My 28th post of June has just been published on the Nihongup Japanese Blog. The Japanese Approach To Avoiding Hangovers
Tech, web, apps and stuff on Japan.
Although day 28 is yet to appear (hopefully released very soon), here are some stats on my 30 days of blogging in June (not including the rogue post).
Total posts: 29
Posts in English: 27
Posts in Japanese: 2
To mark June 30th as Mashable's 'Social Media Day' an event was held in Ginza this evening featuring lightening talks from a whole lot of presenters - some in English, some in Japanese.
Something that is really apparent since last year is how boring social media itself has become - which is a really good thing. Whereas in the past there was still a lot of get rich quick hype and general bullshit, people are now seeing past the shininess and exploiting it for what it does best - connecting people and communicating information in a one to many manner to get real world results. The recent '3.11' earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown really threw up some interesting applications for online media that didn't just have an online effect but had a real impact on peoples' lives and the recovery. A lot of them were completely informal groups - one group of mothers in one town posted that they needed diapers while mothers in less affected places like Tokyo arranged for the supplies to be delivered. The presentations at today's event in Tokyo were a mix of people talking about social media marketing strategies, app. developers and activists. For me, the activism applications were the most interesting. Here is a quick run down of a few of the groups/projects.I don't regard coding for the web as a particularly unique or special skill. The massive numbers of other people out there who can do it better, faster and cheaper attest to this. What I really value about this skill however, is how it allows me to use my creativity - mash things up, build something that's useful to me and generally just make my ideas come to life. You know that idea you've had for a web site or app but you don't know how to build it? When it's my idea I just build it. After the recent earthquake in Japan, everybody (including me) was worried about the radiation from the reactors in Fukushima. Watching the TV, scouring the net and watching facebook and twitter, there were so many figures being bandied about - microsieverts, millsieverts, CPM, grays - it was all too confusing. To try and put things into perspective, I built a radiation units calculator which, although extremely basic, was an instant hit getting about 17,000 unique visitors in the day after I launched it. With kind help from friends it quickly had Japanese and Chinese versions. Even though it's extremely basic and I haven't made any improvements to it in 3 1/2 months, it's still accessed about 60 times a day (mainly on the Japanese site).
Anyway, I digress. On to my journey to becoming a web coder and why you should care. If you're already a web coder, maybe you can relate, but maybe your path was different. If you aspire to write code, I don't know, maybe this will be encouraging!
As with so many in my generation, it all started with my Dad bringing home a hefty piece of digital hardware in the early 80s. The computer was the BBC Model B with an incredible 32KB of RAM. To play games (there was non-game software too but I have no recollection of what they were!) you had to hook up pretty much any old cassette deck, make sure the cassette tape with your software was fully rewound, enter the run command, then hit play on the cassette deck. 5 minutes later, if the game hadn't crashed while loading or the cassette player hadn't started munching the tape, you were ready to go. Games were expensive and I didn't have a lot of funds, so instead I bought books from the bookshop that contained games written in BASIC and fantastic illustrations that were completely unrepresentative of the final product. I would painstakingly enter the lines of code, then spend even longer trying to spot the one mistake that was stopping the entire game from working. Most of them were crap, but it was so much fun making little alterations so that the games were mine.
After drifting away from programming as computers became more and more complex through the 80s and 90s, the opportunity was presented to me in the form of a summer internship in 1996 to build a web site for the Institute of Languages at the Norwegian School of Economics in Bergen. Although I had zero experience, I convinced the director Magnar Brekke that I would buy a book on HTML and make him the site. My first ever site was in about 5 languages and was a glorious showcase of large type and bevels. I was amazed with how so much code could be copied from the web and how I could finish the site within the first two weeks of my internship and spend the remaining 5 weeks surfing the web! Unfortunately, after my departure, the site was promptly replaced by someone who had a clue about what they were doing.
After this, I built sites for friends and experimented with a site profiling local bands complete with MP3 downloads which took about the same time to download on the 56K dial-up connection as getting in your car, stopping for a coffee, buying the track at a record shop and then driving home. Only the record shop was more reliable because it didn't rely on my mum not picking up the telephone half way through the download.
After a few more years and my move to Japan, I again got the chance to get into coding when I was given a job at a small Japanese IT company. For what felt like the first month, I was just told to make as many web designs as I could - the weirder the better. Gradually, I was allowed to work on projects using the Microsoft ASP coding language (basically server side VB script). I really floundered and made just about every mistake that one could make - luckily I was allowed to make those mistakes and to learn from them. Within a year, I had my first epiphany - Object Oriented Programming. Once you start to make reusable objects and you realise the advantage, there is absolutely no going back - literally. I just don't understand how anyone can write linear, function based, spaghetti like code.
After a couple of years at the company, it was time to move on. I taught English and started to do freelance work at the same time. I also decided to throw the ASP out the window and shift to PHP. Ironically, it was the huge paradigm shift presented by ASP.NET that actually pushed me to PHP. The thinking was, if I need to change from what I know, I might as well change to something that isn't proprietary and won't require clients to make big layouts on software licenses.
Since then, my experience as a coder has been stepped - periods of learning new things interspersed with periods of consolidating skills. First it was MVC followed by version control, then the CodeIgniter frame work and more recently JQuery, HTML5 and CSS 3. Perhaps it's just a function of growing older, but it seems like the gaps between the steps are getting shorter and shorter.
One thing I think has saved my sanity as a coder is not losing site of the joy of discovery, the fun and the inspiration of trying out something completely new. When I've been at my most unsatisfied and least productive, it's been when I've lost sight of this. The way I've done this is just by consciously working on my own projects - some as part of my work, some (like the radiation calculator) outside. It's not practical or even a good idea to try every new and exciting thing on a client project - unless you are the client.
Going forward, I don't imagine, nor do I want coding to be my 'main' job. But I'll only stop coding if I physically can't - or maybe I'll just take up a less anti-social pastime!
In the last few years, I've had the chance to assist in the naming of a few businesses and websites. Unfortunately in terms of the businesses, one no longer exists, one is dormant and the other is yet to be adopted by the company after more than a year - so the track record isn't the best! Although I'd contend that in all cases there was absolutely no problem with the name.
If you were to go by the 37signals approach to naming, you would spend as little time as possible on the name and just get the product out. The only thing is, 37signals seem to come up with awesome names for all of their products.
There's a lot to be said for this approach though - spending valuable time on coming up with the right name for a product or service at the start of a project is just a waste. Your energy is better spent working on the product, concentrating on the benefits and talking with potential users. Once the true benefits of the product are clear (they may be different to those at the inception of the project), and the marketing direction set, coming up with a name should be a lot easier.
In terms of basic criteria, I feel the following are most important.
I'm right in 37 signals camp when it comes to how much importance to place on Domain names. If the .com domain has gone, don't sweat it - just be creative and use an extra word in the domain or use a different top level domain. If you are feeling pretty uncreative, a .co would probably be a pretty good choice.
In terms of the process for coming up with the name, there are plenty of other posts on teh internets that cover that. Brain storming, thesauruses (thesauri?) and on line name generators are all good techniques. If you're after something that sounds unidentifiably Latin without being Latin, I find the English to Maltese on-line translator at Google Translate particularly good. Another alternative is to ask Kayac for 110 ideas for JPY11,000. (It looks like they change their mind on names too - the service is called genkidama and the domain is 'sparkball.kayac.com'!)
The reason this is on my mind at present is because we have a service that is on the cusp of launching for which we have chosen the name 'Paperfrog'. We think it's memorable, indicative of the features (it's about print management) and it's surprisingly unique. Where it falls down somewhat is for a Japanese speaker 'Paperfrog' (ペーパーフロッグ) is quite difficult to pronounce and also to hear. As with almost any combination of two English words, the .com domain is gone. This isn't particularly worrying - we have the .jp domain and if we want a more 'global' sounding top level domain, we just have to be a little creative.
Ultimately the product will be aimed at an audience wider than just Japan so I don't think the pronounceability aspect is a make or break issue. I'm sure the success or failure of the product will be related to whether it delivers real benefits to customers rather than the name.
Is good web design universal? Or do you need to redesign or re-conceptualise a site for a Japanese audience? This is probably not something that Japanese web designers who design Japanese sites think about. However, for international companies who might have a main site in English or another European language and are looking to produce a Japanese version or even for Japanese designers redesigning a site in English, this is a question that inevitably comes up.
Simply related to the language and character sets there are some fundamental differences between English and Japanese web sites - Japanese takes up from about 30% to 50% less space than English so more can be expressed in fewer characters. A case in point is Twitter where 140 characters of Japanese is a LOT less restrictive than 140 English characters. So a site with exactly the same content will look comparatively empty in the Japanese version next to the English version. An observation of a lot of westerners is that Japanese web design is very busy - why have white space when you can fill it with another banner or animated gif? Part of this is purely perception - Chinese characters just look more dense - especially if you can't read them. However, taking a look at virtually any shop on Rakuten and you will see densely packed information and graphics that wouldn't be acceptable in an English web site. Most of these sites make Myspace pages look restrained in comparison. However, it's difficult to define this as a universal Japanese aesthetic - minimalism and simplicity are a hallmark of Japanese design from Zen Gardens through to ceramics. Also the simple, clean design of Apple products is hugely popular in Japan. This dense web aesthetic does also surface in printed magazines, TV variety shows and even manga so it would seem that it is related specifically to the presentation and consumption of information. One factor that I'm sure has had some impact is web infrastructure - whereas western designers were punished for content heavy web sites due to slow internet connections, Japan has had fast widespread broadband internet for close to 10 years so there is less pressure to be lean. So the question is, what is the psychology or emotional response from this dense presentation of information and is this essential for the success of my site or business? As I haven't done any detailed research into this, I can only speculate, but I suspect it has something to with perceptions of scale. Japanese society is very much based around personal networks of trust, influence and patronage. Without these direct personal connections to a web site, my main measure of whether I can trust the site will likely be based on the perceived scale of the company behind it. Denseness and variety of information gives a feeling of scale which makes the content more believable and increases my feeling of trust. I'm sure this is only a small piece of the puzzle though. Questions of the dense aesthetic aside, I'm a strong believer that a designer who designs in a foreign language needs to have an excellent grasp of that language. An English speaking designer who designs in Japanese but doesn't have a good understanding of Japanese or a Japanese designer who designs in English but doesn't understand English well will inevitably see the other language as 'icons' and be incapable of understanding the intrinsic meaning or be able to utilise appropriate typography. You need to look no further than 'Engrish' t-shirt designs worn by Japanese or those awful Chinese character tattoos in the west - neither group knows the meaning of these and neither particularly cares. So ideally, a Japanese designer should be given the freedom to re-interpret the international brand for a local audience. In practice, budgets and a desire to keep a cohesive global brand means that this isn't always possible. These are just my interpretations. I would love to hear some insights from Japanese (or non Japanese) designers and web producers in the comments.
Beer Gardens are a summer institution in Tokyo although to the uninitiated they're easy to miss as they are mainly located in slightly obscure locales or on the rooftops of buildings. I haven't been to every single beer garden in Tokyo, but in organising Tokyo Garden Party I've got a fair bit of experience. They also come and go pretty quickly so there is a good chance that the beer garden you went to last year has disappeared.
So what makes a good beer garden? In terms of food and service, it's best to set the bar really low - at most places you'll be lucky to get what you ordered and the standard of food is basic at best. As someone who doesn't eat meat, I often have to eat before hand or resort to a diet of edamame, chips and cabbage What beer gardens are really about is cold beer and a laid back atmosphere.
As I said, there are lots of places I haven't been to but the following ones are in my humble opinion are the top 5 (in reverse order).
This is an institution in Shibuya and has the advantage of well, being in Shibuya. When considering access and stumbling on to the train home, you can't get much more convenient than Shibuya. Most beer gardens have a set course of all you can drink beer and a food course for around 4,000 to 5,000yen. This beer garden however, is a lot more flexible - you can settle in for the evening or you can just pop-in on the way home for a couple of beers.
http://www.tokyu-dept.co.jp/honten/new/index.html/#10187 (link in Japanese - scroll way down)
Phone: 080-2396-0398
This is a relatively small rooftop beer garden opposite Shinagawa station seating only about 100 people. Despite the proximity to the station, this place is beautifully calm and quiet and surrounded by green shrubbery. Of all the beer gardens on this list, it also has the best food - which basically just means it isn't greasy, plain or burnt.
http://r.gnavi.co.jp/a068866/ (Gurunavi site in Japanese)
This tiny beer garden/terrace has an awesome location amongst the skyscrapers on the edge of Kasumigaseki. The food is slightly better than average and they have a gimmick of self serve mini beer kegs placed on each table. On closer inspection, the kegs turned out to be 'beer buckets' with taps on the bottom. Despite this, and the most uptight manager seen at a beer garden in Tokyo, the setting overcomes all.
http://r.gnavi.co.jp/g008287/ (Gurunavi site in Japanese)
Set amongst the trees in the park behind the Mid Town tower, this isn't strictly a beer garden. The house specialty (at least last year) was mojitos. The prices are on the high side and the food extremely basic, but the setting is amazing. You can't book ahead, so best to turn up early to get a good table. The good thing about no bookings is once you have your table, you can settle in until the place closes without getting kicked out. If you're sensitive to mosquitos, take some bug repellent - with all the greenery they're particularly abundant- and vicious. Also this place doesn't open until after rainy season has finished so I don't know if it will be back this year. Also no web site as yet.
This is perhaps the most popular beer garden in Tokyo. If you have a group, you may have to book weeks in advance just to get a table. This place is a kids play park most of the year, but the kids are kicked out over summer so the place can be turned into a huge beer garden! You pay a fixed amount (4,000 for men and 3,800 for women) at the door and then you have the run of the place - fill up your own beer pitchers as often as you like. Food is oriented around lots of meat which you can barbecue at your table, so if that's not your thing then be prepared for lots of edamame, chips and cabbage. The thing that makes this place a winner is the location - set amongst lots of trees and with not a single tall building visible it actually does feel like a beer garden in a forest. When booking, request a table near the waterfall - the worst seats are under the tent. You've got guaranteed rain protection but it's like being in a sauna. If there is a baseball game on next door at Jingu Stadium, you'll have the added bonus of a fireworks show.
http://www.rkfs.co.jp/brand/beer_garden_detail.html
Sadly, some of the best (and more debaucherous) beer gardens are no longer with us. One of the most infamous was 'Shiodome Garden' on the rooftop of a building next to Shimbashi Station. Among the entertainment at Shiodome Garden was foreign strippers and an S&M show with more than a little audience participation. Another interesting beer garden that may not return is the one on top of the Kudan Kaikan in Kudanshita. The building - the former Imperial Japanese Army headquarters during World War II - has an amazing view of the sunset, part of the outer moat and the Budokan. Despite surviving the war pretty much unscathed (it wasn't made of wood) it did suffer some damage in the recent earthquake although I'm not sure if this is the reason why it is closed. The Kudan Kaikan also featured some of the cheesier entertainment - kimono dancers stripping to bikinis followed by a karaoke singalong/dance-along.
This post has been submitted as part of the July, 2011 Japan Blog Matsuri on the theme of Japanese drinks hosted by the NihongoUp Japanese Blog.
To 95% of the people that I even occasionally associate with in Tokyo, the following events will be completely familiar. But the thing that separates them from the plethora of other events in Tokyo is that they have cast aside the tyranny of distance that makes so much on this island nation unique and gone completely global.
Started by Klein Dytham Architecture in 2003, PechaKucha night features speakers on broadly creative topics talk with the accompaniment of 20 slides, each of which is shown for exactly 20 seconds. As of writing, PKN has spread to 412 cities around the world, including 6 nights in my home town of Hamilton, New Zealand. Beyond the event, it is now referred to as a presentation 'methodology' and has been notably copied by the O'Reilly publishing sponsored Ignite events - although these feature 20 slides at 15 seconds each. Surprisingly - given the worldwide success - there haven't been too many events outside Tokyo in Japan. This seems to be changing though.
http://www.pecha-kucha.org/Originally conceived as 'Beer for Books', the idea is simple - organise an event at a bar or restaurant and on that night, a proportion (100yen for Japan) of the sale of every beverage goes to support a charity. Most events have been run in conjunction with Room to Read with a very simple formula - one beer = one book. Gary Bremmerman - who conceived and still helps to organise many of the events - has built a community around the concept that drives huge numbers of patrons to participating establishments in exchange for the 1 book per drink contribution. The events have evolved beyond simply 'Beers for Books' to encompass a range of themes and causes - from Bottles for Books (a wine themed evening) through to Beers for Bits (raising money for computer equipment). With the recent disaster in northern Japan, a lot of money has been raised for this cause.
As of writing, Beers for Books has spread to 7 countries and many, many more cities and has led directly to the distribution of more than 110,000 books to kids in developing countries.
http://www.beersforbooks.org/ The interesting thing about both of these events is the focus on a simple theme or idea and the fact that they were both conceived by non-Japanese people living in Tokyo. This doesn't mean non Japanese are better at running events, just that perhaps exploiting global networks is easier and that they are able to develop the appeal so it can captivate an international audience. There's probably a marketing lesson in there somewhere.I used to be a big fan of the Tokyo2point0 events initiated by Andrew Shuttleworth. They ran regularly for a couple of years until the end of 2009. Tokyo2Point0 featured presentations in English and Japanese from a mix of Japanese and non-Japanese presenters.
It was a great chance to network with fellow web people and I learnt a whole lot of new stuff. Tokyo2Point0 was the place that I first heard about things such as HTML 5, Amazon Web Services, Facebook Applications and CodeIgniter. I also made some good friends, found people to collaborate with and even found a new client who we still work with.
However, since regular events ceased at the end of 2009, it feels like there is a hole not being filled. For that reason, I'm constantly on the look out for events that can give me a similar fix - a mix of new ideas, inspiration, contacts and fun. Here is a listing of events I've either been to or interested in checking out.
Bridge is a regular event organised by Shuji Honjo, who is an entrepreneurial dynamo. The focus is on entrepreneurship, web technology and building a community. Events are held quite regularly with the last event held in April. Attendees are predominantly Japanese and all presentations also are in Japanese. I attended a joint event with OnLab (link in Japanese) in the offices of Digital Garage (the guys who among other things do Twitter in Japan) in Ebisu in February. The long speeches in Japanese were something of a test on my concentration, but the speaker was really interesting and the networking was good also.
This event is huge and is held throughout Japan from Kyushu all the way up to Sapporo. Despite the name, it is not just about CSS - depending on the event there is a different focus. There is actually a free event on tomorrow (June 23rd) at the Apple Store in Ginza about Dreamweaver CS 5.5. I code everything in plain text so that's not really my thing, but I'll be keeping an eye on future events. This would also be a great way to connect with the web communities in provincial Japan if you can time a trip to coincide with an event in the regions.
http://cssnite.jp/ (funny though - for an organisation called 'CSS NIte' you'd think they might use a few cool CSS 3 tricks, but it's very conventional!)Initiated in Spain and brought to Tokyo, the focus of Iniciador Tokyo is on entrepreneurs and start-ups. Unlike the previous mentioned events, everything is (usually) in English. The one I went to was pretty small but it was interesting, inspirational and fun with networking afterwards (which I didn't actually partake in). Depending on who is presenting, there may or may not be a tech/web theme.
A quick glance at the site shows the next event is on the 28th of June and will be the first event in Japanese. Hiro Maeda from Netprice.com and ONLab will be talking on the theme "Starting-up with a global mindset" This should be an interesting topic as I think this is rarely the case with Japanese start-ups.
It seems like this event has been going for years and to my shame, I have yet to attend a single event. Could be something to do with the fact that it's on a Monday. Looks like things are on something of a hiatus since the earthquake but with mobile computing taking over the world, I'm sure they'll be back - and I might even attend an event!
If anyone knows of any other interesting events - in English or Japanese, I'd love to know about them.この間、「会社ホームページの英語版が本当にいらない事」という記事を書いたんだがもっと役に立つ事はB2Bホームページの英語版からよく省いてしまうコンテンツだと思います。
下記のコンテンツを追加したほうがいいです。
よく日本のホームページに出るスタッフの写真など欧米人にとって真面目過ぎる。場合によって真面目な写真が必要(研究所など)ですが相手の 連絡を取りたい場合、フレンドリーで落ち着いたイメージのほうが受け入れるかもしれない。たとえば、真面目な会社のゴールドマン・サックスのホームページを見ても不自然なポーズの写真などありません。
私は何となく日本語で言いたい事が表現できるけど会社ホームページの日本語版のコンテンツは絶対作らない！正しい、ネイティブの英語ではな いと品質管理が下手との印象をする。
という事を必ず追加したほうがいいです。電話でお問い合わせを受けている場合、これが大事です。ホームページのコンテンツが英語なのに英語圏の国ではないので英語が通じないと思ってしまう人が電話しない。はじめて、出身地のニュージーランドから日本の会社に電話した時、英和辞典を使って、言いたい事を文書にして、何回練習してから電話しました。電話に出たのは「なになに会社でございます」と挨拶した外国の方でしたが本物の日本語を知らず、用意したスピーチをそのまま読みつづけた！
最新のニュースが2007年の日付が付いたら、「この会社が真面目に海外の顧客を探していない」とのイメージになってしまう。更新しない予定だとニュースなど入れないほうがいい。よく更新している雰囲気を表現したい場合、簡単に更新できる英語版のツイッターフィードなど 載せたほうがいい。
「弊社が日本一番」だけで足りない。ビジネスマンの間でも日本市場についてなにも知らない人が多いです。アメリカやヨロッパの比較がないと重要さが理解できません。もう海外顧客があった場合、「こんなコンテンツはどうですか？」「もっと知りたいことがありますか？」など直接テス ティングしたほうがいいです。
