October 2007 Archives

I installed Leopard on my old PBG4 last weekend. I did a clean install and am slowly moving over prefs and files (iPhoto and iTunes moved over.) In general I like Leopard and it runs fast on my old 1 Ghz machine. There's things I don't like (the 3D dock, the transparent menu bar) but I know that the internal updates are worth the update.

What I cannot comprehend is how Apple could have not implemented Spaces with the ability to have separate desktop images. What's the use of virtual desktops if you can't change the desktop images so you can have a visual reminder of which desktop you are on? It's absolutely incomprehensible to me that I have to have the same desktop image on all of my "Spaces."

Joe Posnanski of the Kansas City Star newspaper is in Japan covering the Japan Series (on account of Nippon Ham Fighters coach Trey Hillman going to the KC Royals in 2008.)

Baseball in Japan is similar to U.S. game, only with dancing girls (Oct. 26)

Hillman's Fighters fall 8-1 in Game 2 of series (Oct. 26)

Why am I here? It’s a good question, one that at least 20 Japanese reporters have already asked me (this before asking me, “What have you eaten so far?” and “Where is Kansas City?” and, oddly, “How old are you?”).

I’m here, mostly, because new Royals manager Trey Hillman is here. He is trying to become the first foreign-born manager ever to win back-to-back Japan Series, the Japanese equivalent of the World Series. This trip seems like a good way to find out about the man charged with changing the Royals’ fortunes.

But there’s something more. I’m here to see this world. The last few years, we all have watched some terrific Japanese players come into our American game — Ichiro Suzuki, Hideki Matsui and Daisuke Matsuzaka, to name just three — and yet most of us know so little about their game. It’s virtually hidden.

Japanese baseball isn’t easily available on American television. You have to be a computer hacker to find out anything about it on the Internet. To see it up close, you have to deal with a 14-hour flight, extreme jet lag and a language barrier.

And yet, that’s what Hillman kept saying. “You have to see it to believe it.”

Saturday night, Hillman’s Fighters played the Chunichi Dragons in game one of the best-of-seven Japan Series. More than 42,000 people packed into the Sapporo Dome for one of the greatest pitching duels in Japan Series history. The fans sang and chanted and drank heavily and did the “YMCA” and smacked noisemakers together. And the ending of the game was like something out of a movie. It was unlike anything I’ve ever seen.

“Quite a scene, isn’t it?” asked Dave Owen, a good old Texan (and briefly a Royals player in 1988) who came over to Japan to coach for his friend Hillman. “People back home should know about this.”

Japan Series: ‘You have to see it to believe it’ (Oct. 27)

They love Hillman in Japan (Oct. 29)

It's great to see Posnanski's perspective of Japan as he compares and contrasts American and Japanese baseball. It's also interesting to see American mass media cover Japanese sports when the Japanese mass media is going ga-ga over the US World Series (due to 3 Japanese being in the finals.)

This is a few months old but John Udell interviewed my good friend Greg Elin of the Sunlight Foundation. Greg and Sunlight are working to provide information about the US government and congress that we have the right to see but don't often get access to. Udell blogs about the interview as well.

Greg's work at Sunlight reminds me a lot of the work that Carl Malamud is trying to do at Public.Resource.org like opening up the US Government's Copyright database or opening up the C-Span video archives. He's also trying to break open the US court rulings, which currently Westlaw and LexisNexis control.

W. David Marx, proprietor of many interesting websites including Néomarxisme and Néojaponisme, and I will be speaking with Prof. Jennifer Urban of USC at the USC Global Conference this weekend on Saturday the 27th on the topic of user-generated content in Japan. If you'll be attending, please be sure to say hello.

Mary Meeker's presentations at the Web 2.0 events (Summit, Expo, etc.) are always a valuable overview of trends the Internet. Her recent presentation, given at the Web 2.0 Summit is available for download in PDF. If you work on the Internet, I highly recommend it.

There's nothing good about this except to say that there is enough investment capital in Japan to service the internal market.

Foreign direct investment inflows to Japan turned negative in 2006 for the first time since 1989, affected by divestments by large transnational companies, including Vodafone Group PLC, according to a U.N. development agency.

The sluggish result was in contrast to a surge in FDI inflows to other advanced economies amid an increasing number of cross-border mergers and acquisitions, as well as a steady uptrend in other part of Asia, including China, the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development said in its annual report to be released Wednesday.

FDI inflows to Japan fell to minus $6.5 billion last year on a net basis, after an inflow of $2.8 billion in 2005.

Although $2.3 billion in earnings was reinvested in Japan, it was overwhelmed by $8.6 billion in net equity unloading, according to UNCTAD's World Investment Report 2007.

You can download the report here.

Foreign investment in Japan negative in 2006 | The Japan Times Online

Daniel Pink, who 10 years ago penned a popular book "Free Agent Nation", has recently been in Japan researching manga and will be publishing a manga targeted at the business market in English.

Q. Speaking of Japan, we are skipping completely over “A Whole New Mind,” your most recent book. But we’re running out of time and I want to hear about your recent sojourn in Japan. What were you doing there?

A. “Free Agent Nation” was translated into Japanese and still sells well there. They are undergoing a deep change to the long tradition of the salary man, the lifelong attachment to a single firm with very little mobility. With the aftereffects of the real estate bubble and economic stagnation, many more Japanese started thinking of themselves in this free agent way. Americans were always wild, woolly and individualist. But there, the nail that sticks up got hammered down. Now, survival is better for the nail that sticks up. There are also much bigger generational differences there. Twenty and 30-somethings think of free agency as a native language. For 40- and 50-somethings, it’s a concept not immediately at their fingertips. So it is a stark generational divide.

I was there under a fellowship to study the manga industry, Japanese comics, which is the center of all Japanese popular culture. So I was talking to manga artists, editors and publishers, and working on a magazine story that will appear in next month’s Wired magazine.

Q. What’s next for you?

A. Manga is becoming enormously popular in the United States with some titles very high on the best-seller lists, especially among teens and people in their 20s. But in Japan, comics aren’t just for kids. You have manga graphic novels — book-length comics — covering a whole range of topics like how to prepare for retirement or how to cook or how to find a mate. It is a whole genre, a medium analogous to television. Here in the United States, manga has been very literary or targeted toward teenagers.

So, this is all a very long-winded buildup to something, which is that, against my better judgment, I’m doing the first manga title for a business audience. It’s a 160-page graphic novel called “The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: the Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need.” And indeed it is a story, about a guy who works at a company called the Boggs Corporation (it’s up to the reader to decide what he does) and through his trials and tribulations, people can learn the six essential rules to a satisfying and productive career. I hired a talented American manga artist. And it will be out in April.

10 Years of Free Agency, and Growing Fast - New York Times

Japan should have never supported the dictatorship that is Burma. That Japan cancelled the humanitarian "assistance" that it gave to Burma over the death of a Japanese journalist is the right action, but for the wrong reason. It should not have taken the death of a Japanese national in Burma to get the Japanese government to see that any financial assistance to the despicable government of Burma was a bad idea from the beginning.

Japan cancels grants for Myanmar project over shooting - Yahoo! News

Probably my favorite music artist for the past few years, Tom Middleton (homepage, wikipedia, discogs, forum, myspace) has a new solo album out called Lifetracks. Middleton is doing the album release party on Oct. 18th at London's The Big Chill House with a backup band including Tom Szirtes of Shur-i-kan and the boys from The Bays (homepage, wikipedia.) I don't wish I lived in London (food is better and rent is cheaper in Tokyo) but I do wish I could go to this event.

juno records has Lifetracks for download but I'm going to get the Japanese Music Mine release which has an extra disc.

Middleton says:

Eno, Vangelis and Tomita are big inspirations, but you’ll pick up references to romantic impressionist and soundtrack composers; Ravel, Debussy, Satie, Vaughn Williams and Steve Reich to Ennio Morricone, John Barry, Thomas Newman, John Williams and Craig Armstrong for example. In the same breath I’d name check the likes of electronica producers The Boards Of Canada, Black Dog, Zero 7, Air, Massive Attack and The Orb. Additionally the music is fused with the melody and emotion of Pat Metheny, Herbie Hancock, U2, The Police and Prince. Classical, Electronica, Jazz and Pop, all clues to my musical personality and those apparent subconscious influences.

Lifetracks is...

'..a soundtrack for real and imagined personal movies, timeless'
Pete Lawrence ­ Big Chill Co-founder

'Mesmeric, haunting & beautiful'
The NME 7/10

'The Master of chill goes back to his ambient roots'
Mixmag 4/5'

'..a unique atmosphere of optimism and melodic simplicity that shuns pretentiousness in favour of heart-tugging beauty'
DJ Magazine

'a stress busting, lovingly crafted listen'
M8 Magazine

'a vast cinematic score for a film with lots of sex in it'
Boyz Magazine

'a logical progression from Tom and Mark Pritchards seminal Global Communication work'
One Week To Live

W. David Marx reviews Patrick Macias and Izumi Evers’ new book, "Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno" (Chronicle Books, 2007) in Marx' Neojaponisme site:

Unlike other collections of Tokyo fashion history such as PARCO’s Street Fashion 1945-1995 or the more recent, less theoretical The Tokyo Look Book, Macias and Evers limit their focus to outcast/delinquent styles and ignore the media-dictated and ultimately middle-class consumer lifestyles like Nyutora, New Wave, American Casual, Ura-Harajuku-kei, Shibuya Casual, and the DC Boom. But Inferno’s narrow scope makes the point that the most extreme and interesting Japanese fashions have primarily originated amongst social rejects and not elite stylists....Essentially, most Japanese young people adopt magazine-derived styles to look good, whereas the Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno delinquent subcultures all intentionally want to look bad.

I don't think there is anyone who can unpack Japanese youth culture better than Marx.

Neojaponisme - Blog Archive - Into the Schoolgirl Inferno

Our family friend and long-time New Yorker Kazuko has passed away. I will miss you Kazuko-san.

Simon Doonan wrote a nice obituary in The New York Observer.

When Kazuko first came to New York from Japan in 1968, to study drama at N.Y.U. on a Fulbright scholarship no less, the town was knee-deep in freaks. They lived la vie bohème, little knowing that the loft spaces where they ate, shagged, staged their happenings and wrote their poems would, less than half a century later, be occupied by hedge-fund dudes and the like.

New York cannot afford to lose any more wackadoos. When a great eccentric leaves Manhattan, especially one as sweet, kind, talented and demented as Kazuko, one can only hope and pray that a new one, maybe some loopy Harajuku gal with Kazuko’s extreme arty sensibility and lack of preconceived ideas, is waiting in the wings to take her place. Fingers crossed. New York is nothing without the Kazukos of the world.

Sayonara, Sweet Kazuko: Jewelry Designer, Loveable Kook | The New York Observer

The NY Times also has a short obituary for her.

Ms. Oshima was born in Tokyo on Jan. 4, 1942, and came to the United States when she was in her early 20s. Her early career was as a video artist and photographer, and she was a familiar presence in Manhattan’s Downtown art scene. She was a narrator on the soundtrack of the documentary film “Hiroshima-Nagasaki, August 1945,” released in 1970.

Kazuko Oshima, Designer of Stone Jewelry, Dies at 65 - New York Times

This is very, very disappointing.

Sony BMG's chief anti-piracy lawyer: "Copying" music you own is "stealing"

This is an absolutely fascinating profile of a gentleman from Panama, Eduardo Arias, who was the first person to realize there was diethylene glycol in toothpaste from China. His inspection of the ingredients and the eventual global recall of the related products affected nations around the world and most likely saved many lives. The Chinese government was forced to ban diethylene glycol from the manufacturing of toothpaste (which is a good thing as it is poisonous.)

The New York Times has video of Mr. Arias and the report: A Consumer Alerts the World

But one Saturday morning in May, Eduardo Arias did something that would reverberate across six continents. He read the label on a 59-cent tube of toothpaste. On it were two words that had been overlooked by government inspectors and health authorities in dozens of countries: diethylene glycol, the same sweet-tasting, poisonous ingredient in antifreeze that had been mixed into cold syrup here, killing or disabling at least 138 Panamanians last year.

Mr. Arias reported his discovery, setting off a worldwide hunt for tainted toothpaste that turned out to be manufactured in China. Health alerts have now been issued in 34 countries, from Vietnam to Kenya, from Tonga in the Pacific to Turks and Caicos in the Caribbean. Canada found 24 contaminated brands and New Zealand found 16. Japan had 20 million tubes.

People around the world had been putting an ingredient of antifreeze in their mouths, and until Panama blew the whistle, no one seemed to know it.

The toothpaste scare helped galvanize global concerns about the quality of China’s exports in general, prompting the government there to promise to reform how food, medicine and consumer products are regulated. And other countries are re-examining how well they monitor imported products.

It's fascinating and telling to me to see that no one looked at the ingredients of this item. I'm sure there are many other dangerous items on our store shelves because we don't choose to inspect them closely enough and the people who are tasked to do this in our governments are most likely overwhelmed and understaffed.

The Everyman Who Exposed Tainted Toothpaste - New York Times