The National Art Center, Tokyo is one of the newest museums in town, it opened three years ago. The temporary exhibitions are usually pretty good; however the museum is worth the visit simply to enjoy the interior architecture of the building. The National Art Center, Tokyo is located in Roppongi near Tokyo Midtown; you can find here a map in English.
One of the things that I like the most in the building is the cafeteria. One part of the cafeteria is on the top of a mug-shaped structure, and the rest of the cafeteria is below around the structure.
Mug-shaped cafeteria.
The handle is a small footbridge so that people can access the top of the mug.
In January I had the opportunity to revisit Singapore for work; I had been there before as a tourist in 2008. This time I met many businessmen, investors, programmers and hackers that introduced me to the start-up and innovation world in Singapore. I will tell you some of the stuff I learned.
With only five million inhabitants, Singapore has become one of the biggest exporting and technological powers in the world. Only 50 years ago Singapore was a small fishing town and nowadays its GDP is bigger than much larger countries like Portugal or Ireland. Singapore’s GDP has multiplied by a factor of 10 in just the last 30 years, having today the fourth largest GDP per capita in the world.
It is such a small country that the government can control better what happens in the country, take decisions faster and adapt to changes with more agility. One of the great strategies of the government during the last decades has been to turn Singapore into a financial and technological hub.
The government controls 60% of the whole GDP through several entities, some of them half-private, and even though it seems like they control too much of the GDP, they are very flexible at leaving the money flow and create wealth. Because it is not a big country they can control well how the money is spent and use it in an efficient way.
Singaporeans are really open when receiving foreigners; if you have university studies it is relatively easy to get a job permit. This helps new companies to acquire talent all over the world without the immigration barriers that other countries impose (lately it’s more difficult than ever to get a job permit in United States or Japan). For example, Google has one of their main offices in Asia in Singapore just because of this reason, it’s much easier for them to find talent here than anywhere else in the world. Singapore is very multicultural.
The government gives a lot of support to people with entrepreneurial intentions, not only with money but also with advice from experts. For example, one of the investment plans that the National Research Foundation started last year gives you 85% of the investment that you are willing to assume up until half a million dollars per company. In other words, if you invest 75,000 dollars, the government will invest 415,000 dollars in your company! If the company fails you never have to give that money back and if the company is successful you have the option to regain that 85% of the company buying it back from the government and assuming total control of it. The government takes a lot of risks but then they are not selfish and leave you grow with freedom.
The infrastructure, the size and the open mentality of the government, the talent pool and the new companies that invest in Singapore are the ideal breeding ground to create a great future.
Look how well defined are the objectives of the Singapore Government for 2015, they look like the targets of a private company:
To be #1 in the world in harnessing infocomm to add value to the economy and society
To realise a 2 – fold increase in the value-add of the infocomm industry to S$26 billion
To realise a 3 – fold increase in infocomm export revenue to S$60 billion
To create 80,000 additional jobs
To achieve 90% home broadband usage
To achieve 100% computer ownership in homes with school-going children
A new trend is emerging in Harajuku, a neighborhood where you can frequently find many of the urban tribes in Tokyo. The new trend is brought by a new urban tribe auto denominated: “skirt men” (スカート男子). There are still not many men wearing skirts but there are already two shops specialized in skirts for men. In this video that I recorded directly from a TV report a “skirt men” (スカート男子) goes into a shop where he finds many skirts specially designed for men.
Motoi Yamamoto is a Japanese artist that uses salt as the main material to create his artworks. In Asia, salt is a symbol of purification; for example, in Japan small plates with salt are usually placed at the entrance of restaurants to protect them against evil spirits. Salt is also used in Shintoist rituals and to purify the ring before sumo combats. One of the most interesting things that Motoi Yamamoto does are super-intricate labyrinths using only salt. It is impressive how much patience, dedication and attention to detail he possesses.
In this videos you can appreciate the process that Motoi Yamamoto follows to create his salt labyrinths.
Do you think that Sanyo’s only business is to build electronic devices? They also build houses! It still surprises me how many different things can big Japanese corporations do. Did you know that Sony sells life insurances or that Mitsubishi apart from cars also sells pencils? Is it better to diversify so much or is it better to focus in the main business line? Many Japanese companies decide to expand into a complete different sector inside the country before deciding to go abroad; just the opposite of what American companies do, that even being small what they first do is to expand internationally.
The sign says that, once finished, the house will be ecologic and secure.
Mexican businessman Carlos Slim has recently been ranked by Forbes magazine as the richest person in the world. In Japan the richest person is Hiroshi Yamauchi, the ex-president of Nintendo, who transformed a small company dedicated to the hanafuda (traditional Japanese card game) card-making business into the biggest video game empire in the world.
At the end of the 80’s and during the 90’s Japanese companies like Sega, Nintendo, Capcom or Sony conquered the planet with their video games reaching a market share of more than 50% of the global market. Japan was the factory of dreams of millions of children around the world. According to a poll carried out in 1995 among children of more than 100 countries, Mario was the most recognized fiction character in the world, even more than Mickey Mouse.
Nowadays Japan is still a video game giant but has lost a lot of the strength that once had. Japanese video game companies have gone from controlling 50% of the global market to just controlling the 20%. The two main causes of this change are the arrival of powerful mobile devices developed by American and European companies, like for example the iPhone, able to run video games of similar or even better quality than that of games developed exclusively for portable gaming machines like the PSP or the Nintendo DSi; and on the other hand the success of Microsoft Xbox and its successor, the Xbox 360, becoming the first two successful video game consoles developed outside of Japan.
The Japanese home market is really important for the video game industry. In terms of sales Japan is usually considered as a “continent” along with United States and Europe. In 1993 the consumption of video games in Japan was so high that with a third of the population of United States more games were sold in Japan than in United States. In 2010 Japan is still a big consumer, mostly of turn-based RPGs like Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy, but in United States eight times more video games are sold, what supposes a radical change from the outlook of a decade ago. Satoru Iwata, the current president of Nintendo, announced in a press conference that the lifestyle of Japanese people is more and more “occupied” and that the people has less and less time to play. Satoru Iwata said that Nintendo is taking measures to create entertainment that can adapt to these new needs of the market but at the same time innovate in new ways like they did with the Wii. In the digital world where borders between television, computer, music player and cellphone are more and more diffuse, it is more and more easy and cheap to compete globally with software products, the rules are changing and Japanese software and hardware developers are having a hard time keeping their status as kings of the video games.
During the year 2009 the video game industry was not only in crisis in Japan, but all over the world. What will happen in 2010? Will the big Japanese companies regain market share with the arrival of the eight generation of video game consoles or they will keep on loosing market against the Android and the iPhone?
Article originally published in the Spanish newspaper El País.
Kobe beef is the most known Japanese meat outside of Japan, it is considered by many the best meat in the world. To make the meat the softest possible the cows are massaged once a day and in some farms they are given beer to drink. Kobe beef tradition comes from long time ago, in this video you can see the cow massages and how cows drink beer in a farm in Kobe:
I ate Kobe beef once and it was fantastic! But the other day I was invited to eat Ozaki beef and I found it as delicious as Kobe beef or even more. Even though Ozaki beef is not as known as Kobe beef the process to take care of the cows and produce the meat are very similar. The main objective of this process is to spread the fat all over the meat so that it doesn’t accumulate in some points; in this way all parts of the meat will be soft and juicy. You can even eat the meat without chewing! It’s a flavour explosion! We ate it in this yakiniku restaurant in Ebisu; its specialty is to cook Ozaki beef. Here you have a map, I totally recommend it but take into account that it’s VERY EXPENSIVE.
This is the best beef piece we ordered, pure glory. What you see in the picture costs 45 euros/61 dollars! Notice the fat streaks.
It’s been raining non-stop in Tokyo for almost a month now. Before coming to Japan I was used to the Mediterranean torrential rains that come and go but don’t stick around too long; when I arrived I couldn’t get used to the London-style raining that doesn’t stop for many days or even weeks. Lately I’ve really accepted the fact and now I even enjoy the rain because it’s a great time to take photos in a much different atmosphere than in a normal day. If you visit Japan try to come on times of the year when there is low rain probability: from mid-March to June, or from October to February. In any case, it’s almost sure that you will get at least one rainy day; don’t worry, take an umbrella, go out and enjoy Japan under the rain!
When I arrived to Japan in 2004 one of the first things that caught my attention were the cellphones. In Europe I was using a 2G Nokia and suddenly I had in my hands a 3G Casio cellphone.
My brand new Japanese 3G Casio cost me three euros, much cheaper than the 2G Nokia I had just left in Spain, it had a much bigger screen, I could use the Internet without worrying about being charged exorbitant rates, GPS navigation, 3 megapixel camera etc. It looked like a cellphone brought from the future, with functions and characteristics that were going to be seen in Europe in the coming years.
It shocked me that my new Japanese mobile phone couldn’t send or receive SMS, it turns out that all Japanese cellphones use e-mail by default as the way to interchange messages since 1997, something that wasn’t available in Europe until the arrival of the Blackberry and similar devices many years later. It was also confusing that it was produced by Casio; a Casio cellphone? Up until then I had only seen calculators and watches made by Casio; why wasn’t Casio selling cellphones in the rest of the world?
In 1999 i-mode was born in Japan, the technology that allowed the land of the rising sun to leap five years ahead of the rest of the world. i-mode allowed users to access the Internet in mobile devices. The price for using those services was so cheap that it soon became something used by almost everybody, reaching a usage of almost 60% of Japan’s population.
Vodafone tried to enter the Japanese market but failed in the attempt. Nokia also tried and failed as well, their cellphones were too “old” for Japanese standards. Ericsson also tried but eventually Sony “rescued” them. Motorola also tried with worldwide popular cellphones like the Razor but also didn’t succeed. Japan is a strange place with a very peculiar mobile ecosystem, all the industries related to mobile communications have evolved during the years with almost no foreign influence, developing their own telecommunication networks, their own communication standards and their own mobile terminals. Japan’s mobile phone market is something like the Galapagos Islands, isolated from the rest of the world.
Outside of Japan people usually ask me: If Japanese mobile devices are so ahead of their time, why they don’t go out to conquer the world? That is a very difficult question to answer, in fact it’s so difficult to figure out that the Japanese government and the biggest companies in the industry have formed a special committee with the only aim to solve what they have called the Galápagos syndrome.
The two main causes of Japan’s Galápagos syndrome are the extreme control that the phone companies exert over local phone terminal manufacturers and that cellphones are designed from the beginning to be used exclusively in Japan, with Japanese keypads and functions that are only useful in Japan, they are not designed to be used in the rest of the world like for example Nokia cellphones or the iPhone.
NTT Docomo tried to introduce the i-mode to the European market but it wasn’t something as revolutionary as it had been in Japan and we can now say that it was mainly a failure, did it arrive too late? E-mail on the cellphone, push e-mail, also arrived to Europe quite late, but it was not introduced by Japanese companies. American and Finnish companies were the ones that succeeded in incorporating the Internet into cellphones.
The Walkman, the PlayStation and the Wii knew how to go out of the ecosystem where they were born and spread throughout the planet; Japanese cellphones sat comfortably in their local ecosystem and evolved oblivious to external influences for many years. They always knew how to mitigate the entry of non-native new “species”; but lately something is changing with the arrival of the HTC3 and the iPhone; being able to adapt to any environment they have suddenly burst into the Japanese Galápago ecosystem. It seems like something is finally changing, let’s see how the Japanese industry and the Galápagos Syndrome committee react; will the Japanese “native species” go out and conquer the world? or they will stay in Japan trying to devour the “invading species”, like HTC cellphones or the iPhone, as they have been doing up until now?
Article originally published in the Spanish newspaper El País.
I’ve realized that being Yoyogi my favorite park I haven’t written too much about it. Yoyogi park is not the most beautiful park in Tokyo; however it is the most lively and fun, mostly on weekends. At the entrance, every Sunday you can find the rockabillies, in the central part you can find all kinds of jugglers and “ninjas”; in fact practically all over the park you can find people with good vibes doing whatever the hell they want. If you are lucky, maybe you can spot some “pee geyser” or some weirdo trying to fly a robotic dragonfly. Even if you are only staying a few days in Tokyo, don’t miss walking around Yoyogi during the weekend. To get there, the best way is to stop at Harajuku station or at Meiji-jingu Mae station.
Now I leave you with quite a few pictures I have been taking during the last five years; notice how different the seasons look and the great atmosphere around the park:
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