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.
David Hoffman spent decades making corporate films and documentaries, he has self-made films and footage such as this clip on Giorgio Moroder. If you’re younger than 30, Giorgio Moroder is the old guy who collaborated with Daft Punk on their album Random Access Memories. The story of Giorgio Moroder is larger and more complex than this.
Start to Musicland
At the time of writing 83 year old Moroder has spent over six decades in the music industry. Giorgio Moroder came from an artistic family in a small corner of what is now Italy, that spoke German and Italian. His brother Ulrich is a famous painter.
From the age of 18, Moroder worked as a musician and songwriter. He eventually got into sound engineering. He founded the Musicland Studios in Munich, which was a popular recording venue with even large artists like the Rolling Stones.
Songwriting
While Giorgio Moroder is most famous as an electronic music producer, he couldn’t have succeeded without songwriting. Before his success in electronic disco and after it, he was a successful songwriter. Through the 1960s and 1970s, artists often covered songs in different languages. In addition Moroder’s birthplace helped him to be multi-lingual. The royalties from these songs helped him build the production side of his business.
Moroder claimed that the song he was most proud of writing was Berlin’s Take My Breath Away– made famous by the original Top Gun movie.
Electronic production to disco
Musicland gave Moroder a base in the 1970s to start producing music. Here is where he started to record disco projects.
Munich Machine
One of the projects was Munich Machine – a mix of electronic music with session musicians and singers. Like a lot of European disco at the time it draws from latin music elements and even classical music, with a mix of original songs, interpolations of classics and high tempo cover versions of older pop. The original Munich Machine album art featured ‘Gundam’ type robots that sent my young imagination into overdrive. I saw them in the clouds on long journeys or in car parts my Dad had around the place. Munich machine went on to make three albums.
Munich Machine influenced a lot of hi-energy recordings, as well as British gay club culture like Almighty Records.
Productions done for artists that they worked closely with like Donna Summer’s I Feel Love and Midnight Express movie soundtrack contribution The Chase were much more driven by synthesisers – rather than ‘traditional’ instruments supported by synthesisers. As disco record production budgets shrank away from the Salsoul orchestra-driven productions, electronics made dance music more financially viable and Moroder showed the way.
Recursion to Daft Punk
And in a further link back to disco Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter had a father who was a peer of Giorgio Moroder. Daniel Bangalter better known as Daniel Vangarde was a disco era writer producer who was behind Ottowan’s D.I.S.C.O. and The Cuban Brother’s Cuba with a more conventional disco sound. You can see Bangalter senior’s influence in the way Daft Punk wrote and produced music.
The David Hoffman clip era
The David Hoffman clip of Giorgio Moroder, shows his electronic studio set up I guess around the time of Giorgio Moroder’s E=MC2 album. In the same way that Bob Dylan’s 1965 move to incorporate electric instruments and rock sound into his previous accoustic folk sound shook things up, E=MC2 could also be considered to a similarly iconic moment.
Moroder and his studio partners created a pre-programmed, using only electronic sounds for the instruments. It was also described as first electronic live-to-digital album.
A quick aside on digital recordings
Japanese broadcaster NHK had a stereo digital recorder working in its research lab in 1969, Dr. Takeaki Anazawa of Denon and others had been doing digital recordings from 1971, these were live one-take recordings mostly of jazz and classical music music performances. Denon digital recorders went on record more jazz, classical and traditional Japanese music over the next couple of years. But it was only Sony’s PCM-1600 in 1978 that made digital recording viable for commercial recording studios.
Ry Cooder is the first popular music artist to make an album Bop Til You Drop as a digital recording using a custom-built 32 track digital tape machine by 3M.
It was in March of 1979 that Philips demonstrates its first compact disc player, a prototype called the Philips Pinkeltje. The first commercial production of compact discs was made in August 1982 and the first commercial compact disc players are launched on October 1, 1982 by Sony and Philips.
Recording E=MC2
Moroder uses US start-up Soundstream’s digital recorder, that makes use of computer tapes as its recording medium, which gives an indication of how forward looking Giorgio Moroder was at the time. (Soundstream goes out of business in 1983).
Moroder’s album was probably being recorded and produced by the time Sony launched their PCM-1600. E=MC2 was released at the end of August 1979.
Giorgio Moroder combined digital recordings with electronic instruments. On the album there are credits for ‘programming’ and computerised digital editing. This was a decade before DigiDesign (now AVID) launches its Sound Tools (which evolved into Pro Tools) software for computer-based audio recording, editing and mastering.
This was a few years before Ikutaro Kakehashi of Roland proposed developing a standard way of communicating control instructions to instruments to Oberheim Electronics founder Tom Oberheim. This was seen as the starting point to come up with interoperable instrument instructions.
At the time when Moroder made E=MC2. Some instruments from the same company could control each other, but couldn’t control ones from other companies. It would be four years later before the first MIDI instruments would be launched for sale.
In addition, other instruments had no method of electronic control at all, which is why you see electronically actuated motors pushing instrument keys in the footage below.
Now all of this could have been done in software like Apple’s Garageband, but not in 1979. In fact, it would be 25 years before Apple launches Garageband.
Shusei Nagaoka
As another aside the original album artwork with Giogio Moroder wearing an electronic t-shirt was done by Japanese artist Shusei Nagaoka, famous for The Electric Light Orchestra’s (ELO) Out of The Blue cover art with its space opera visuals. The image that Hoffman uses below is from the remastered re-released version of E=MC2 without Nagaoka-san’s iconic artwork.
Space Battleship Yamato goes back to one of the most creative periods in Japanese animation or anime as its known. It develops a complex plot and covers themes such as honour, sacrifice, death and loss.
The show was originally made in three TV series and four movies from 1973 through to 1983. An additional five episodes were made from 2004 – 2007. There was a 2009 animated film reboot and a live action film the following year. It was then remade as two 26-episode TV series between 2014 and 2017 with the remakes of the original movies from 2021 onwards.
In addition, there were manga adaptions of the Yamato universe published in 1974 and 2000.
Star Blazers or Space Battleship Yamato also indicates the curious relationship that Japan has with its imperial legacy.
The Yamato was named after a Japanese province that’s the current Nara prefecture. The original Yamato and its sister ship the Musashi were the heaviest battleships ever built with the largest guns.
What these Japanese battleships lacked in numbers compared to the American navy, they made up for in firepower. Unfortunately for the Imperial Japanese Navy, the very nature of warfare at sea was changing with the rise of the aircraft carrier. The Yamato was sunk in the East China Sea along with five other warships as it sought to engage and slow down the US invasion fleet attacking Okinawa. The Musashi had been sunk the previous year off the coast of the Philippines.
In the story, earth is threatened by an alien race who irradiated the earth’s surface, requiring the survivors to live underground. A spaceship is needed to get help to undo the damage. There are clear analogues of the Cold War and the atomic bomb experience of Japan in the plot line, along with the popularity of disaster movies.
In order to make the spaceship christened Argo, the ship is built around the sunken wreck of the Yamato, joining the Japanese imperial past and pacifist present together.
Satellite and open source intelligence
Satellite technology improvements allowing more sensing capability to be fitted in a much smaller package is changing what can be done and reducing costs. The analogy of mainframe to personal computer movement with a 1000 fold increase in technological change is very interesting.
Progressive distortion
YouTuber Curious Droid asked the question Why is Older NASA Launch Film Footage Still the Best? The use of engineering cinematic film created some of the most iconic footage of the space race. It turns out that its a fascinating edge case of how film handles over exposure better than digital cameras reminded me of how analogue tape handles over peak levels compared to digital recording in a similarly progressive way. It seems film mirrors the progressive distortion of analogue audio recordings.
Sengoku burai (戦国無頼) aka Sword for Hire
The 1950s saw the resurgence of a confident and creative Japanese film industry. Sword for Hire is a classic example of a chambara film. The ronin character in chambara films is a prototype for the stranger that comes into town in western films.
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.‘
