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.
KanDenko is a Japanese construction company that specialises in infrastructure. This advert communicates effectively what they do in a creative manner. KanDenko must have spent a good deal of money to have this film produced. But it is well worth it.
Vintage Singapore
Footage of Singapore‘s North Boat Quay circa 1983. This area has now been redeveloped with the shop houses refurbished and now holding cafés, restaurants and bars. What this video shows is traditional Chinese life that would have been similar to the mainland prior to Mao’s ‘new China’ which culminated in the cultural revolution.
Thankfully overseas Chinese and Taiwan had preserved the culture and beliefs.
Stussy x Nike
Nike and Stüssy have collaborated on bringing an old Nike model back to life.
New Order’s Blue Monday on 1930s instruments
The BBC made a video of Orchestra Obsolete using early electronic instruments (including a Thermin) alongside traditional instruments to reproduce New Order’s Blue Monday
Distorted Kowloon City
When I first saw this footage of Distorted Kowloon City, I was reminded of the locative art discussed in William Gibson’s novel Spook Country. I read this shortly after being switched on to where 2.0 services while working at Yahoo! on search and Flickr offerings. Yahoo! bought Whereonearth, to better understand what ‘local’ meant with its InternetLocality product set. At the time Whereonearth worked with Three on local mobile services and was a data provider to the likes of insurance companies and credit reference agencies. Yahoo! engineers like Dan Catt and Paul Hammond worked on projects like ZoneTag and including location data in the EXIF metadata of photography; something we just accept as normal on smartphones now.
Distorted Kowloon City is a piece of immersive digital abstract art. Or according to The Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC)
Kowloon City is full of collective memories of Hong Kong people. Spanning the old town with restaurants and specialty shops, Checkered Hill (also known as Radar Hill), tree-lined parks, the historical remains of the Kowloon Walled City and the former Kai Tak Airport, Kowloon City is as diverse as Hong Kong.
To re-interpret how we perceive, how we feel and how we see Kowloon City, moon.moon weaved the sensory data elements of the real world into an 360-degree audio-visual experience with the aid of original music and technologies (e.g. Point Cloud Processing and drone photography), allowing the public to re-discover Kowloon City from abstract art perspective.
Design Inspire | HKTDC
From this explanation, its a mix of history, Hong Kong culture and geography blended into the art work.
The work was done by local digital artist Moon Hung.
Fractured markets
The effect of low interest rates in the aftermath of 2008 on financial investors was to encourage increased risk taking and one of the first casualties of interest rate increases were UK pensions under management. The FT goes into more depth in a video documentary.
AT and T True Experience sprang out of the the mid-1990s. At that time AT&T was thinking about how they could own the customer as the internet superhighway became a reality.
David Hoffman
David Hoffman worked on promotional videos for AT&T at the time including a video showing a service based on General Magic internet appliances for business, personal use and telecommuting.
AT and T True Experience outlined in this video looked to be:
Customers relationship with the nascent web would be mediated through AT&T
AT&T also wanted to build an e-commerce shopping mall similar to what AOL later set up
AT and T True Experience went on to join similar services like Apple’s eWorld, CompuServe and AOL in irelevance as the first generation walled gardens fell away.
The tech ‘nepo babies’ are coming | Financial Times – SEC research found that seven or more years after listing, companies with perpetual dual-class shares underperformed. Still, founders continue to push for them
Refreshing our approach? Updating the Integrated Review – Foreign Affairs Committee – China ‘a significant threat to the UK on many different levels’ and dependency should be curbed, MPs warn. While supporting a potentially risky shift in using stronger language towards the economic and military giant, the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC) argues it must be backed up by action rather than “empty rhetoric”.
COMAC’s challenge to Airbus and Boeing and the perils of forced technology transfer.
Wall Street Journal on how financial companies are now buying up YouTuber back catalogue content in the same way that they have previously bought up music back catalogues
The buzz in part of our office about Midjourney has subsided to be replaced by buzz about ChatGPT, rather than Christmas. ChatGPT is is a software application used to conduct an on-line chat conversation via text. ChatGPT was considered to be a superior example of a chatbot down to the power of machine learning used in creating the content.
I was curious about how good ChatGPT actually was given the following commentary from The Verge:
The primary problem is that while the answers which ChatGPT produces have a high rate of being incorrect, they typically look like they might be good and the answers are very easy to produce
Vincent, J. (2 December, 2022) AI-generated answers temporarily banned on coding Q&A site Stack Overflow | The Verge
The Verge article was interesting. Most of the places where chatbots might be needed: providing customer services, regulated industries like finance would suffer from confident, but incorrect answers being provided to customers.
Secondly, media outlets decided that ChatGPT was a potential Google challenger, with outlets like CNBC comparing the two and equity analysts at Morgan Stanley feeling the need to come out and say that ChatGPT was not likely to replace Google.
Sample of conversation
Google’s innovators dilemma
What became quickly apparent Google’s narrative about being an innovator full stop, has been threatened by ChatGPT. Google as an incumbent is now stymied by Clayton Christiansen’s Innovator’s Dilemma. Google is no longer cool, its conversation related products are seen to be behind the curve and the company is seen as being too big to out-innovate itself easily.
So what’s ChatGPT like to use?
I have shared a picture of some of the better responses I had from the service. I started off with a certain amount of ambition. I asked it about who it felt might win the current war in Ukraine. I found that the training set of data used to power it was finished in 2021. This was obviously done to filter out the worst of the internet from the content, getting around rather than solving problems that previous chatbots have suffered from like Microsoft’s Tay project.
Eventually I managed to get on to safer ground for ChatGPT. It answered questions about what an AI winter was, whether fuzzy logic is a form of artificial intelligence (it is), whether Baye’s Theorem was a form of AI (it isn’t per se, but it is employed to solve some AI problems there similar to the kind of uncertainty challenges fuzzy logic solves.
ChatGPT said that AI (like Bayes Theorem) could be used to provide a solution to buffer bloat – which massively increases the latency on data networks.
I found out quantum computers could make an optimised AI more power efficient and the business expert systems popularised in large companies during the 1980s and 1990s were analogous to modern day AI systems.
It reminded me a lot of content I had read on Summly, the mobile news app that mashed up an AI service API with news sources to summarise articles. This start-up was bought by Yahoo! a decade ago.
In this respect, I do wonder whether ChatGPT is truly the quantum leap forward that many seem to think, or is it merely a reminder of how well understood technology can be applied in different ways?
Can India build a military strong enough to deter China? | Financial Times – I think that this is down to the lead China has in manufacturing capability and innovation as much as anything else. There is a substantial risk that India could lose many of its northern provinces in theory. In theory being the operative phrase here. Ukraine has show what’s possible with people fighting for their homes. It makes more sense for India to think about assymmetric and grey zone tactics at scale to bleed China’s financial and human lifeblood. From hacking well in advance of a conflict, to militias trained and equipped for guerrilla actions allowing for attack in depth once China crosses the threshold.
China boosts military aid to Africa as concerns over Russia grow – Nikkei Asia – China has kept its forces from direct engagement in crises in Africa as part of its noninterference policy, it has also taken an increasingly high profile in United Nations peacekeeping missions. It has sent more than 1,000 troops, police and specialists to oil-rich South Sudan, for example. “When Chinese interests were threatened by insurgencies in Nigeria, China issued a statement, as it still lacks the military commitment. This can, however, change in the future,” Ali said. Experts say China is more focused on economic and national security interests than on peacebuilding. Beijing prefers strategies centered on development that help to alleviate poverty and provide stable governance, but do not necessarily advance protection of individual rights and free markets. But this growth-first attitude may be counterproductive over the long term. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, China has a very close relationship with the government, but attacks in the resource-rich east of the country by a number of rebel groups pose threats to its mining interests. “Insurgencies happen as the product of social exclusion,” Nte said. “There must be a stable political climate to address economic degradation caused by the wrong policies.”
UK economy rebounds by more than expected in October | Financial Times – the second largest contributor to growth in October was performance of the health sector in administration of vaccine boosters and flu shots, the biggest sector was construction. But construction has started to slow since then with sites halting work in November
How Putin’s technocrats saved the economy to fight a war they opposed | Financial Times – tough moral questions to be asked. However, Central Bank governor Nabiullina’s moral calculus reminds me a good deal of convicted German war criminal Albert Speer, in particular the “Speer Myth”: the perception of him as an apolitical technocrat responsible for revolutionising the German war machine. The close alliance with Iran should allow both countries to pool expertise in sanctions busting.
Meanwhile air travel is going great guns according to airlines like Lufthansa who are bringing back their Airbus A380 jumbo jet airliners.
Hong Kong media mogul Jimmy Lai’s sentence casts chill over relaunch, analysts say — Radio Free Asia – “If you can’t say anything anyway, then you might as well locate [your office] in mainland China,” Chow said. “Using Hong Kong as a jumping-off point to the mainland is a waste of money, because rents are much more expensive than in mainland China.” – there is also the tax aspect (expats pay much more tax in Mainland China) and a transferrable currency, but otherwise the point is pretty valid
A Vibe Shift Is Coming. Will Any of Us Survive It? – In the culture, sometimes things change, and a once-dominant social wavelength starts to feel dated. Monahan, who is 35, breaks down the three vibe shifts he has survived and observed: Hipster/Indie Music (ca. 2003–9), or peak Arcade Fire, Bloc Party, high-waisted Cheap Mondays, Williamsburg, bespoke-cocktail bars; Post-Internet/Techno Revival (ca. 2010–16), or the Blood Orange era, normcore, dressing like The Matrix, Kinfolk the club, not Kinfolk the magazine; and Hypebeast/Woke (ca. 2016–20), or Drake at his Drakest, the Nike SNKRS app, sneaker flipping, virtue signaling, Donald Trump, protests not brunch
Amazon’s heroic phase is over | Amazon Chronicles – My first theory is that capitalism doesn’t stop evolving. The evolution of the microprocessor, digital computing, the internet, the personal computer, the World Wide Web, and the tech giants that have emerged in their wake are all transforming capitalism as we experience it and the culture produced by it in ways we don’t even fully understand. These are the biggest companies in the world and the ones with the greatest impact on how we think, work, shop, and communicate. You can’t understand capitalism in the twenty-first century without understanding how technology is changing it. I think this theory is pretty uncontroversial. It’s certainly not new. My second theory is that the arc of capitalism traced by Marx and Lukács and others writing in their tradition can also be retraced on a smaller scale. Like those early modern bourgeoisie, big tech has moved from its initial chaotic and subterranean strivings, to a heroic universalist phase where it championed political and economic liberation. Now these companies are consolidating their dominance by reducing or eliminating their workforce, shifting away from consumer goods, and brokering compromises with state power.
IEDM: DTCO & More than Moore – by Doug O’Laughlin – The future is about Design Technology Co-optimization (DTCO), and Backside Power Deliever Networks (BSPDN) is a huge part of the roadmaps forward post-gate-all-around. A good place to start on what exactly Backside Power Delivery Networks (BSPDN) is is my post I wrote a few months ago about the bold bets Intel is making there. The big takeaway is that BSPDN is clearly going to be inserted in the design processes, and there is a small roadmap of improvements afforded by BSPDN. But after that, BSPDN will change the design process to allow adding more features, like moving functions on to the backside of the chip. By splitting the signal and power layers, there’s a whole new set of ideas of how to design chips with the space afforded from the power layers. This is Design Technology Co-optimization (DTCO) and System Technology Co-optimization (STCO) at it’s best. BSPDN looks like it has several years of obvious scaling potential, so it will be a huge part of the incremental semiconductor process from here until 2030. It will not only improve the energy delivered to the chip, but actually shrink the cell size. Think about it like a new way to organize the room, and now we can fit more in less even though its the same room filled with the same objects. Next, the roadmap in the long term after we have fully achieved backside power contact networks means we could open up the wafer on the other side of the chip. If we are opening up the other side to be a functional signal layer, there’s a potential we can start adding backside devices to the chip! This blew my mind, and the options for stacking layer, memory, and other devices (like energy capacitors) is endless! This is huge! – BSPDN is a key part of Intel’s technology roadmap. BSPDN is a mix of process lithography and logic technology to decouple the power grid from the design.
The proposed technique delivers power from the backside of a thinned device wafer, which allows for greater wafer sizes in terms of the amount of logic in a chip
Business
Jeep-Maker Stellantis Is Laying Off 1,350 Workers, Blaming EVs | Business Insider – interesting and complex picture being painted. In general, electric cars have less parts for assembly than their internal combustion engine powered equivalent cars. The costs must be coming in component costs and or research and development
China
Fashion factory: Mango brings production closer to home in rethink on China | Financial Times – “In this debate about whether 30 years of globalisation will continue or go backwards, the most important thing for us to follow in detail is the China issue,” he said. Asked if Mango would reduce the proportion it buys from the country, Ruiz replied: “I would say yes, but we’ll be very alert to how things evolve.” Mango gains some freedom from the fact it has only six stores in mainland China and consumers there contribute little to total sales, which it predicts will this year surpass its 2019 record of €2.4bn. Other brands have already moved more decisively. The US jeans maker Levi’s and UK bootmaker Dr Martens have been reducing their sourcing from China since before the pandemic.
Ian Hislop is well known in the UK as being the editor of Private Eye and managing to bring the snark of the paper into real life. In this interview with the politics channel of Joe, he seems flummoxed by the state of politics in the UK over the past year or so.
In this video, Ian Hislop talks about the year with clear sense of exasperation. The laughs are for relief rather than humour. The commentary by Ian Hislop on collective short term memory is very interesting.
Tiananmen Square killings
CNN put together an interesting collection of footage around the Tianamen Square protests and put some context around what was happening in China when the protests happened. CNN seemed to have done a better job than most western media at the time in its coverage of the protests. If anything the footage seems even more harrowing now than the bit I remember from the time.
CNN
Darlie Malaysia travel promotion
Back when I worked on Colgate brands in Asia, Darlie was the ‘entry level’ brand. As such its one of the best selling toothpaste brands in Asia and you can see it in any pharmacy or supermarket you walk into in China, Hong Kong and across Southeast Asia. It’s actually an old brand founded in the 1930s in Shanghai that latched on to the popularity of Al Johnson to promote the teeth whitening effect of their toothpaste.
The brand seems to have changed to Darlie around about 1990.
Colgate Palmolive
Moving forward three decades Darlie is still wrestling with its heritage in the eyes of western stakeholders important to Colgate Palmolive. Darlie is a best selling brand.
In Malaysia it seems to have got involved in a package promotion with local travel brand Klook to provide travel vouchers and hotel discounts as Malaysia kick started its domestic tourism and hospitality industries. Much of the promotion revolves around the use of influencers (to appeal to the three main ethnic groups in Malaysia – Chinese, South Asians and Malays).
I am not a huge fan of their books generally, but if the Darlie adverts spark your interest, then the Lonely Planet travel guide is your best option for the two main areas to see: Kuala Lumpur (KL) and Georgetown on Penang island.
The Reflex
I have been listening to this mix a few times this week.
Zone Energy
Zone Energy drinks targeted students sitting exams with adverts on the Tokyo subway that only. they could see using the red plastic sheet lens that is used to decode answers in their work books.
