Culture was the central point of my reason to start this blog. I thought that there was so much to explore in Asian culture to try and understand the future.
Initially my interest was focused very much on Japan and Hong Kong. It’s ironic that before the Japanese government’s ‘Cool Japan’ initiative there was much more content out there about what was happening in Japan. Great and really missed publications like the Japan Trends blog and Ping magazine.
Hong Kong’s film industry had past its peak in the mid 1990s, but was still doing interesting stuff and the city was a great place to synthesise both eastern and western ideas to make them its own. Hong Kong because its so densely populated has served as a laboratory of sorts for the mobile industry.
Way before there was Uber Eats or Food Panda, Hong Kongers would send their order over WhatsApp before going over to pay for and pick up their food. Even my local McDonalds used to have a WhatsApp number that they gave out to regular customers. All of this worked because Hong Kong was a higher trust society than the UK or China. In many respects in terms of trust, its more like Japan.
Korea quickly became a country of interest as I caught the ‘Korean wave’ or hallyu on its way up. I also have discussed Chinese culture and how it has synthesised other cultures.
More recently, aspect of Chinese culture that I have covered has taken a darker turn due to a number of factors.
Japanese sportswear brand Asics (アシックス) have launched a campaign that’s training AI to create more inclusive and representative images of fitness as an activity beyond über fit athletes.
Asics called these über fit representations exercise airbrushing.
https://youtu.be/eo13_v_Ase8
Generative AI is only as good as the source material that it gets to work from. And this has meant a lot of content that is heavily skewed what is the aggregate image. Think about the kind of content that already creates body dysmorphia across society. This can be corrected by training AI on a wider range of images.
In the words of Asics EMEA communications director Caroline Fisher
We’re training AI to see the real power of exercise.
Ask AI what exercise looks like and it’s likely to generate images of chiselled jaws, muscles on muscles and six-packs. Because AI has been taught that exercise is purely about aesthetic gain … and it’s learnt this from us.
This focus on exercise purely for physical transformation is feeding into unrealistic body standards and impacting our mental wellbeing.
In response, we’ve created an AI Training Programme to help AI learn what exercise really looks like. Our aim is to teach AI that the benefit of exercise is not just on the body, but also on the mind.
Everyone can help change the way AI sees exercise by posting their exercise images online with #TrainingAI and tagging ASICS.
To learn more, see the link in the comments.
We are ASICS. Anima Sana In Corpore Sano, a Sound Mind in a Sound Body.
Another great mid-century chambara film to follow up the 47 Ronin that I shared in an earlier post.
Nissan borrows from YouTube culture
Nissan borrowed from the Lofi Girl YouTube channel to make this four hour advert for their new Ariya electric vehicle. The illustration is wonderfully done and there are Easter eggs buried in the Japanese driving scenes. From Nissan iconic model name drops to mecha and more.
Judi Oyama
Judi Oyama is a Japanese American skateboarder and graphic designer who was there at the beginning of Independent trucks and Santa Cruz boards. At 63 years old she’s still a pro-skater.
WWE on fan engagement
Interesting video having different generations of WWE wrestling stars talk about fan engagement at SXSW. Elements of what we’d call method acting were talked through by The Undertaker. The para-social links of fanbase and stars that has been amplified via social media.
Flow state
I wish I had watched this when I first started DJing. I did my best work when I was in a flow state. It is hard to get in it consistently.
China on war path
China’s rapid militarisation discussed by Singapore public broadcaster CNA (Channel News Asia). There are some interesting points in it.
Elliott Management wrote this opinion piece on Apple and China: Apple is a Chinese company | Financial Times – interesting assessment of risk exposure with a focus on the Apple share price.
The Apple and China relationship started before China joined the WTO. Taiwanese contract manufacturers had built huge industrial sites in Shenzhen, China and later in other parts of China. The best known of which was the Foxconn plant in Shenzhen. Back in 2010, I was driven around the perimeter of the site, which went on for miles.
The only site that I had seen which would be comparable would be the Mercedes-Benz manufacturing site in Sindelfingen which is part of the Stuttgart metropolitan area. I spent part of my childhood and early adult life living next to a General Motors car plant, a shipyard and a couple of oil refineries, so I am used to scale of industry.
As Apple came back from a near demise in the mid-1990s, it needed manufacturing scale so the combination of Apple and China happened due to that. Over time the Apple and China relationship drove manufacturing expertise and new ways of doing business, such as using CNC machines at scale. Prior to Apple and China, smartphones were plastic mainly due to product engineering influenced by Nokia’s work on its feature phones.
Over time, the Apple and China relationship evolved. Chinese developers make up about half of the programmers making iPad and iPhone applications. Chinese component manufacturers replaced US, Korean, Japanese and European suppliers. Apple and China has become tightly entwined as Chinese manufacturers look to dethrone Apple at the same time.
Apple and China national security focus
China’s state and national security focus has spilled into the economic and social aspects of policy which has a high probability of reaching the Apple and China relationship. Apple already compromises on its privacy tenet in the way it handles China’s data. It actively supported China versus Hong Kong protestors – doing everything it could to disrupt the protestors self-organising tools.
China has shown that its ever expanding security considerations trump business so Apple and China may come to a rapid and disruptive break. Apple is trying to de-risk production outside China but it might be too little, too late. Apple and China are due for a relationship reset.
China’s assessments of Soviet Union’s collapse is very interesting as they offer a playbook of Xi Jinping thought
China’s ‘men in black’ step up scrutiny of foreign corporate sleuths | Financial Times – “It’s hard to attract capital if you can’t get a report from a global due diligence firm,” said one international services executive. That could run counter to the government’s efforts to revive animal spirits in China’s economy, consultants and investors said. “Maybe this is the intention,” said the head of one consultancy in Beijing, “to choke off investment and get the state to step back in, to stop the ability of investors to place bets.”
Xi Jinping Can’t Handle an Aging China | Foreign Affairs – less convinced this assertion is true, when we look at natalistic policies in authoritarian regimes such as what happened in Romania under Nicolae Ceaușescu with Decree 770 which was one of the strictest anti-abortion law at the time, or Nazi Germany’s breeding programmes
US Companies in China Grow More Pessimistic of Ties: AmCham Survey – Bloomberg – Some 87% of respondents to a flash survey taken last week said they were at least slightly pessimistic about US-China ties, according to the survey published Wednesday by the American Chamber of Commerce in China. That was 14 percentage points higher than the chamber’s previous poll. “Bilateral relations between the United States and China have substantially deteriorated,” said Lester Ross, chair of AmCham China’s Policy Committee. “It’s hard to see at this point when they will begin to improve — and this, of course, affects the ability of business to operate across borders.”
China Ratchets Up Pressure on Foreign Companies – WSJ – Business executives who have consulted with Chinese authorities say a central tenet of the effort is the desire to more tightly control the narrative about China’s governance and development, and limit the information collected by foreign companies such as auditors, management consultants and law firms that could influence how the outside world views China… Some foreign business executives say they worry the rewriting of the espionage law means that many topics, ranging from the status of Taiwan to China’s human rights record to technology such as semiconductors, are now becoming off limits in discussions with their Chinese counterparts. The recent trouble for foreign companies in China is drawing criticism in Washington. Rep. Mike Gallagher, a Republican from Wisconsin who chairs a congressional committee on the Chinese Communist Party, said in a statement Thursday, “Our business leaders need to take off their golden blindfolds and recognize that the recent police raids of American companies Bain and Mintz are not one-offs, but part of a long, proud tradition of exploitation.”.. The push is driven by a deepening conviction within China’s leadership that foreign capital, while important to China’s economic rise, isn’t to be fully trusted – if I was a brand planner in China or Hong Kong I would be very wary at the moment as this will spill over into agency life (paywall)
Longitudinal consumer behaviour change around increased empathy in western markets
A lot of this focus on the expertise in the ‘aspiration economy’ sounds like brands back in the early 1990s again. The kind of expertise exemplified by Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity or the characters Randall Graves and Dante Hicks in Kevin Smith’s movie Clerks.
The new industrial policy, explained – by Noah Smith – the speed and disruptiveness of China’s entry into the global trading system destroyed the career trajectories of large numbers of American workers and hurt the economies of whole regions. Second, U.S. complacency about the trajectory of Chinese politics, combined with a massive campaign of technological espionage, hastened and encouraged the rise of a new, hostile superpower. By the mid-2010s, only economists thought that free trade was still an unquestioned good, and the country wasn’t listening to economists the way it used to
Too Big to Challenge? | danah boyd | apophenia – the tech industry represents 9% of the U.S. GDP and only five Big Tech companies account for 25% of the S&P 500. Prior to Covid, most of the growth in stock market came from Big Tech. Now, as the U.S. economy is all sorts of wacky, Big Tech is what is keeping the stock market’s chin above water. In the process, Big Tech is accounting for more and more of the stock market – edited for brevity
The gender pay gap is not a myth, it’s math – it’s mostly not a discrimination story, it’s a parenting story. But more flexible employment is likely to be more of a discrimination story
Microsoft-branded mice and keyboards are going away after 40 years – this reminds me of when a new exec joined Bill Gates era Microsoft in the late 1980s/1990s. The company had unintentionally had in warehouses 3 years sales worth of Microsoft mice ready to sell. Their hardware with the exception of an ergonomic keyboard haven’t been great products that were superior to other technology companies
Interesting that even state broadcaster Deutsche Welle is complaining about the poor quality of modern German cars. Back in the early 1970s BMWs had a reputation as being clever fragile rust buckets, but the decline of Mercedes is far more dramatic in terms of quality. The decline seems to be in lock step with the globalisation of these companies and an increased focus on shareholder value.
Compare and contrast with older Mercedes cars across the Middle East and Africa.
Project MUSE – China’s Hong Kong Affairs Bureaucracy: Factional Politics and Policy Consistency – “From the perspective of factional politics, this article sheds light on the functions and operations of the Central Liaison Office and the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office (the “two Hong Kong offices”) throughout the history of the Communist Party of China (CPC), focusing on the 2013–22 period. The authors posit that the stronger the factional relationship between the top leader responsible for Hong Kong affairs and the heads of the two Hong Kong offices, the greater the policy consistency between the two offices and the central authorities on Hong Kong issues. This article uses text mining techniques to measure the degree of policy consistency between Chinese President Xi Jinping and the two Hong Kong offices from 2013 to 2022. In 2020, Xi appointed his protégés as directors of the two Hong Kong offices, thus regaining absolute control over Hong Kong affairs. Xi may further tighten his hold on Hong Kong in the future, thereby undermining the region’s autonomous status.” – Interesting aside: The Party and State Institutional Reform Plan (党和国家机构改革方案) unveiled in March established the Hong Kong and Macao Work Office of the Central Committee (中央港澳工作办公室) on the basis of the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office of the State Council. The latter has essentially become a Party body instead of a state body, and the arrangement is now “one organisation, two nameplates” (ie., two identities). – expect even further ratcheting of authoritarian measures in all aspects of Hong Kong life and economy
Culture and technology adoption’s effect on Japanese information design online. It reminds me of the early web portal designs were more like print newspapers.
Interesting that the Korean government is allowing these strikes to go ahead given the central role of Samsung in the country.
Luxury
Alibaba, Partners Fight Fraud and Root Out Counterfeits – Over 730,000 IP rights were under Alibaba protection by the end of 2022. 98% of IP takedown requests by rights holders were handled within 24 hours for the third consecutive year – I wonder what Amazon numbers look like for this?
I didn’t realise that Taiwan’s semiconductor expertise went back this far. DigiTimes has unprecedented access to the elder statesmen and experts on the early Taiwanese semiconductor industry
McDonalds CSR activities came up a few times over the past day or so I thought I would visit it. CSR stands for corporate and social responsibility. A few American PR executives that I have come across used not to like the S in the middle, which sounded like socialism. The idea was doing good to enhance brand reputation – generally it was a strategic function.
ESG operates at a higher level. CSR predates ESG as an idea. McDonalds CSR is interesting because of the tactical way it seems to be employed around what a couple of rules that I have noticed.
Children are always a good universal focus of McDonalds CSR, which is the reason why Ronald McDonald House is a common theme throughout the worldwide operations of McDonalds
McDonalds CSR is on the side of authority, hence its support for the Metropolitan Police when dealing with XR protests and Korean national service draftees. There is a risk that this could make its conduct in authoritarian countries more problematic
To be a poem. – from the Web Curios newsletter ‘is a digital poem by Alicia Guo – it’s infinite and self-generating, and I don’t quite know how it works or where it’s pulling the words from, but each time it’s different and each time it’s fragmented and magical and silly and poignant and confusing and beautiful and I would like this to be read forever by a choir of machine voices until the heat death of the universe please thankyou.‘
The playground behind the interviewee before it was refurbished in the early 2000s used to have a roundabout that I was thrown off at a tangent while it spun around when I was about 3 or maybe 4 years old and landed straight into a puddle. I wore a red hooded anorak made of a red sherpa fleece fabric with an elasticated hood, cuffs and bottom which soaked up half the puddle like a sponge. The photographer had his back turned to Grove Road and what is now an Iceland supermarket. Back when I fell off the roundabout it was a Kwik Save.
Struggling
Even back then it had a reputation of being a hard neighbourhood. Local shops such as Griffiths the butchers catered for a customer base struggling to make ends meet.
To the photographer’s left down the road a bit would have been a social club for (former) members of the Civil Defence. The Civil Defence Corps itself had been stood down in 1968. It was a solid working class area full of unskilled and semi-skilled workers who were employed either locally at the Lever factory next door or on the Mersey from the shipyards of Birkenhead to the chemical industry of the Mersey basin and assorted factories further afield.
Community spirit doesn’t pay the bills
By the 1980s, it looked worse for wear. There were few jobs, fewer still that paid well. And that was before unemployment and the heroin epidemic took their toll. As the economy picked up in the 1990s, the benefits didn’t make it to New Ferry. The one bright spot was a pirate radio station ran by community DJs playing house and techno records every night of the week close by to Grove Road playground. I’d held a couple of small (250 people) all night parties (acid house and garage) in the Civil Defence social club, with the blackout curtains keeping the noise and lights away from nosy neighbours and police patrols.
The people who ran the club put on breakfast for the revellers after the main event. We played ambient music from CDs supplied by a friend’s older brother (Tangerine Dream, The Orb, Vangelis, Kitaro, Pink Floyd’s Shine On You Crazy Diamond and Abba’s Arrival) mixing between two Discmans as the tired revellers drank tea and ate bacon ‘bin lid‘ sandwiches while sprawled out on the floor.
Tickets were sold in advance and the venue details given out on the night by ringing an answerphone. Everyone involved broke even if they were lucky.
Despite being really hard scrabble there was a certain amount of community dynamism going on in the village hall. My Mum used to travel down there to go to knitting classes with older women, some of whom were Irish like her. They would knit for charity.
But all that won’t keep social decay from the door while the community is underemployed and underpaid.
No easy answer
The social decay described in the article isn’t something that happened overnight but over decades. There is no quick fix to the social decay of bad behaviour and feral gangs of children. It is not clear whether there is the commitment, investment, government will or the way to resolve this social decay.
The most individually logical thing to do in a time of social decay is thinking more about personal safety.
Techno-utopianism of early 2000s
Looking back the technology adoption of the 1990s and early 2000s was phenomenal. The mainstreaming of the cellphones, the PlayStation, home PC computers and internet access creating immediacy.
The changes wrought by mobile phones in particular are still rippling through the developing world.
Driving in Japan
I am a huge fan of walkabout and driving videos because you can tell so much about the environment looking at retail spaces, brands, clothing and social interactions going on around you. For instance Japan’s apparent rejection of the electric car for now, favouring hybrid vehicles instead. This particular one of a rural Japanese town gives you a good idea of where Studio Ghibli‘s work comes from.
Fintan O’Toole on Ireland
Great talk by Fintan O’Toole at the Edinburgh Book Festival.
Quiller came out of the cold war. The Quiller series were written under the name Adam Hall by Elleston Trevor who had actually been born Trevor Dudley-Smith. Elleston Trevor like most of the other writers had either served in the second world war or in the national service afterwards. Quiller features in 19 novels written from the mid-1960s to the last one in the mid-1990s.
The books go into a lot of technical detail about spy craft. While he is a man of action, he doesn’t live the high life like James Bond, but has to worry about filing expenses and grim and grey atmosphere of London and Warsaw Pact countries. He has a nervous tick when under stress and has to deal with ‘office politics’ of difficult personalities.
Like Bond Quiller appeared on film, The Berlin Memorandum was re-made as the Quiller Memorandum. Quiller was also made into a TV series by the BBC in 1975 for one season. I knew nothing about it until YouTube.
Spy novel industry
There was a veritable industry of British spy writers. Ian Fleming had James Bond which has been continued like some bizarre literary science zombification experiment long after Fleming himself had died. Post-Fleming’s death there has been 32 new James Bond novels written.
Len Deighton had the unnamed protagonist of his first set of books (though they would be given the name Harry Palmer in the film adaptations):The IPCRESS File, Horse Under Water, Funeral in Berlin, An Expensive Place to Die, Spy Story, Yesterday’s Spy and Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy. As this wasn’t enough Deighton wrote ten books about the jaded intelligence protagonist Bernard Samson.
Anthony Price wrote 19 novels featuring Dr David Audley and, or Colonel Jack Butler.
All of these characters had more ‘derring do’ than John LeCarre‘s George Smiley. Deighton’s Bernard Samson’s character has the jaded aspect of Smiley. Anthony Price’s stories are best described as as somewhere between George Smiley and Robert Hannay with the past and ‘present’ woven together.
For the love of books
I picked up the bug of reading these books from my Dad. He used to go and buy these books along with Alistair McLean novels from a florid man in the local market. (Alistair McLean novels were basically the same book and same character with different names and locations).
My Dad left school at 13, he can’t spell but at that time he loved reading novels, engineering books and history. They were around the house at home, so usually after my Dad had read them, I started to read them myself. My childhood reading was a weird mix of ‘children’s books’, fantasy novels which were considered suitable for children (J.R.R. Tolkien and Ursula LeGuinn), spy novels, text books and classic science fiction. My Mum made sure that I had a smattering of Irish folklore books in the mix as well.
One person’s literature is another person’s trash
Nowadays, alongside the weighty tomes of James A. Michener, you would be hard pressed to get an Oxfam shop to take many of these books off your hands.
While Le Carre & Fleming have their dedicated followers, the Quiller books, Len Deighton and Anthony Price will be overlooked.
The war on terror didn’t fire the imagination in quite the same way, yet as we go into a new cold war we might see a renaissance in Quiller-type archetypes in escapist fiction of our current times. Mick Herron’s Slough House series ground us too much in reality sometimes.
Abbott curated this interesting discussion on sports health. In my lifetime we’ve gone from football coaches giving players Guinness to bulk them up to this detailed scientific approach which I previously would have only associated with serious bodybuilders like my college friend Carsten who looking for marginal advantages.
Hong Kong
Brain-drained HK workforce marks historic decline – Asia Times – a few things here. The Chinese visa applicants (less than 15,000) coming in won’t plug the gap: 95% of Hong Kong Talent Visa Approvals Are From China – Bloomberg. Though this might not cover mainland Chinese graduating from Hong Kong universities. Secondly, once growth takes off Hong Kong will lose its relative attractiveness for Chinese from an economic point of view. Secondly, the brain drain of teachers, medical staff, social workers and middle class professionals is starting to become significant from the Hong Kong government’s perspective; but a rounding error from Beijing’s viewpoint.
Japan
Repost: Weebs! – by Noah Smith – Noahpinion – While I was in Japan over the last two weeks, I asked some local startup founders, VCs, consultants, and random friends whether they had ever heard the word “weeb”. Not a single one had. I was pretty stunned, because Japanese cultural products have given rise to a whole worldwide subculture, and people in Japan itself are barely aware that that subculture even exists. It’s not like it’s a fringe thing, either — the latest volume of the anime Spy X Family was the bestselling book in North America this week, and soldiers at the front in Ukraine do Pikachu dances to relieve stress. Japan became a cultural superpower almost by accident – this was a new one on me. I thought otaku was still the label. NHK World on famous ‘Weeb’ Steve Jobs.
pearº – The World’s Biggest Social Experiment – Pear Ring – imagine if Match.com as well as extending into events for singles decided to allow people to have a badge that said ‘I’m single, date me’. That’s the premise of Pear, except that the badge is actually a ring that looks like fake jade…
