Yōkoso – welcome to the Japan category of this blog. This blog was inspired by my love of Japanese culture and their consumer trends. I was introduced to chambara films thanks to being a fan of Sergio Leone’s dollars trilogy. A Fistful of Dollars was heavily influenced by Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo.
Getting to watch Akira and Ghost In The Shell for the first time were seminal moments in my life. I was fortunate to have lived in Liverpool when the 051 was an arthouse cinema and later on going to the BFI in London on a regular basis.
Today this is where I share anything that relates to Japan, business issues, the Japanese people or culture. Often posts that appear in this category will appear in other categories as well. So if Lawson launched a new brand collaboration with Nissan to sell a special edition Nissan Skyline GT-R. And that I thought was particularly interesting or noteworthy, that might appear in branding as well as Japan.
There is a lot of Japan-related content here. Japanese culture was one of odd the original inspirations for this blog hence my reference to chambara films in the blog name.
I don’t tend to comment on local politics because I don’t understand it that well, but I am interested when it intersects with business. An example of this would be legal issues affecting the media sector for instance.
If there are any Japanese related subjects that you think would fit with this blog, feel free to let me know by leaving a comment in the ‘Get in touch’ section of this blog here.
Hong Kong Stock Market filing – the Company (China Renaissance Holdings – *added this for clarity) has been unable to contact Mr. Bao Fan (“Mr. Bao”), Chairman of the Board, Executive Director, Chief Executive Officer and the controlling shareholder of the Company. The Board is not aware of any information that indicates that Mr. Bao’s unavailability is or might be related to the business and/or operations of the Group which is continuing normally (PDF) – Bao Fan has been incommunicado for a number of days. He is not responding to messages. While its unusual and considered bad practice having the same person as chairman and CEO, in China its more common. So Bao’s dual role at China Renaissance Holdings isn’t unusual. But that is the least of the worries that western investors will have about China Renaissance Holdings at the moment.
Meituan delivery workers waiting for the food to be prepared
Some thoughts:
China Renaissance Holdings has been involved in funding some of China’s biggest technology companies including Didi (think of Lyft or Uber as a western analogue) and Meituan (Deliveroo, Doordash or Just Eat equivalent.
Didi in particular seems to have gained the wraith of the Chinese government. Some of this feels to be down to sexism due to the company having a connected female president Jean Liu. The party leans more toward the Andrew Tait school of feminism
Mr Bao Fan’s disappearance evoked memories of Jianhua Xiao and his company Tomorrow Holdings. Xiao was snatched and smuggled out of his apartment in the Four Seasons in Hong Kong back in 2017. Xiao for a few years all that people knew was that he was wheeled out of the hotel asleep in a wheelchair despite having a security team. He then spent a few years ‘helping‘ authorities unwind his business Tomorrow Holdings. Finally, he got sent to prison for 13 years with charges including embezzlement and fraud. If this happens with China Renaissance Holdings, or any of the prominent companies that it has as clients like Meituan there would be a shockwave, even through the most pro-China of foreign investors like Bridgewater Capital or Goldman Sachs
Bao Fan is one of several executives who were disappeared for a while. The most prominent executive who disappeared from the public eye was Jack Ma. Ma then stepped back from his businesses. If Bao steps back from China Renaissance Holdings, the Chinese tech sector will lose an investment rainmaker. China Renaissance Holdings maybe unwound or its assets handed over to state-owned banking institutions
What happens next will likely impact western sentiment towards Chinese investment in the short to medium turn, but financial institutions are still seduced by the ‘Chinese opportunity’. And the smart money this time might be wrong
Patriotic Alternative wasn’t a name familiar to me when I first heard about them instigating a riot in Liverpool on Saturday night. It doesn’t take that much to create a ruckus in some of the poorer areas of Liverpool.
I wasn’t particularly surprised by the burnt out police van; it sounds like a Merseyside Saturday night that went a bit out of control. That’s as Liverpudlian as a fried breakfast served in a ‘bin lid’ – a large white bun or bap large enough to contain bacon, sausage, a fried egg or two and brown sauce.
But there were aspects that did surprise me and all signs point to Patriotic Alternative. It’s a multi-cultural city, everyone has relatives abroad whether its extended Irish family, West Indians or deep connections within the Chinese diaspora. Which is why I was surprised that Patriotic Alternative managed to stir up so much trouble against an asylum hotel in the Knowsley area of Liverpool.
The city does have a certain degree of prejudice; primarily sectarianism. Its one of the few areas in England that has a marching season rather like Northern Ireland with an Orange Order parade held annual in Southport back when I lived up there. But Knowsley was something else. Patriotic Alternative managed to do something that I never thought was possible in cities like Liverpool or Bristol.
So reading about the event and the role of Patriotic Alternative in Dazed was an eye opener. It portrayed a city that I no longer recognised. Patriotic Alternative apparently organised the protest on a Telegram channel. What Dazed claim happened is that mainstream political statements and mainstream media coverage created an environment ripe for trouble makers like Patriotic Alternative.
According to Hope Not Hate, Patriotic Alternative shared members with prescribed far right organisation National Action. For an organisation that has a couple of hundred core members Patriotic Alternative has an outsized footprint. This footprint seems to be driven by the Patriotic Alternative Telegram channel with some 5,000 followers
Consumers in the 1970s on the changing nature of growing old, unfortunately attitudes and biases haven’t improved in the last 50 years.
Economics
US chip packaging firm Amkor closes its Shanghai plant for a week amid global market downturn | South China Morning Post – this is signalling a recession, as was AP shipments to Chinese smartphone brands stay in decline in 1Q23, says DIGITIMES Research – Fourth-quarter 2022 smartphone application processor (AP) shipments to China-based smartphone vendors amounted to 137 million units, plunging 24% from the prior quarter and 20.3% from the prior year, and will continue to experience a double-digit decline in the first quarter of 2023, according to figures from DIGITIMES Research’s latest report covering smartphone AP shipments. Because of shrinking demand and high smartphone inventory at the channel in both China and emerging markets, AP shipments to China-based smartphone vendors had already experienced on-year declines for five consecutive quarters
How China Fell In Love With Cheap Wine | Sixth Tone – reminds me of my time working on the Bordeaux wine marketing board as an account at the agency I worked for in Hong Kong. The work was focused on mainland China and promoted Bordeaux as a lifestyle brand for wine consumption rather than just gift giving
Massachusetts Democratic organ donation proposal sounds like prisoner organ harvesting. | Slate – Democratic state representatives Carlos González and Judith García introduced legislation that would allow incarcerated people to go home early—if they “donated” their organs. Specifically, the bill would “allow eligible incarcerated individuals to gain not less than 60 and not more than 365-day reduction in the length of their committed sentence” if they “donated bone marrow or organ(s).” Gonzalez argued that the bill was a step towards advancing racial equity in health care and making it easier for people of color to obtain transplants.
Hong Kong
The Hong Kong government must break its habit of relying on property developers | South China Morning Post – the article itself isn’t that interesting, but the author is. Regina Ip would be what the conservative party in the UK would call a big beast. She is a former minister level politician in the pro-China camp. Add to this the fact that despite mainland Chinese companies now outnumber local and foreign firms in Hong Kong and the economy is in decline. I expect Ip’s op-ed to be the tip of an iceberg of a shift in economic drivers that will occur sometime after John Lee leaves office. The clock is ticking on the big five families to diversify their wealth out of Hong Kong and China, following Jardines example to go into Indonesia might be a prudent start
Hong Kong reopens with post-Covid charm offensive | Financial Times – Johannes Hack, president of Hong Kong’s German Chamber of Commerce, who sits on a new task force to promote the city, said a “long-haul” effort to change business perceptions would have to go beyond plane ticket giveaways. “If you have relocated corporate functions to another place, half a year later you are probably not going to reverse the whole thing,” he said. “People who have moved to Singapore with their teen kids, there is no way they are going to do that again . . . They are not going to come back.” – feeds into the ‘its just another city in China now’ narrative
UK universities starting to lose allure for Chinese | News | The Times – well that’s screwed the Ponzi scheme that universities have engaged in via over-priced student accommodation real estate investments for reasons that aren’t exactly clear given their ownership structure and charters
Japanese fashion magazine Popteen ends physical version, switches to web installments instead – move to online only and moving away from monthly updates. Popteen ended its physical publishing as of February 1, 2023, with the February 2023 edition (released on December 28, 2022) being its last. web-based articles will be released on the first and the 15th of every month, known as “Popteen media”, and full editions of the fashion magazine will be updated a few times annually. The main reason for switching to the web edition was to make the magazine more accessible to middle and high-school students, who may not receive an allowance or be able to work part-time to afford physical copies of Popteen
Great video on microchip counterfeiting and recycling. The Japanese are doing some of the best work authenticating chips. Also if its bad for US defence contractors, just imagine how bad it will be for the sanctioned Russian defence sector.
Seeing for the Sightless – Luo, 26, suffers from congenital cataracts and is pursuing a degree in acupuncture and massage therapy at a college in Beijing. He needs help on the scales as there is no voice assistant function at the training center. On a mobile app called Be My Eyes (BME), he sends out a video call. Pointing his phone camera at the scales, he asks, “Hello, can you read the number for me, please?” A volunteer on the other end tells him, “91 kg.” Luo says thanks and hangs up. Usually, these exchanges only last a few seconds. Being tech savvy, Luo wrote a program back in high school to help the visually impaired memorize English vocabulary, something he himself struggled with. The app would randomly pick a word from a list he composed and he would spell it out after hearing the word. BME, developed by Hans Jørgen Wiberg, a visually impaired man from Denmark, drew Luo’s attention as soon as the Android version was available in China in 2017. Currently, there are 445,000 visually impaired users from all over the world and more than six million volunteers on BME.
Style
Adidas Tumbles as Losses From Its Kanye West Venture Pile Up – The New York Times – interesting how badly Ivy Park is doing and this on their business in China: Adidas in China: a brand seeking its redemption – In the second half of 2022, Adidas CEO Kasper Rorsted estimated losses of revenue of more than 35% in the Chinese market. He declared that such a violent drop was caused by some mistakes. For instance, the struggle of keeping up with the local brands, the failed recovery after the zero-covid policy, and the scandal of Xinjiang cotton.After the winter Olympics, the trend of Guochao, or the “national trend”, started to develop. More young Chinese consumers prefer buying local brands rather than western sportswear brands. In August 2022, the local firm, Anta, overtook Nike and became the biggest sportswear brand in China with a revenue of more than USD3.79 billion. Li-Ning, another Chinese firm, also registered revenue of USD1.76 billion against Adidas’ USD1.72 billion, pushing the German brand out of the podium. The zero-Covid policy has been a big problem for Adidas. In 2022, the company had to deal with closed shops and rising costs. In particular, the general lockdown which paralyzed China for the last few years resulted in the desegregation of the complex system of supply chains built up by the German brand. The disrupted supply chains cost Adidas a loss of USD427 million in the first quarter of 2022.
SMIC expects 10-12% revenue drop in 1Q23 | DigiTimes – China-based pure-play foundry Semiconductor Manufacturing International (SMIC) expects to post a revenue decline of 10-12% sequentially in the first quarter of 2023, with gross margin falling further to 19-21%.
MotherDuck: Big Data is Dead – Jordan Tigani spent ten years working on Google BigQuery, during which time he was surprised to learn that the median data storage size for regular customers was much less than 100GB. In this piece he argues that genuine Big Data solutions are relevant to a tiny fraction of companies, and there’s way more value in solving problems for everyone else. I’ve been talking about Datasette as a tool for solving “small data” problems for a while
The idea of forbidden movies for me started as a child. There were certain things that I wasn’t allowed to watch. It was a big deal when I was allowed to stay up late on a Saturday night and watch Starsky & Hutch.
But movies that appeared later, were never open to me. So that created an aura of mystery and intrigue around these forbidden movies.
A cinema trip was something that I did maybe a dozen times prior to me turning 16, so television was my sole access to film full stop. Video shops came along a bit later.
Television used to feature movie trailers as part of commercial advertising. Judicious editing of footage into the trailer made ropey films like Hangar 18 seem much more attractive than they actually were. As an adult I can say that Darren McGavin and Robert Vaughn were wasted in the film. But it was a tough time for Hollywood and they needed to take what work they could get.
Being in school
In primary school and the beginning of secondary school there was a lot of bravado about who had seen what films. Death Race 2000 was a popular film to name drop because of its transgressive nature.
In reality the film was a Roger Corman produced black comedy that sparked their imagination. But the reality was a mix of imagination and third hand accounts from older family relatives made up the schoolyard mythology of Death Race 2000 and other forbidden movies.
Video tape
I had friends who went to art school and got tapes through them. For instance this interview by Geraldo Rivera with death row inmate Charles Manson together with a copy of Cannibal Ferox – an Italian exploitation film banned in the UK under the Obscene Publications act. Neither was ever screened on British TV.
The first time that I watched A Clockwork Orange was on a tape too. Stanley Kubrick asked for distributors Warner Brothers to remove A Clockwork Orange from UK circulation once it had run its corse at the cinema. The reason was media hysteria had built up around the film and alleged copycat crimes perpetrated. After Kubrick died, Warner Brothers put the film back into circulation and I got to see it in the cinema and own my own copy.
Although I had seen these films, I had watched them on noisy recordings, so it was like being at a drive through in the middle of a blizzard. But these under the counter copies only magnified the myth around these and other forbidden movies. The 051 art cinema in Liverpool and Moviedrome series on BBC did a lot to widen my film consumption and media literacy.
Exploitation cinema
Forbidden movies generally fell into one form of exploitation film genres. These were films that rode a current trend, were niche genres or had transgressive content of one sort or another. Out of exploitation films came the modern porn industry, spaghetti westerns, horror films, sci-fi and fantasy genre, blaxploitation films, LGBTQ cinema and the popularity of martial arts films in the west. They were typically shown in what were known as grind house cinemas in the US. These were cinemas that charged low prices and continually screened films one after the other.
Some film production companies such as Roger Corman’s New World Cinema and Cannon Pictures specialised in exploitation films. By the time home video and the video rental business came along there was a good body of content to draw from globally. For some reason Italy was a major source of content due to extensive experience dubbing into multiple languages. Italian films were also very transgressive to draw audiences in.
Content that was created to fuel cinema viewers landed on the small screen thanks to consumer video recorders. There was a single video standard (after Video 2000 and Betamax were outlicenced by VHS). At first VHS viewing was treated as something personal to the household. But eventually the law intervened.
On the childhood street were I lived until secondary school, there was a family who ran video rental shops and made hardcore pornography in a studio above one of the stores. Their films apparently starred several of our neighbours. They were prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act and the father did prison time for it.
The media and government started to take a second look at exploitation genre films that had managed to get a release to video. A pressure group got the government to create a list of 72 films thought to be in contravention of the Obscene Publications Act and then brought in the The Video Recordings Act 1984 which required all films to get a classification as if it was going to be released for cinema display. Included on the list of 72 forbidden movies were works by Wes Craven, Sam Raimi and Dario Argento – all of whom have made a major impact on the history of the cinema and the art of film-making.
Exploitation films live on through its influence on mainstream film makers such as Eli Roth, Quentin Tarantino and Roger Rodriguez. The modern equivalents of the exploitation production houses would be the likes of The Asylum who produce a lot of direct to Amazon Prime level films.
Mondo films to shockumentaries
Mondo films were pioneered in the 1960s by a duo of Italian directors: Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi. Jet travel had opened up the world, but long haul travel was only available to a privileged elite. Far flung parts of the world were largely a mystery to each other. Secondly, the world in a process of decolonisation. Jacopetti and Prosperi’s films showed that a documentary could be profitable at the cinema and could entertain. They weren’t without controversy.
They also inspired other directors to put together clips of salacious content as documentaries. The most famous of which was Faces of Death and its subsequent four sequels. The most controversial footage in Faces of Death was faked.
Found Footage
Found footage has been used as a cinema trope recently with the likes of the Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity and Cloverfield. But it started as a device in cinema with the release of Italian film Cannibal Holocaust which features on the UK list of 72 forbidden movies.
Moral panic
Moral panic accelerated by the tabloid press fuelled a lot of what happened in the UK film industry right through to the 1990s and beyond. The backlash against video nasties in the 1980s matched the backlash against Child’s Play 3 in 1993 when allegations were made that Jamie Bulger‘s killers were inspired by the film. That moral panic also came out again when one of them reoffended. Nowadays the panic is more focused on the internet.
The documented life
While film cameras were available in the pre-war period, much less people had access to their own film development lab. So ‘stag reels’ were able to be shot, but these were either personal films of the very rich, an inside film industry endeavour or involved organised crime.
The rise of home video in the 1980s changed things dramatically. The family that I mentioned early on who set up the pornographic film studio started with a video camera and recorder combo unit that they originally bought for filming weddings.
By 1984 the JVC GRC-1 camcorder provided consumers with a TV studio in a easily portable unit using VHS-C cassettes allowing for recording and immediate playback. Consumers started bringing these camcorders everywhere.
It reduced the cost of film making sparking an explosion in film making for local audiences from Nigeria to the Philippines.
The camcorder allowed things to be filmed that wasn’t previously possible, including every conceivable form of pornography that you could think of including ‘point of view’ or gonzo content. Accidents could be captured fuelling more series like Faces of Death.
Internet of everything
The internet opened up new opportunities for sales and viewership that non-authoritarian governments haven’t really controlled. If you have forbidden movies in one country, it could be available to watch or on DVD or Blu-Ray in another which saw a boom and then massive disruption in the media industry and made a mockery of banned or forbidden movies.
Smartphones
If the JVC GRC-1 pioneered the home TV studio, the smartphone mainstreamed the concept and online video platforms provided the broadcast infrastructure. Judicious use of a search engine allows you quickly to find content that exceeds anything shown on the video nasty list of forbidden movies. And it’s real from the war zones of the Middle East to the latest combat footage from Ukraine.
China is no longer a good thing on your CV, part of this is down to ‘Brand China’. You are likely to be viewed negatively by peers and even family members at home. From the Chinese perspective, foreigners are now viewed with more suspicion and distaste as the government has fermented fear of foreign spies and nationalistic populism. I am sure that the Chinese government would see it as advantageous if locals had these jobs instead. A position in China might be a rear-guard action now while the future of the corporation that you work for will now be elsewhere in Southeast Asia
There are better opportunities elsewhere in South East Asia such as Singapore, Vietnam or even Indonesia. A lack of travel to China opened up the eyes of foreign c-suite members who have spent a good deal of time looking elsewhere. Even businesses like Apple are looking at their supply chain options
China is more expensive to live in. Costs had been shooting up in the years running up to COVID-19 and haven’t got any cheaper
Accessing timely, good quality healthcare is an issue
Effective tax has risen a lot. You will have to pay into local pensions that you will never be able to use. So you are paying more tax and living in a much more expensive country
The Chinese visa system is much more hassle filled
China’s preference for hostage diplomacy
International schools have to follow a Chinese curriculum due to changes in regulations. If you value your child’s education, you will no longer want them to go to school there
The businesses that made life more tolerable in China have been disappearing. I won’t list off the range of bars in restaurants, but also access to English language books, formerly through stores like The Book Worm in Beijing. The eco-system of businesses that supported expats living in China is rapidly disappearing even before COVID-19 hit
A progressively stricter and harder to crack version of the ‘Great Firewall’
RUSI put together a great presentation on the nature of illicit finance from the perspective of terrorism and terrorist states including Russia and the People’s Republic of China. The foundations of illicit finance seems to be the offshore financial structures that were build up by the United Kingdom in the post-war period to capture the EuroDollar market.
In some ways this lecture on Illicit finance felt very familiar. It is exactly the same structures that John Le Carre outlined in his post-cold war novel Single and Single. The nature of illicit finance was also covered in Michael Oswald’s documentary The Spider’s Web – Britain’s Second Empire. This linkage was not lost on the audience attending the talk.
The concerns about illicit finance now are because these structures are being used to attack democracies at their core and buy influence for hostile states such as Russia and China. It is like the west is slowly awakening from a slumber as its enemies try to slit their throat.
Riding the slow train in China | The Economist – As Mr Xi enters his second decade as supreme leader, his sternly paternalist version of Communist Party rule seeks to draw ever more legitimacy from the provision of customer-friendly public services, supplied via modern infrastructure. In the case of China’s railways, at least, that promise of order and efficiency has been kept.
Wintershall’s empty bank accounts expose plight of western companies still in Russia | Financial Times – “We helped create a very powerful and dangerous Russia without being cognisant of the risk,” he said, while acknowledging that the country had done its best to remedy this in the past 12 months. And he said BASF risked repeating its Russian mistake in China. “What I’m really surprised about, and almost upsets me, is that while this is all happening . . . BASF decides to invest €10bn in China,” he said, referring to a planned chemicals complex that will be the company’s largest ever foreign investment. “That’s the most upsetting part,” he said. “That we don’t learn from it.” – this quote from Thomas Schweppe of 7Square nails the problem neatly
Finance
Thousands of offshore companies with UK property still not stating real owners | Tax havens | The Guardian – wealthy businessmen, Gulf royalty and states such as China have legally bought up billions of pounds of mostly London property, often via jurisdictions such as the British Virgin Islands (BVI) and the Channel Islands. Stephen Abbott Pugh, head of technology for Open Ownership, a non-governmental organisation focused on beneficial ownership transparency, said the fact that so many of the offshore companies are declared as owned by other companies or trusts means “the public still aren’t able to easily discover the people behind those companies in many cases”. “With access to many European beneficial ownership registers being shut off following a 2022 court ruling, the Register of Overseas Entities shows how useful public data is for tracking how offshore money is used to buy assets,”
Health
The 1964 House Report on how smoking affected the health of Americans went around the world. Sales dropped 30 percent in a week, and then picked up back to normal after existing smokers addiction kicked in.
How Microsoft’s Stumbles Led to Its OpenAI Alliance — The Information – For more than a decade, Microsoft Research, the company’s in-house research group, has touted artificial intelligence breakthroughs such as translating speech to text and software that could understand human language or recognize objects in images. But the company’s effort to commercialize its AI research moved at more of a crawl – this was at the centre of Microsoft’s innovation narrative for the best part of two decades. It’s embarrassing
Inside the secret Facebook groups where women review men | Dazed – then there’s the whole other side of ‘Are We Dating The Same Guy’, which is a lot more ethically ambiguous. Is it ever OK to publicly share someone’s photos and private conversations without their consent? Or in other words, to ‘doxx’? There’s a clear power differential, but if genders were reversed and guys were exposing females to strangers on the internet, it’s unlikely we’d see the group in such a positive light. “If a boy posted me and people were writing ‘red flag’ in the comments, I would genuinely be quite hurt,” says Tara, 20. She notes how, sometimes, users make particularly unfair remarks: for example, they’ll lambast a date for having “shit chat”, or “[talking] like a 60-year-old dad”.
Getting Personal With State Propaganda – China Media Project – Nanchang Aviation University (南昌航空大学), located in China’s southern Jiangxi province, announced that it had launched the “Jiangxi International Communication Research Center” (江西国际传播研究中心) in cooperation with the China Media Group, the state media conglomerate formed in 2018 directly under the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department. According to coverage by China Education Daily, a newspaper directly under the Ministry of Education, the new center is an experiment in combining central CCP media and universities (央媒+高校) to carry out international communication by using the “overseas student resources” (留学生资源) of the university.
