Ged Carroll

Category: japan |日本 | 일본

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.

  • Cristiano Ronaldo & things from last week

    Football star Cristiano Ronaldo is sponsored by a Japanese company to promote a facial fitness device resulting in a cringeworthy advertisement and some of the most uncomfortable event footage I have seen in a while. It is worthwhile watching just for the cringe factor. There is no word on how well the Cristiano Ronaldo promotion has been doing for manufacturer MTG.

    The deal looks like a triumph of money over fit with the Cristiano Ronaldo’s profile. It is a freakish spectacle. More related content here.

    Amazing video of how the FBI used to handle fingerprints prior to digitisation of records. The filing cabinets are impressive and the process is laborious. The sheer scale of the filing cabinet room is mind boggling. It is more like a factory than an office space.

    Finally a great presentation from New Zealand conference Webstock on the benefits of quitting, which seemed appropriate content to round this post off on

  • Ghost in the Shell

    Masamune Shirow’s Ghost In The Shell is a three-volume manga series (volumes 1, 1.5 and 2) that is based on a Japanese security service team who try and solve cyber-crime related issues.

    The stories deal with a future where technology is embedded into human beings and augment them. It is also based around a world where the internet of things is an everyday occurrence. Shirow’s future is believable. Unlike Star Trek, he recognised that the future is built in layers on the past. So you see this in the architecture in the background of picture cells.

    You also see that layers in terms of everything from clothing and personal effects to vehicles of the protagonists.

    The author obvioiusly goes deeply into the story as a thought experiment with copious side notes explaining either technological developments or why he has made certain decisions. The stuff that he incorporated was cutting edge scientific research at the time. Whilst I love the anime adaptions, this insight into Shirow’s thinking makes the books invaluable.

    The books seem to have been remarkably prescient about hacking and the risks of technology. In previous literature, hackers were generally on the side of good or libertarians. In Ghost In The Shell you have cyber warfare and cyber crime similar to our own reality today. A crumbling healthcare system, organised crime, private military entities and shadowy state actors.

    Unfortunately, the designers of smart televisions and refrigerators didn’t pay much attention to these books, otherwise they would not have left these products so open to being hacked. Come for the sci-fi stay the course of the books for the underlying ideas. More book reviews here.

  • Jim Yurchenco & other things this week

    Before IDEO was better known for corporate workshops and collaborative sessions; it did really good product design. This great interview / video by IDEO of veteran mechanical engineer and industrial designer Jim Yurchenco. Yurchenco is a throwback to when IDEO designed things.

    Yurchenco worked on the design of the original Apple mouse, in the video he discusses his approach to design. It is also great to see him actually using real tools, rather than just tapping away at a work station. Yurchenco was retiring last week and leaves IDEO with some 80 patents to his name. Alongside the original Apple mouse Yurchenco also worked on the Palm V, in his own words:

    That was a really important product for us, and the industry, Yurchenco says. “It was one of the first cases where the physical design—the feel and touch points—were considered to be as important as the performance

    You can read more on Yurchenco’s work here. I worked on the marketing of the Palm V and Vx. The exterior of the devices set the standard for the smartphones we got a decade later. The problem with the V and Vx is that they were held together with hot glue. Yurchenco made an object of beauty, but one that was very difficult to repair.

    The PDA launched with a lithium ion rechargeable battery around about the time that the Ericsson T28 came on the market. The T28 was the first phone with a lithium ion battery. This allowed Ericsson to make a really small clamshell phone. The Yurchenco design completely encapsulated the battery, rather like the first iPhone years later.

    Subtraction.com did a great job of collating the user interface (UI) designs done by Territory Studios for Guardians Of The Galaxy.

    In the same way that Star Trek, Ghost In The Shell and Star Wars have influenced engineers, who is to say that Territory’s work won’t be the creative DNA of new interfaces in the future?

    In the earlier days of the web, interactive content had a distinctly trippy feel, from site design to ‘Mind’s Eye’ videos and The Shamen’s generative screen saver.  Japanese group BRDG (Bridge) have gone back to that psychedelic feel with this brilliant discordant video:

    Twitter cards are something that is interesting me at work at the moment and I was particularly taken by this interactive one from Acura – the upmarket brand of Honda.

    Pizza Hut Japan, have managed come up with marketing gold by creating an interactive YouTube series based around the grand opening of a pizza restaurant run by cats. Japan is obsessed with cats, which explains the prominence of felines. I am just surprised that Jonathan Hopkins and Nando’s hadn’t done it much earlier…

  • Japanese week

    Things that made my day this week has a lot of a Japanese feel, this maybe some sort of invisible psychological hand of some sort as I am currently reading Ghost In The Shell Man-Machine Interface by Masamune Shirow, but more on that later.

    First up Bose have been positioning their brand as having a love for music through a series of short films, my favourite one was about how Japanese people have taken the Jamaican dancehall sound and done their own thing with it. Japanese dancers have won competitions in Jamaica. Like hip-hop and Chicano car culture before it, Japan put their own spin on it rather doing straight cultural appropriation. 

    Usagi Yojimbo is an American comic drawn by a Japanese American author Stan Sakai and based on classic Japanese chambara film, so you can imagine how psyched I was to know that this was a proof-of-concept prior to a possible animated film.

    Toyo Tires have combined their Japanese heritage with tire technology to come up with yakatas (traditional summer weight kimonos) with a tire tread based print that still didn’t seem out of place.
    Toyo Tire yakatas
    Toyo Tire yakatas
    Moving away from the land of the rising sun to China, Apple’s new iPad featuring Yaoband who use an iPad in a similar way to the way the Art Of Noise used the Fairlight CMI or hip-hop producers used the famous Akai MPC workstation series. It’s interesting that Apple is focusing the light back on creativity.

    Finally a vintage film about the MTR in Hong Kong complete with a stuffy voiceover and pseudo-Krautrock backing track. The trains look retro-futuristic in a Logan’s Run kind of way

    More Japan related content here.

  • Oris Aquis depth gauge + more things

    Oris Aquis dive watch with built-in depth gauge

    IWC Aquatimer Deep 3 vs ORIS Aquis – Gear Patrol – Oris’ approach to its depth gauge on its Aquis dive watch is a really elegant design solution. In the Oris Aquis there are are no moving parts, or complex surfaces to waterproof. Instead the Oris Aquis relies on Boyles law and the different refractive index between glass, air and water to form a meniscus. You might worry about dust getting into the depth gauge of the Oris Aquis, but the risk is relatively low and would be likely to be cleaned out by water action. More related content here.

    Consumer behaviour

    China’s Growing Gray Market for All That’s Foreign – haitao – searching abroad

    Number of Cars Per Household Stagnates in Japan | WSJ – peak car in Japan (paywall)

    More Than a Third of Americans Have No Retirement Savings | TIME – shocking and astonishing

    Marketing

    BlueFocus Hires Holly Zheng To Oversee International Expansion | Holmes Report – Because the industry landscape is changing, people are looking for more integrated solutions. We want to be a solutions company — a one-stop shop when it comes to digital.

    Tumblr to start searching images for brand info | PR Daily EU – interesting use of image recognition

    Media

    Orange Bear | Facebook for Business – is it just me or is anyone else trying to see the business case / causality in this case study? It looks like a press release with bursts of numerical tourettes

    Online

    Giving You More Reasons to Share on SlideShare – explains why they weren’t taking premium subscriptions

    Google Made 890 Improvements To Search Over The Past Year | Searchengineland – competitive advantage right there in the headline

    Twitter now officially says your timeline is more than just tweets from people you follow – Quartz – interesting changes

    Google Is Planning to Offer Accounts to Kids Under 13 – WSJ – interesting restrictions and opportunities for marketers willing to play ball

    Telegraph “Forgets” Its Own Stories Documenting Google “Right To Be Forgotten” Removals | Marketingland – something recursive in the nature of this and straight from the pages of Franz Kafta

    Security

    Researchers find it’s terrifyingly easy to hack traffic lights | Ars Technica – no real surprise

    Technology

    Sales of wearables set to rocket despite current ‘chaotic’ stage of development | Marketing Week – nothing particularly insightful

    Are processors pushing up against the limits of physics? | Ars Technica – the struggle to extract greater parallelism from code. Even low-end smartphones now have multiple cores, but we’ve still not figured out how to use them well in many cases.

    A portable router that conceals your Internet traffic | Ars Technica – inexpensive pocket-sized “travel router”

    A brief history of USB, what it replaced, and what has failed to replace it | Ars Technica – I found an ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) connector keyboard at the weekend

    VCs suck (but there’s a way you could prove me wrong) | Fortune – issues in data transparency

    Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet – Atlantic Mobile – one of the nicest pieces I have read in a while. Lastly other forms of communications are harder to search or keep a record of.

    Wireless

    Lenovo becomes China’s top smartphone supplier: IDC – interesting that Lenovo managed to get a jump on the likes of Xiaomi and Huawei

    The simple reason smartphones are getting bigger | Quartz – APAC market preferences dictating global move