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.
Wired magazine had an interesting article on revisiting old technology magazines. The idea was that while in some ways technology has progressed. In other ways, good ideas got bypassed. There are a number of Good ideas that might have more currency now. There is a contrasting ahistoric technology view held by some Silicon Valley luminaries.
Bret Victor gave a presentation ‘from 1973’, showing the fallacy of the ahistoric technology viewpoint. These ideas will be of more relevance to the audience of programmers, but you can grasp the gist of what’s going on.
One of the reasons I stuck with the Mac platform was that small development houses and lone programmers built useful software based on similarly niche concepts.
Now these software applications, alongside web services that have been developed in a similar way, like Newsblur and Pinboard are a key part of my workflow.
McDonalds Japan have a reputation for doing localised products to appeal to Japanese consumers. The flavours and the marketing are grounded in Japanese culture. They have tapped a well loved manga Touch (published during the 1980s) for an advert to promote the 30th anniversary of the chicken Tatsuda burger.
The Oxford Union is trying to keep its programme of speakers going via online sessions. Including Hong Kong exiled dissident Nathan Law.
Oxford Union
Finally Asian Boss appealed to viewers for donations as they are struggling financially and are likely to shut down soon without money. This raises questions about the effectiveness of monetisation on YouTube, even with a lightweight structure media organisation like Asian Boss.
Should you wish to do so, you can donate directly to Asian Boss here.
Collapse OS — Bootstrap post-collapse technology – a vision of dystopian technology that fits right in with William Gibson’s more recent views of the future with the Jackpot. A slow moving systemic collapse due to global warming, flooding, pollution, global conflict, terrorism and pandemics
The battle inside Signal – Platformer – Casey Newton has pulled together an interesting portrait of Signal and how its developing as its user base scales
Online retailers are playing a risky game with the UK high street | Financial Times – like Arcadia and countless rivals, Debenhams had underlying conditions stemming from over-enthusiastic cash extraction. CVC, Texas Pacific and Merrill Lynch acquired Debenhams in 2003 in a £1.8bn leveraged buyout that needed just £600m of equity. The trio then extracted more than £1bn via property sale and leaseback agreements and floated it again for almost the same price in 2006 – the Times makes a really good case with regards private equity excesses. Other examples outside the retail sector include TWA and Eircom
Jim Slater and the warning from the 1970s that we ignored – BBC News – a very brief piece in the BBC Online reflecting on the legacy of Slater Walker. The reality is that there needs to be a far deeper reflection on the effect of his asset stripping model had lighting a touch paper that led directly to deindustrialisation, populism and Brexit.
“Marketing is what you do when you have a sh#tty product.” – Christopher Lochhead – not particularly smart viewpoint, though great product and service design really helps marketing and helps reduce the amount that needs to be spent due to word of mouth. A second thought occurred to me, people with this mindset are building the entire martech stack….
CES 2021 – the Consumer Electronics Show usually sets the tone at the start of the year for consumer-oriented technology. It usually fills up Las Vegas’ hotels and conference facilities.
CES 2021 went online only. Like attending online conferencing the experience was lacking. Networking and informal conversations aren’t something that technology has managed to solve.
Consumer electronics manufacturers didn’t let the virtual nature of CES 2021 put them off though. LG and Samsung went gangbusters rolling out new products. One can understand their enthusiasm based on CTA research for US TV sales in 2020:
Televisions: Households channeled discretionary dollars into upgrading TVs in a record-setting year for shipments in 2020. CTA expects steady demand for displays in 2021 as TVs remain the centerpiece for entertainment in homes. Television shipments will drop 8% to 43 million units in 2021, the second-highest volume on record, while revenues will decline just 1% to $22 billion. Growth areas for TVs in 2021 include sets over 70-inches (3.3 million units, up 6%) and 8K Ultra High-Definition TVs (1.7 million units, up 300%).
U.S. Tech Industry Revenue to Jump 4.3% in 2021 After Record Year in 2020, Says CTA
According Parks Associates, smart TVs were the most popular devices for streaming content. This has been on the rise since 2018. This offers a business opportunity for TV manufacturers and also a potential point of differentiation.
Based on research by Park Associates
TV vendors were looking at differentiating their products from the increasing amount of competition.
Looking at the change in TV design; where there is less distinction from the display technology, cabinet or frame design, even OS (with Android) has become commoditised – new sources of differentiation become important.
LG has been soldiering on with with version 6 of webOS, originally derived from Palm’s attempt to meld HTML 5 web service based apps on top of Linux during the mid to late noughties. (It was also interesting that Samsung didn’t do a similar thing with their Tizen OS; which is derived work done by Intel and Nokia on Linux for mobile and consumer electronics applications.)
Google Duo tried to get a jump on Zoom by having support in smart TVs. TVs were found to be supporting multiple voice assistants which implies that there has been a stalemate amongst the major players. Whether or not that will result in voice service customer us promiscuity in the home is an interesting question.
On the hardware front, Japanese manufacturers Sony & Panasonic were promoting the use of onboard machine learning to optimise image processing in real time.
SWAS – screen with a subscription
LG expanded its support of content streaming services to include streaming games platforms. Looking at the Parks Associates data, one can understand why they think that the games console market is ripe for disruption.
Samsung looked to get into the digital art market, with subscription based imagery available on its Lifestyle TV line, which look like a picture frame when off. This is only three decades after Bill Gates Xanadu 2.0 home was filled with digital art. He patented the e-picture hanging in 2003.
Samsung has gone into coopetition with Peloton with new functionality within the Samsung Health function on its TVs. But also integrating with the fitness training service. The camera and machine learning provides guidance and advice on form for exercisers. This mirrors where Apple has gone with its fitness offerings that are included in the Apple One subscription.
Sony doubled down on its content business with the Bravia CORE streaming service for its top of the range TVs. A few things with this announcement:
CORE uses up to 118Mbits/sec for ‘IMAX enhanced’ content
It is initially only a 2-year project, which implies that it might be a reaction to COVID limited box office numbers rather than an ongoing Netflix killer
It is also interesting that Sony is still hamstrung by its different lines of business and hasn’t launched a streaming games service in its TVs for fear of cannibalising PlayStation sales.
Other revenue streams on screen
LG Shop Time 2.0 built on the Shop Time app launched late last year. ShopTime allows you to buy what you see on screen with 1-click in partnership with the Home Shopping Network. Korea has a large TV shopping culture, with mobile commerce and TV experience integration, so this move seems to be a logical progression.
Picture I took on a trip to Ulsan in 2012, TV home shopping integrated with mobile commerce by scanning QRcode to buy item currently being sold on the show.
However the launch of Shop Time 2.0 is a decade on from the pioneering work by Japanese media house Girlwalker; that mixed live and streamed entertainment with 1-click shopping. Their Tokyo Girls Collection and Shibuya Girls Collection events set the standard in this kind of retail experience.
Samsung TV Plus focused on new targeted advertising capabilities with its own DSP and DMP solution. Ad tracking provides a record of everything that you watch on TV for better ad targeting.
SWAS and the other revenue streams change the game for TV manufacturers at CES 2021. Previously, a TV was once in a decade purchase. Now manufacturers have the opportunity in the upfront purchase and in multiple recurring revenue streams. The increased amount of technology in the devices, implies an expectation of faster upgrade cycles. However device security and data privacy still don’t seem to be issues on the radar of TV manufacturers.
AIoT – artificial intelligence of things
In the same way that fuzzy logic made its way into consumer electronics from rice cookers and cameras to lifts, connected machine learning is now taking a similar path with variable results. Machine learning seemed to feature in CTA Innovation Award Honorees across categories at CES 2021.
The COVID-19 factor
CES 2021 itself went virtual because of the pandemic. And two trends became apparent. Machines replaced service staff with devices like an autonomous shopping trolley that would follow the consumer around a supermarket. The second was disinfection, with UV light used as a the go-to germ-killing technique. LG had a number of robots for aiding in hotel room service functions such as delivering items including food packages. There was also a bot for sterilising empty rooms with UV. Accessories company Targus won an award for its UV-C desktop disinfection lamp.
Cheddar put together an interesting study into popular Christmas songs. I really like that Cheddar put their sources including The Wall Street Journal and other news sources. I’d love to see more people do this on YouTube videos. The start of popular Christmas songs took off with recording music and the move away from religious music to a more secular family festival celebrated in America.
As the clock ticked down to Brexit finally happening, I watched the late Darcus Howe’s three part series White Tribe using the All4 service. Looking back two decades, you could see effects of the Thatcher administration which accelerated the decline of the British industrial heartland without thinking about what came next beyond shopping malls, loft apartments and garden festivals. The schism in society that fuelled Brexit was readily apparent. The void of what being English meant, was again apparent during the head-scratching paean to the NHS that was the London Olympics opening ceremony. What I thought was most remarkable is that White Tribe is very consistent with what I saw in John Harris’ series for the Guardian Anywhere but Westminster. All of it in retrospectYou can watch the full series of White Tribehere.
In common with other organisations from design agencies to the Irish government’s department of foreign affairs; Japanese airline ANA celebrated Christmas with a content focus this year DO: Bring Japanese Christmas Home ‘Tis the season… – ANA. The content is unusual as it focuses on secular Japanese Christmas traditions including Christmas songs. More Japan related content here.
Revealed: China suspected of spying on Americans via Caribbean phone networks | US news | The Guardian – China is alleged to have used Caribbean phone networks to conduct its surveillance. I’d imagine that they aren’t the only people to do this – At the heart of the allegations are claims that China, using a state-controlled mobile phone operator, is directing signalling messages to US subscribers, usually while they are travelling abroad. Signalling messages are commands that are sent by a telecoms operators across the global network, unbeknownst to a mobile phone user. They allow operators to locate mobile phones, connect mobile phone users to one another, and assess roaming charges. But some signalling messages can be used for illegitimate purposes, such as tracking, monitoring, or intercepting communications.– always use a VPN when roaming whether it’s Caribbean phone networks or elsewhere. We don’t know which Caribbean phone networks are vulnerable, could it be Digicel? More security related posts here.
LS Keynote Shanghai 2020: The Digital Transformation of International Brands in China – studies by Boston Consulting Group for the luxury sector showed that 93 per cent of purchases in China are influenced by digital touchpoints – which is significantly higher compared to the 60 per cent observed in the global market. This makes developing digital offerings in China more significant for luxury brands. On top of its external transformation, it is also crucial for brands to establish an effective organisational structure and infrastructure internally. When it comes to creating omnichannel experiences, the development of online channels should be done so in tandem with offline touchpoints, opined Liang. Any projects that straddle online and offline must be supported by frontline staff – something he sees as a key challenge for luxury brands today – interesting stuff from Luxury Society
To the moon and back, Chinese R&D is leaving the US behind | Financial Times – Once upon a time, the US government invested heavily in research. US federal R&D spending surged after the Soviets launched Sputnik, peaking in 1965 at 11.7 per cent of federal spending and at 2.2 per cent of gross domestic product. Frontier discoveries from that time led to the internet and GPS, the global navigation system. But in the decades since putting a person on the moon, US government investment in ideas has waned. In constant dollars, Nasa spending had fallen by more than half by the early 1970s; it has been flat ever since. By 2019, total federal R&D spend constituted just 2.8 per cent of all federal spending and just 0.6 per cent of GDP — the lowest since the start of the cold war.
US orders emergency action after huge cyber security breach | Financial Times – Hundreds of thousands of organisations around the world use SolarWinds’ Orion platform. The US department of Homeland Security’s cyber security arm ordered all federal agencies to disconnect from the platform, which is used by IT departments to monitor and manage their networks and systems. FireEye, a leading cyber security company that said it had fallen victim to the hack last week, said it had already found “numerous” other victims including “government, consulting, technology, telecom and extractive entities in North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East”.
‘This Feels Uncomfortable’: Nike Tackles Racism In Japan – observers criticised Nike for misunderstanding or disrespecting its host country — as if racial prejudice were somehow a component of Japanese culture that should not be challenged. The issue is more complex than both the content and the censure suggest, but the reaction was a reminder that Japan is still less accustomed to ‘purpose-driven’ brand work than many economically advanced markets. It also underscored that extreme right-wing views exist in Japanese society, even if people rarely give voice to them in an offline environment. For some ordinarily bold brands, it is likely to prompt a round of second-guessing before adopting a sensitive social topic as part of their marketing efforts. “People think discrimination isn’t part of Japanese life, but it is,” said one Japanese in-house communications head at a multinational consumer-facing company, who wanted to remain anonymous. She added that she did not see the work as offensive but as helping to raise awareness of unconscious bias. At the same time, she said she would weigh the risks with extra care before embarking on any diversity-oriented campaign
China pulls back from the world: rethinking Xi’s ‘project of the century’ | Financial Times – two Chinese banks lent $462bn, just short of the $467bn extended by the World Bank, according to the Boston University data. In some years, lending by the Chinese policy banks was almost equivalent to that by all six of the world’s multilateral financial institutions — which along with the World Bank include the Asian Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the European Investment Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the African Development Bank — put together. In global development finance, such a sharp scaling back of lending by the Chinese banks amounts to an earthquake. If it persists, it will exacerbate an infrastructure funding gap that in Asia alone already amounts to $907bn a year, according to Asian Development Bank estimates. In Africa and Latin America — where Chinese credit has also formed a big part of infrastructure financing — the gap between what is required and what is available is also expected to yawn wider. China’s retreat from overseas development finance derives from structural policy shifts, according to Chinese analysts. “China is consolidating, absorbing and digesting the investments made in the past,” says Wang Huiyao, an adviser to China’s state council and president of the Center for China and Globalisation, a think-tank. – there are limits to what even China can do to defy economic laws. Overall the infrastructure costs of the British empire were much higher than is generally realised
