Max Fujita, head of European hydrogen fuel cells at Panasonic, discusses the importance of hydrogen technology. Hydrogen is the most widespread chemical element in the universe and could play a significant role in achieving zero net emission and other goals such as wind and geothermal power. Hydrogen is important for more environmentally friendly steel mills and foundries. It even offers a solution for the range anxiety caused by lithium ion battery cars.
The Asia Society have a video on the story behind the Japan traditional craft revitalisation competition. If you read Monocle you will be well aware of Japan’s strength in traditional crafts, often within centuries old businesses. More Japan related content here.
Interesting observations on culture and remote working. Interesting where they are talking about a culture crisis. For the past five years before the pandemic I saw company cultures changed as noise cancelling headphones went on and desks turned into long benches. This ironically damaged company culture. The pandemic shook up office space again, with the home office. I was quite fortunate as I had pretty much everything I needed after freelancing. But I did a lot of Zoom calls with people punched on the end of their bed. The range of views in this series of interviews shows that there will be wide mix of responses.
Finally as a curry cup noodle fan, this next story appealed to me. Nissin (who make the iconic Cup Noodle) has a new strategy in the sustainability game by eliminating the “lid closing seal,” a thin strip of sellotape type material that holds your noodle cup closed while the ramen is cooking in boiling water. This very small change will save an estimated 33 tons of plastic waste per year produced by Nissin. Instead the lid will be held shut by two ‘ears’ on the lid film.
2008 was the best and worst of times for Chinese brands. The Beijing olympics was supposed to spur national pride. Included in this national pride was pride for Chinese brands – guo chao. Chinese athletics brand Li Ning took centre stage in the opening ceremony, screwing over Olympic official partner Adidas. For other olympics ambush marketing is severely restricted, but this was a national champion in China. Chinese pride usually means someone else’s humiliation, in this case Adidas.
Right after the Olympics in September that year, a major food adulteration scandal became public. Over 300,000 babies were harmed when melamine was added by baby formula. The reason why this was done was to boost its ‘protein content’ in tests. The main brand in focus was Sanlu – a local milk powder brand. Subsequent tests found that adulterated powder had been sold around the world, by multiple Chinese brands.
Chinese consumers hoovered up milk powder all over the world. Several countries and Hong Kong had to limit milk powder purchases, due to Chinese tourists and intermediaries cashing in on the demand for safe milk powder. During 2013, I was working behind the scenes at an agency for FrieslandCampina to try and combat the shortages in Hong Kong. The ban has been put in place indefinitely.
Move forward a decade and guo chao is mainstream
Everything is political, this is even more so in China. With the rise of Xi Jingping he sought to stop Chinese ‘irrational worship of the West‘. There are well loved domestic legacy brands in China, a prime example would be White Rabbit candy.
Guo chao brand ‘White Rabbit’ candy
Along with this inflated Han nationalism has gone a pride in domestic brands. Huawei handsets are as expensive, if not more so than Samsung and Apple – which equated to a perception of similar quality. The fact that Chinese live most of their online lives inside WeChat dulls the difference in software. The operating system is no longer important. This is similar to the vision that Jim Clark had for the Netscape browser. If apps were on the web and ran through the browser, that would negate the stranglehold Microsoft Windows had on corporate and personal computing.
Young adults in China now favour products with Chinese cultural designs and products made in China – guo chao. In one survey 75% of Chinese consumers surveyed state they like products that incorporate Guochao design elements. Design and colour choice is particularly important: doesn’t just mean “made in China” but embracing traditional Chinese elements and inciting national pride. Foreign brands have struggled to maintain market share. Guochao brands have built a good consumer reputation and market share by relying on the advantages of lower price, practical and competitive levels of quality. They have also suffered from the perception of being a copy or imitation of more expensive brands. Domestic brands have managed to use e-tailing to get over established foreign brand advantages in market penetration. More consumer behaviour related content here.
Claas acquires share in Dutch robot manufacturer | Irish Farmers Journal – Claas has acquired a minority shareholding in Dutch start-up AgXeed B.V, with the aim of co-operating on the development and commercialisation of autonomous agricultural machines. AgXeed makes robot tracked tractors that look suspiciously like vehicles from the first Terminator movie. Automation like AgXeed is going to become more important in agriculture at labour moves to the cities and farming consolidates. You can see how unskilled factory work is also having to look at automation in the below piece from the South China Morning Post. AgXeed is the flip side of the coin to industrial robotics.
What’s driving the Chinese boom in cosmetics for children? | Vogue Business – In China, it’s more socially acceptable these days to show individual identity in looks. Parents born in the 1980s or 1990s are less likely to curb their daughters’ interest in beauty products and may even encourage it. The current boom is certainly one to watch: according to data from Kaola, in May 2020, sales in China of children’s cosmetics were up by more than 1,200 per cent year-on-year. Disney’s sales alone were up by 100 per cent over the same period.
In China, children’s cosmetics are defined as those for children aged 12 and under. On e-commerce platforms, a quick search for children’s cosmetics brings up dozens of brands and thousands of products, with prices ranging widely. Products are typically sold in sets, including colourful eye shadows, blush, lip gloss, nail polish, compact powder and makeup brushes
China’s Communist Party chips away at Hong Kong business houses | The Economist – Expropriations may violate local law. But laws can be changed, as the imposition of new security and electoral rules show. Such an outcome looks “all too believable”, says Mr Blennerhassett. The tycoons thought “they didn’t have to do anything as long as they didn’t question Beijing”, says Joseph Fan of Chinese University of Hong Kong. Now the Communist Party will not even settle for overt expressions of fealty. It appears intent on extracting value, too. – not terribly surprising. The hubris of Hong Kong business people is surprising, even to someone like me
Can Gucci Sell High-End Watches To China? | Jing Daily – “Gucci’s high-priced watches are lacking legitimacy. Real watch collectors will not buy,” Müller concludes. In fact, the expansion into high-end watches may not help Gucci attract new clientele but will undoubtedly enhance the Italian maison’s prestige. As the luxury entry barrier lowers, the brand is required to expand in the high-end sphere to retain its exclusivity and appeal to local high net worth buyers
China’s Hottest Livestream Trend: Fraud – The episode was a disaster for Li. Her company had paid 200,000 yuan ($31,000) upfront just to secure a spot on the influencer’s show. It had also stocked over 4,000 boxes of shakes, anticipating a sales bonanza. But in the end, they hadn’t earned a single yuan. “Apart from the financial losses, we felt humiliated,” says Li. “All the other employees at the company were whispering that our team was totally fooled.” – ad fraud is universal but this one seems to be particularly shocking
Technology
iFixit tells the sad story of how Samsung “ruined” its upcycling program | Ars Technica – “Samsung, like every manufacturer, should set their old phones free. Open up their bootloaders. Let people use their cameras, sensors, antennas, and screens for all kinds of purposes, using whatever software people can dream up. The world needs fun, exciting, and money-saving ways to reuse older phones, not a second-rate tie-in to yet another branded internet-of-things ecosystem.“
Web of no web
Europe looks to the end of the mobile phone | EE News Europe – The aim is AR glasses that are wearable all day and weigh less than 60g with a 500mW power consumption. “We can achieve that this year with 1000nits for outdoor brightness, compared to 500nits that needs darkened lenses, and a 30 to 50 degree field of view (FoV) is enough,” he said.
“In the end there is a tradeoff in power consumption. The way you build the relay optics is where you lose the field of view. Increasing the field of view means the energy is relayed into the comb of the lenses so the limitation is on the capabilty of the waveguide to have a good colour uniformity across the field of view, and we are working with waveguide makers to get to 60 to 70deg. Today Hololens has 55 degree field of view for example but the military were asking for 85 degrees.” – more related content here.
Filipino fast food restaurant Jolibee have created a series of films that tap into the zeitgeist. A message from the future captures Filipinos dreams for a post-COVID future, leaving hard times behind them. A message to the future is well worth watching, despite its efforts to pull at the heart strings
The Jolibee contrasts sharply with the Burger King UK creative below, which just promises business as usual. More Jolibee content here.
Burger King
Burger King reasserts their brand proposition to UK consumers who are hopefully venturing back into their restaurants. There is a nod to the untrustworthiness of internet content and vegan options. At the centre of it all, reminding the audience what flame broiled actually means.
It’s unlike the usual in-your-face disruption content that Burger King agency David Madrid has been doing over the COVID lockdown. The dark lighting draws your eyes into the protagonists, but also makes a Burger King restaurant feel unwelcoming. It is an interesting creative choice.
McDonalds Singapore
McDonalds Singapore has gone completely the other way and focused on cocooning, which they seem to be betting will be post-COVID behaviour. Singapore used to be all about eating out, from kopi stands and hawker food to high end eating; because real estate is expensive, the third space was your space. McDonalds think that this might have changed.
Masters At Work
Defected regularly puts up high quality mixes, but this one by Masters At Work particularly stood out. And I’ve been listening to it a number of times.
I was just a few years too of the right age to be the target audience for Flight Of The Navigator. So I didn’t go to see it on release, but I appreciate the film and its one of my go to science fiction Blu-Rays alongside Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. This video goes into how early 1980s technology managed to produce realistic effects of the curved mirror surface spaceship. What’s really interesting is how many practical (analogue) effects including trick photography and modelling there are in the film.
Get Tough is a book on hand-to-hand fighting originally published in 1942. It is important for what it represents as much as it is with regards its content.
Fairbairn as an author
By the time Get Tough was written in 1942; Fairbairn was an experienced published author. In 1926, Fairbairn wrote the book Defendu. This was a step-by-step guide to Fairbairn’s fighting system that distilled his experience in street fights, alongside the jujuitsu he learned from early Japanese teachers that went abroad. In this respect Fairbairn, was similar to the Gracie family in Brazil, Imi Lichtenfeld’s Krav Maga and the Soviet founders of SAMBO. Globalisation drove hybrid fighting styles. Something we’d later see with mixed martial arts in general.
Defendu as a title didn’t catch on that well as a title so it was republished as Scientific Self-Defence in 1931.
The second world war resulted in Fairbairn’s most prolific period as an author. He wrote Shooting to Live with a colleague and firearms expert Eric Sykes. All-In Fighting was written by Fairbairn as a manual in close quarters combat. Though a section on using firearms in a close up situation was contributed by P.N. Walbridge.
Get Tough was an American and Australian edition of All-in Fighting, but without the section by P.N. Walbridge. Where All-in Fighting was aimed at the soldiers Fairbairn and his colleagues taught, Get Tough looked to appeal to a wider audience.
Fairbairn provided an edited version of his work called Self Defence For Women and Girls, which is about a quarter of the pages of Get Tough. There was also an American edition retitled Hands-Off!
Fairbairn managed to write the book whilst training British commandos. Fairbairn and Sykes had a falling out sometime in 1942 and were never reconciled. Fairbairn took his expertise to to the US and Canada. Sykes carried on teaching in the UK.
Get Tough and colonialism
Get Tough was a distillation of experience that Fairbairn had in Korea and then later in Shanghai. As a member of the Shanghai Municipal Police he had been involved in hundreds of fights with local and international residents of the port city.
The experience led to Fairbairn to play a role in developing:
Anti-riot techniques
Police sniping techniques with Eric Sykes
The Defendu fighting style
Two types of knives. The Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife. A slender but sharp double sided stiletto blade designed the weapon to strike at the vulnerable parts of an opponent’s body, especially the vital organs. The original version was known as the Shanghai knife and had a 6 inch blade. It was likely part of the cache of illegal weapons that Fairbairn and Sykes brought back to the UK from Shanghai during the war. The military versions were 1.5 inches longer, to get through winter clothing. The Smachet, a large broad knife almost like a machete or a Roman sword
Fairbairn’s work was based on the health and lives of colonial subjects. Fairbairn often enjoys exclusive credit for this work, but the reality was that it was a collaborative effort from several officers in the Shanghai Municipal Police including Eric Sykes and Dermot O’Neill. The Shanghai Municipal Police was what modern organisational theorists would have termed a ‘learning organisation’.
Part of this learning culture was forced upon them by events. The Shanghai Municipal Police killed four members of a protest in May 1925 because they didn’t have enough police on duty to manage a demonstration. This felt rather similar to the Amritsar shootings of 1919, which shattered support for British rule in India by both Indians and people in the UK.
This led to the Shanghai Municipal Police founding the first modern SWAT team called the reserve unit; this unit was also responsible for modern methods of policing riots.
The Get Tough legacy
Defendu had been taught to hundreds of policemen who rotated through Shanghai before the second world war. They then went on to work in other outposts of the British Empire in a policing or military capacity.
When Sykes and Fairbairn brought their particular set of skills back to the UK in 1940. They were put to work training commandos and and secret agents in their skills. These skills were taught to military age men and women, the women were predominantly going to be dropped by parachute into occupied Europe.
Again hundreds, if not thousands of people passed through the schools that they ran in Scotland and the south coast of England. Some of the people who went through those schools were from overseas. When they eventually went home, the ideas and training that they learned went with them and were put to use. At first trying to retain colonial rule. Then later, building up nascent special forces units including units from the US, Belgium, Holland, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.
Over time these countries evolved their techniques to match modern war, but the principles where still there.
After the second world war, the colonial policemen of the Shanghai Municipal Police who survived scattered across the British empire. Fairbairn went to Cyprus to train police in his techniques. He then ran two sessions in Singapore for the newly formed riot squad unit.
The contents of Get Tough
Fairbairn wrote Get Tough for a wide range of readers, not just the military as Fairbairn himself said:
It is not the armed forces of the United Nations alone who can profit by learning about how to win in hand-to-hand fighting. Every civilian, man or woman, who ever walks a deserted road at mid-night, or goes in fear of his life in the dark places of a city, should acquaint himself with these methods.
Releases – how to get out of holds by an assailant
Holds
Throws
Miscellaneous advice – mostly covering improvised weapons from things at hands
Use of the knife – Fairbairn talks about using the Sykes-Fairbairn fighting knife
The Smatchet – use of a short machete type weapon designed by Fairbairn
Disarming an opponent of his pistol
If you’ve trained in a martial art, you’ll have done drills of some sort like katas in karate. Fairbairn’s work doesn’t have drills per se. The idea is that if you do the hold or the blow, you are unlikely to need follow up.
