stingy and the survey doesn't explain what "being concerned about technology" means. It could be that Europeans are concerned about whether the technology actually works or that they are concerned that they won't know how to use it. The Japanese concern about keypad usability, content and speed of access yet again shows what demanding and meticulous customers they are.

Don't shoot the messenger

When I was asked to speak in July this year at a Voxpolitics meeting in London about politics and blogs, with the brief that I talk about moblogs and anything relevant from Japan, I soon hit a brick wall. There wasn't any connection between mobile phone-based blogging in Japan and politics. In fact I couldn't even find any general Japanese web blogs that had a political focus. Unsurprisingly, explaining this to the audience of keen-as-mustard geek bloggers and warbloggers did not go down particularly well. Lesson learnt - if asked to speak, make sure that the brief you are given really will lead to something substantial and relevant to the audience.

I've now seen this on Japan Media Review, a site I've looked at many times and printed off lots from in the past. I unaccountably failed to spot this article in time for the July talk about how Japanese anti-war activists are using their mobile phones and the internet to organise themselves. But, rather as my friends in Hong Kong explained when I asked them about mobile phones, blogs and the democracy protests in July (in desperation for something to say to those fierce Voxpolitics bloggers!), it turns out that mobile phones were mostly used to organise and coordinate protests rather than to create moblogs.

There does seem to be some kind of cultural barrier (and not just because of government censorship) to being overtly political on weblogs in (certain? all?) Asian countries. An indicator of this is the ban in Japan on using the internet for electioneering, for fear of libel.

One of the Japanese anti-war organisations' websites does have a weblog (and even calls it a weblog) though. But it has no comments, just links to relevant news stories, which is something that I have seen with other Japanese blogs - comments, if they exist at all, are often one liners.

At least it is still being kept up-to-date - another thing I noticed with Japanese blogs in general was that many of even the most popular ones had been shut down by their owners, who were finding it too much work for no money after a couple of years of fun. (I had to duck the flak again when I made this point at Voxpolitics ;-) ).

PowerPoint - not just evil but also monocultural?

I've just been re-doing a PowerPoint presentation that was originally created by a Japanese businessman. I couldn't see it working with a British audience so I replaced the dark blue swirling background with plain white, made all the fonts the same (arial - sans serif seems to be the best for a British audience?), cut down the number of colours used and dropped some of the less necessary text.

So I wonder, is it just me applying my own aesthetics or is this a crosscultural difference between Japanese and British taste in slides? When I was working for a Japanese company in Japan a few years ago, we hardly ever used PowerPoint - I got the impression such presentations were regarded with suspicion. Rightly, Edward Tufte would say.

Maybe high context cultures like Japan find slide presentations too unsubtle - they give lots of low context information and therefore not the real story. And perhaps I am appealing to the high context side of British nature, by ensuring that the presentation is aesthetically pleasing (subtext to the presentation is therefore - I'm intelligent and a person of taste and education, so you can trust my products).

Tengu

When I was seven years old, I was the only Westerner at my all-Japanese school in Sendai, in the north of Japan. One of our projects in art class was to make a mask, and I chose to make a mask of a tengu. Tengu are demons or goblins in Japanese mythology, mischievous rather than evil, who live in trees and are master swordfighters. They are sometimes depicted as part bird, or as red skinned mountain priests, with long noses. This site has more on them.

I thought at the time I made a good mask, and I seem to remember my parents thought so too. But I got a strange reaction from the teachers - who laughed knowingly and said that my choice of character was to be expected. I didn't really understand this and I still am not sure what they meant. I do know I felt humiliated and embarrassed. Was it because I was a westerner, and westerners are famous in Japan for having long noses? Commodore Perry was depicted as a Tengu when he first arrived in Japan in the 1850s.

Or was it because Tengu and long noses symbolise conceitedness in Japan, and I was thought to be rather too full of myself? I was sure of how good my mask was, especially as everyone else in the class had created dull and predictable princess masks.

Paranoia, ignorance of symbols, refusing to conform to a cultural norm - I now realise they are all signs of intercultural frictions, and I still can't help liking Tengu masks!