Japan's first Apple store opened its doors today. The store is on the hoity-toity Ginza - Japan's Fifth Avenue - and the outside of the store is a great match for its high-luxe surroundings. The store's second story is wrapped in G5-grey panels interrupted with a 10-foot white Apple, and the street level is wrapped in glass. I can't really tell you what the store is like inside, because I didn't get in...

I arrived about 10 minutes before the store's scheduled opening at 10 a.m., and the line to get in was no kidding, nine blocks long. It snaked down Ginza Dori, made a little bight down a side street, passed Kyobashi Station and wound up in sight of Tokyo Station. The Apple Store staff were stressed and not in any mood to answer my questions, but a few of the people in line were willing to chat. I asked one pair of friends how long they'd been in line (they were near the head and looked in good shape to get in before 11), and they said "three hours." Yikes.

So I asked if they were planning on buying something, and the response was a noncommital "No, not really. Well, you know, maybe if they have something good."

Grossly generalizing this one conversation to everyone in the queue, I'm guessing that most of them were there for spectacle, not because they're die-hard Mac loyalists. In an extremely unscientific sampling (I hope my stats professor never reads this), I watched 10 people in a row leave the store and none of them was carrying anything. Granted they could have bought desktops and gotten them delivered, but at the very least, none of them bought iPods or laptops.

More thoughts and pics later today...or maybe tomorrow.

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One of my professors here at Waseda got into an amusing tangent during his lecture yesterday. Talking about regional differences in Japan, he said, "You know, I went to dinner with two friends a while back. One was from Nagoya, the other one was from Osaka."(I should add at this point that this professor is a Tokyo native.)

"We stopped at the cash register on our way out, and I took out my wallet and started to pay. My friend from Osaka reached for his wallet, but that's as far as he went: his hand never came out of his pocket. And the guy from Nagoya was already waiting outside!"

Pause for a beat.

"You know, Toyota is based in Nagoya. That's probably why they developed JIT manufacturing. And Nissan is in Tokyo, and they still can't get the hang of it!"

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Holy smokes, here's some surprising news. I just read in Asahi Shinbun's online edition that Japanese police have arrested two people for making copyrighted material available for download through file sharing software. Both the suspects have admitted their guilt. The program in question was a Japanese program called "Winny," and the police chose to search the software developer's home (!) as well as other locations.

Wow, that makes the RIAA's "we're going to sue you for $800,000...oh, you want to settle? OK, how about $3,500" strategy look charmingly civilized. What with Singapore's recent decision to effectively give the government the right of eminent domain over resident's PCs and networks, and now the Japanese arrests, being online in Asia is starting to look about as regulated as the Japanese import market.

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A Korean friend here just gave me a link/logon for her Web site. I went and checked it out - it's a basic community site where she's stored some of her favorite pics, and her friends can post comments on a bulletin board. The first page had four images and weighed in at, get this, two megabytes!

I mean, I know that they have cheap fast broadband in Korea like we have lawsuits in the U.S., but that's still an eye-opener. By U.S. standards, building a page like that would be borderline bad manners; everyone you sent there would yell at you. (Well, my friends would. If your friends are slightly less geek - and have broadband - you might be OK.) But apparently, my friend here thinks nothing of having a two meg top page.

People always say that no matter how much bandwidth you have, it gets used up; I guess this is one more proof of that statement. Of course, I think that when most people say that, they're imagining streaming video or other interesting multimedia content, not non-thumbnailed 500k JPEGs. Nope. Our glorious future of universal broadband will be characterized by bandwidth-hungry applications that supplant the adequate - even elegant - workarounds that we've developed to cope with historical bandwidth constraints. (Funny though - isn't a grid of thumbnails better from a UI perspective than clicking through a series of 4 x 6 images?)

Hmm...if anyone wants to draw parallels between the advance of processor technology and the corresponding progress of software bloat, this might be a good time.

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Check it out - my favorite dive arcade in Shinjuku brought its "Michael Jackson's Moonwalker" game out of storage. I assume that the paper across the top of the machine has some flip comment, but I can't translate it for you: unfortunately, I don't speak Japanese emoticon. (I wonder if there's such a thing as Japanese leetspeak?)

In other Michael Jackson-related news (I know you just can't get enough), my journalist friend says that her agency's film crew spent yesterday evening staking out Yoyogi Park, where a group of Michael's fans were planning a vigil. In the end, no one showed.

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Just have to comment on a New York Times article that ran on the 21st. It is one of the more disturbing things I've seen in a while, right up there with some of the edgier entries in Tokyo Damage Report. It's an article about parents putting VCRs and DVD players into their cars to pacify their children on long trips. The link above will only be good for two weeks, so I'm taking the liberty of quoting from the article - see below.

Yet some parents staunchly refuse to join the growing fleet of rolling entertainment rooms. "We take a lot of long road trips, and I would never have a TV in the car," said Amy Maneker, a pediatric emergency room physician in Cleveland. "In fact, I am morally opposed to it." Last summer, she drove to North Carolina with her two sons, ages 12 and 9. The trip's highlight? Listening to the audiotape of "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants." "It was a very thought-provoking book, and it led to some very interesting family discussions," she said.

Nancy Risman, a marketing executive from Greenwich, Conn., turns a deaf ear to her three children's pleas for a car DVD. "We are total holdouts," she said. "For one thing, I feel like there's enough TV at home. For another, trying to get them to agree on one movie would be impossible."

Yeah, these parents are certainly praiseworthy stalwarts. They're really standing firm against the tide of overpermissiveness. The article quotes Amy Maneker describing herself as being "morally opposed" to putting a TV in the car. Huh? Why do you have one in your house then? Which is more morally repugnant, letting your kids watch a movie during a four-hour car trip once in a while, or turning their brains to Jell-O by plugging them into the boob tube four hours every day at home?

Never does the article suggest giving the little darlings a book. It all-but dismisses books-on-tape as an impossibly low-tech solution that many of today's kids won't put up with. Yes, that's right, the New York Times has sold out people who read - no doubt they're planning to convert the Sunday book reviews to a DVD review section. Surely, the end is nigh.

As far as I can tell, the creeping encroachment of popular media into every nook and cranny of our lives is sucking our society's collective level of discourse not just down to, but actually below, the lowest common denominator. Resist! If I ever have kids, there's going to be no TV in the house. (That's how I was raised, and look how great I turned out.) And when we take long trips in the car, they'll have to settle for a GBA SP, dammit.

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I've been a bicycle fan from way back. Even a close encounter with a Japanese delivery van (and a few more with the asphalt) haven't dampened my enthusiasm for this mode of transit. I've yet to own a car (though I admit I'm not shy about borrowing other peoples'), and in Portland and Seattle—the cities in which I've lived most recently—I've found that I didn't really need one. Given the cost of auto ownership (especially Oregon's mandatory liability insurance), I'm constantly surprised that bicycles aren't more widely used in the U.S.

A quick comment on the cost of owning a car: last year in my finance course, my study group found that over three years, 1) buying a car, 2) leasing a car, or 3) buying a Seattle all-zone bus-pass, taking cabs daily, and renting a car a few days a month (I think four days was the number we used) all cost about the same.

Granted, bicycles are probably most widely used in the developing world: India and especially China come to mind. But even the developed countries of Western Europe make much greater use of two-wheeled transportation than the U.S. Those countries have much lower rates of obesity too. Hmm...connection?

Though it's true that there are a few dedicated people in the States trying to change our existing car culture, we've got a long way to go to catch up with Japan. Here, it's commonplace to see 60-year old women riding bikes to the grocery store, or salarymen in suits riding to the train station. This down-to-earth view of bikes means that the handcrafted carbon fiber and titanium pieces of artwork that are so easy to spot in the U.S. are unusual finds here. (Of course, in the U.S., these gleaming toys are typically locked up outside a Starbuck's, not on the road or out in the mountains where they belong, but that's a topic for another day.) However, Japan's bike scene is changing a little bit lately (driven partly by Tokyo's emerging bike messenger industry, I suspect - I've never seen messengers riding such nice bikes), and every once in a while a Colnago or a Moots brightens my day. It's still extremely unusual to see a Japanese cyclist wearing a helmet, but at least Japan's nationalized health care system means that the families aren't bankrupted by the cost of care every time a bareheaded cyclist gets run down by a cab.

Anyway, I took a crack at documenting local bike culture with these photos - enjoy. Note that I'm trying out a new way to organize my galleries - click the photo to open an index page showing all 15 of the lovely bicycle photos that are waiting for you today.

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Eh, presidential candidate Wesley Clark's questionable record/stance on privacy issues does not fall into the category of "things I planned to write about," but I haven't seen anyone else pick it up, so why not? Hopefully I won't alienate my hordes of faithful readers.

On November 17th, Wired ran an article about questionable business practices by Acxiom, a friendly little company that, according to Wired, describes itself as "the premier source of addresses and phone numbers for telemarketers and mass mailers." Apparently your contact info is worth money: Acxiom claimed $866 million in revenue in FY 2002.

According to the Wired story, a company called Private Citizen, which charges its clients $20/year to remove them from mailing lists, has been submitting names of opt-outs to Acxiom for several years. But Acxiom has refused to remove these names from its databases, saying "it wants to hear personally from each individual who wants to opt out."

As the president of Private Citizen commented, "Acxiom collects and merchandises the personal data of many (if not most) of those same Private Citizen subscriber/consumers without their knowledge, permission or 'direct contact.'" Suddenly taking the high road and requiring direct contact in order to opt out is rather self-serving. Why, if I were a little more judgmental, I'd probably say that this policy smacks of hypocrisy.

Curious about this model corporate citizen, I went and took a look at Acxiom's Web site, where I read this news release: "Wesley Clark Resigns from Acxiom Board of Directors." According to the release, as well as sitting on the board of directors, Clark has also served as a consultant to the company.

You know, I go to school in Seattle most of the time, and in Seattle I couldn't get into a Steve Ballmer speech to save my life - let alone sit in the second row. Heh, I guess some things really are different here. (Kind of like how there was no line for the Half-Life 2 demo at the Tokyo Game Show.)

Microsoft's CEO gave a good presentation at Waseda today, focusing on the need for Web standards and how Microsoft and educational institutions could work together to develop them. The presentation itself was solid but not remarkable - I'd guess it's been delivered plenty of times to other audiences. But Ballmer's delivery was outstanding. If he decides to keep working post-Microsoft, he'd make a great professor. There will be no sleeping in Steven Ballmer's Business 101 class, I'll guarantee that.

One of the most interesting things he said came during the Q and A session. The questions had been vetted beforehand, presumably to head off embarrassing queries about Linux and the latest WinXP patch, but one of them was still pretty interesting: "How do you think the world will be different in 20 years?"

That got a smile, which it deserved. It's not a reasonable question because basically you're asking someone in 1980 to imagine Napster, and a few other contemporary inventions/developments recognized as breakthroughs. Well, it's not like Todd Fanning came up with Hotmail after Napster, and then thought a bit more, had the idea for Snapfish, then called it a day after developing the Bluetooth standard and launching TinyUrl. It's a bit much to ask one person to anticipate all that goodness.

But here's what Ballmer came up with. He said: I grew up thinking it was normal to have 3 TV channels. My kids grew up thinking that 30 channels were normal. Their kids will grow up thinking that infinite channels or video feeds are normal.

Gotta say that's right on the money. Especially "video feeds," 'cause most likely it's not going to be cable, now is it. It's all going to be video-on-demand...guess someone is going to have to develop some DRM that actually works.

Ballmer then continued, "and my grandchildren won't know what a book is." Ouch.

I didn't care for that idea much - kneejerk, I admit, but there it is. Will we really be foolish enough to permit such things to vanish from our world?

Then I thought it over a bit. Here are my objective reasons why we'll still be wedded to our books in 2023 (though hopefully we'll be making them out of something besides dead trees by then).

1. No batteries required, dammit.
2. Unlike computers, books can withstand extreme environments. They're unfazed by temperature extremes (up to a point anyway), they can bounce back from being immersed, and they don't mind being dropped or crushed.
3. High-res display. I'm guessing that your average supermarket murder mystery is printed at around 600-1200 dpi or so. I'm not going to swear that screens will never be that sharp, but I'm doubtful.
4. Longevity. Specifically, lack therof in digital media. We're better off with printed matter. If the Dead Sea Scrolls had been stored on CD-ROMs, they wouldn't have lasted ten years.
5. And of course, good form factor for reading in bed.

Just a clarification - my comments yesterday weren't meant to suggest that Xbox's Japan market share is suddenly going to grow to match its numbers in the U.S. But Microsoft's latest moves are definitely going to help sales here.

I surf a few Japanese gamer chat rooms on a regular basis, and the Xbox price cuts created some of the longest threads I've ever seen. Most of the comments were positive - along the lines of "Ooh, 16,800 yen? Damn, maybe I'll have to get one now."

The most common objection now seems to be form factor. One poster said "I'd have to break down a wall to fit an Xbox in my place - literally." Another said "It just doesn't fit in my rack!" Apartments in Japan are small, and the Xbox just doesn't fit for a lot of people.

But everyone recognized that it's a good deal at its new price. One surfer added up the list prices of the various components of Microsoft's latest Xbox bundle (console+extra goodies for 19,800 yen) like this:

"Gotham II: 6,800 yen
Second controller: 3,500 yen
DVD kit: 3,500 yen
Halo: 2,800 yen
That makes the console 3,000 yen..."

Hmm, if you look at it that way, it really is a screamingly good deal. You could probably sell the extras on Yahoo Auctions or something.

Damn, maybe I'll have to get one now.*

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Today, I'll be giving in to my base desire for self-glorification, so if you have a weak stomach, scroll on down the page and come back tomorrow, OK?

About three weeks ago, I spent a good number of hours reading Sony's quarterly and annual reports for the last three years. (Stupidly, I did this in Japanese - I realized later that English versions of all those reports are on Sony's English Web site.) All that number-crunching yielded an article that was so wonky and business-geeky that Gamespot didn't run it.

Lucky you, now it's available right here on Gaming Japan. Brief summary for those of you who aren't interested in wading through financial analysis: historically, Sony's game business has consistently delivered healty profits, which helped offset seasonality and simple ups and downs in its other businesses. (Earnings from Sony's music and film divisions are especially erratic - a hit or a flop can color a whole quarter's results.) But now game revenue is slumping: Sony can no longer depend on its cash cow.

In conclusion, I noted that as a result of poor performance from its game division, Sony is open to an attack from Microsoft. To quote myself (what cheek!), "With Sony in an extremely poor position to engage in a price war, Microsoft couldn't ask for a better chance to carve itself a bigger slice of the console market. This earning report opens the door for Microsoft; it's just a question of when and how the Xbox team will make its move."

Well, it looks like Microsoft is making its move now....so I guess I get to say "I told you so!" In Japan, the company has slashed the Xbox price from 24,800 yen to 16,800 yen, and has announced plans to distribute free copies of Xbox Music Mixer. Xbox Music Mixer will also be available in the U.S., though unfortunately American gamers will have to fork over $39.99.

As far as I can tell, Xbox Music Mixer is a PSX-killer. Ostensibly a karaoke game, it also allows Xbox users to transfer WMA, MPE3, and JPEG files from their PCs to their Xboxes, "to create the ultimate music and photo library." Microsoft is shrinking the feature gap between the PSX and the Xbox. Obviously the Xbox won't be able to match the PSX's DVD burning functions, but what do you want to bet that someone in Microsoft R&D is working on a PVR function right now?

There's been a lot of talk about how the next battle in the console wars is the fight for the living room - or more specifically, for the living room TV. Microsoft couldn't make its intentions any clearer than this: " Xbox Music Mixer brings your music and photos out from the back room and adds power to your party with an enhanced media player, incredible visualizers, Karaoke, and a photo album viewer."

It looks to me like Sony is in a bind. The company needs strong PSX sales to tide it over until it can launch the PSP and the PS3 - but marketing the PSX against the Xbox will be a challenge. The Xbox is much cheaper, duplicates many of the PSX's functions, and its marketers have access to Microsoft's deep pockets - a formidable advantage. It will be interesting to see how events unfold over the next few months. (Hint: I don't think it's going to be pretty.)

You know what I don't get in this picture? Where does the Microsoft Media Center PC fit in? Is there room in the living room for two Microsoft boxes, or will the Xbox be positioned as a lower-cost alternative? I guess time will tell.

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Oh, just couldn't pass this up. Hong Kong e-tailer Lik Sang is accepting pre orders on the iQue console in anticipation of its upcoming launch in China. Lik Sang has had previous legal trouble with console manufacturers, and I bet Nintendo is trying to find a law against gray marketing the iQue outside of China right now.

Lik Sang suggests on its Web site that French big-box retailer Carrefour will be one of the first merchants to carry the iQue in China. Did Carrefour manage to steal a march onWal-Mart? That would be quite an achievement - the iQue is expected to launch sometime next month, so I guess we'll know pretty soon.

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There is one thing that I have never understood about the Japanese economy. How can people spend so much money? I mean, Japan has been in recession for 10 years (ever since I started studying Japanese, though I'd like to believe the two events are unrelated), yet according to an estimate from Merrill Lynch, Japanese consumers account for "40 percent of the world's high-end handbags, shoes, watches and other items...."

Huh? How does that work? When I lived in Sapporo five years ago, my friend Ian was doing a homestay with a Japanese family. One day he asked me "Dan, where do these guys get their money from? My host father works for the city, and his wife is a housewife, but they have a new house, two new cars, a kid, and he seems to go drinking all the time. I just don't see how they can afford it."

Ian thought that I might have an answer, but I'm afraid I let him down - at the time I had no idea how on earth Japanese consumers manage to support their lifestyles. Since then I've done some reading on the subject, and as near as I can tell, it sounds like the high end and the low end are prospering now, while the mid-level retailers are taking a beating. People save enough money shopping at the 100 Yen Shop to buy that new Louis Vuitton bag, while the department stores sit empty. That explanation helps, but given how many LV bags are out there, consumer spending still seems to be a lot higher than income. How do they do it? But the other day I saw the flip side of the coin.

I was getting my hair cut at a trendy-looking hair salon where the basic cut - with student discount - cost 3,000 yen. The stylist was in his mid-20s, and seeing as how I can still kind of remember what it was like to be that age, we hit it off pretty well and had a good chat about what I thought of Japan, favorite movies, and girlfriends or lack thereof. He asked me where I was living, and I told him: the Waseda dorms.

"Where do you live?" I asked.

"Oh, I live in a dorm too."

"What dorm?" I asked.

"Oh - you know, the company dorm. We have common toilets and the showers are coin-op, but it's not too bad. I can always go to the sento [public bath] if I want."

I knew there was a public bath right around the corner, so I agreed, saying that would be pretty convenient.

"But of course, that costs 400 yen [about $4] - so it's really too expensive to go every day."

What?! I'm paying you $30 for a haircut and you can't afford to spend $4 for a bath once a day? What's wrong with this picture?

We chatted some more and I found out that his work day was something like 12 hours long: after cutting hair until 8 p.m., there were mandatory company-sponsored training sessions on the fine points of styling hair. Basically, my stylist was an indentured servant.

Japan Inc. has grown up on the myth of all-inclusive middle class. Back when I was in college, one professor quoted surveys showing that 95% of Japanese self-identify as "middle class." That is clearly no longer the case. The wage gap is wide and growing, as more and more Japanese young people reject corporate careers - or just can't find them given the the poor state of the economy. Instead, they take part-time jobs and live at home.

I think it's pretty evident that the resulting wage gap and the emergence of "haves" and "have-nots" in formerly homogenous Japan is fundamentally altering the "polite and safe" Japanese society of Western stereotype - but that's a big topic that I'll leave for another day.

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Gamespot just posted an article saying that from December, 10 stores in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen will be selling the PS2. To quote Keanu Reeves, "whoah."

I don't want to hurt any feelings, but that smacks of desperation, especially in light of Sony's current financial troubles. Piracy is rampant in China. In one E3 presentation I attended, an analyst said that Blizzard sold 100,000 copies of Warcraft in China, but estimated there were 5 million pirated copies, for a 1:50 ratio of legit to pirated versions. The November issue of Japanese industry mag Gemu Hihyo included a special on this topic, reporting that pirated console games in China cost around 100 yen - about a dollar. Even if legal PS2 games sell for the equivalent of $20 in China - much cheaper than Sony's other markets - it's hard to imagine that they'll be able to sell many games.

So revenue from software sales will probably be small. What about hardware sales? Is Sony banking that profits from console sales will make this venture worthwhile? I don't get it - I mean, people in China that wanted PS2s could always get them gray market. People that haven't done so yet are the casual gamers.

So Sony's venture in China can be summed up like this: "we think there are enough casual gamers in China that are willing to lay out half the average monthly salary for the PS2 that it will pay off to invest in distribution and sales channels."

Hmmm. I know that Sony has access to much more detailed market information than I do, and I know they have some very brainy, highly numerate people crunching these numbers, but I just don't see how this works. I guess time will tell.

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Sorry about that - I spent longer at the gym yesterday than I thought I would. Quite uncharacteristic of me. But here it is, without further ado: Dan's cellcam extravaganza!

A picture is worth a thousand words, so not much commentary from me today. But I will say that my journalist friend who's covering today's national elections said two hours ago that the LDP is "yabai," which in this context suggests that their plurality is threatened.

That's kind of exciting. After all, they've governed the country for almost half a century, and considering their record of late, it's about time that someone else had a shot at it.

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I attended the Tokyo International Computer Graphics Festival (a.k.a. TIGRAF) game graphics presentations on the 6th - my coverage should be up on Gamespot.com on Monday. I just wanted to add some comments that didn't fit in my articles.

Tetsuya Mizoguchi is a crazy game god. That's pretty much the size of it. Hearing him speak after all the other producers was like going to a conference and hearing Stephen King, Anne Rice, and Tom Clancy speak. You just sit back, soak it in, and gloat softly to yourself, thinking "Unbelievable!" But just at that moment, the conference organizers bring out William Faulkner, he starts talking, and everyone's jaw hits the floor.

This is by no means a slur on the other presenters. They have stellar careers - between them they sell almost enough software to turn around the Japanese economy. But Tetsuya Mizuguchi has vision.

Mizuguchi-san was the only one to talk about game theory, describing his quest to understand why a game is fun, and how to make his games more fun. He said that his design brief for Rez was "How good can we make someone feel through a video game?" (Given the notorious "vibrator pack" accessory for that game, I expected this comment to elicit more snickers than it did.)

By contrast, the other presenters focused their talks on developing CG and the cost-effective ways to use it, though Capcom's Tatsuya Minami showed his own contemplative streak when he mused about a game industry equivalent to the Dogma film movement, which eschews special effects and studio tricks in favor of documentary-style film. (Though admittedly he's not the first to make this kind of comment.)

At any rate, Mizuguchi left Sega last month, and he's now considering his next project. Even during his stint at Sega, Mizuguchi built a reputation for creating innovative and risky games - now that he's working for himself, I think it's safe to say that his next project will be like nothing we've seen before. It's nice to have something to look forward to.

Gotta hit the gym. Come back in a couple of hours for the Cellcam Pic Extravaganza!

In the past month or so, I've heard a couple of people that know what they're talking about compare the game industry to Hollywood, and suggest that Hollywood's current studio system might show the future shape of the game industry. Most game industry workers would freelance on a per-project basis, and producers with hot game ideas would shop them around the different "studios" (publishers in this case) until they found a place that wanted to make the movie, so to speak. Then they'd assemble a team of contractors and start development.

Interesting. One way that people support arguments for this model is by pointing out that in its infancy, the film industry was organized in pretty much the same way that the game industry is now: directors, actors, and production staff all worked full-time for a given studio. This being the case, it's only logical that the game industry will follow the same path as Hollywood.

Hmmm...not quite sure whether I agree with this or not. I mean, film and games are two very different things. But setting aside the logic of this argument for the moment, would it be a good thing for game studios to develop this way? What do we really want from the game industry?

I think the answer to that question is the willingness to expand product lineups beyond the latest mediocre FPS and develop risky, ambitious games that will either be runaway successes ("El Mariachi"), or terrible, embarrassing flops ("Brown Rabbit"). Basically what we want is an industry that supports non-commercial - or at least potentially less-commercial - games.

Is the Hollywood model for game development the way to get what we want? Hard to say, but I doubt it. I mean, how much indie film comes out of Hollywood?

At least when it comes to games we're not solely dependent on the game industry: thank goodness for the PC and the modding community. (Hmm, come to think of it, personal computers have played a huge role in democratizing video/film as well. Maybe there's something to this analogy.)

Last week I went to visit Cyberfront, a company that localizes U.S. PC games for the Japanese market. I had a very interesting conversation with two of their staff, and the resulting article is now available on Gamespot.com.

Unfortunately, I had to omit some of the most interesting parts of our conversation because they just weren't germane to the topic of the article. But now you can read the truth: "What Japanese Game Execs Really Think About Game-related Lawsuits."

We were talking about the recent GTA III lawsuit, and Cyberfront's Managing Director Seiji Murai pointed out "You know, a suit like this would never get to any kind of higher court in Japan because at the initial hearing [at district court] the judge would say 'don't waste our time with this nonsense.'" (The word he actually used, "bakageta" has a lot of rich associations that aren't fully conveyed by "nonsense," but that's the general idea.)

One of Cyberfront's producers agreed, saying that Japanese people, in general, were not likely to initiate lawsuits because it's kind of embarrassing - almost a personal failure. I pointed out that in the U.S., a lot of suits are actually driven by lawyers, and that there's a kind of semi-celebrity status accorded to these publicity-seeking trial lawyers.

Murai leaned back in his chair. "Oh, that's different. See, in Japan, lawyers are just the people that weren't smart enough to be judges."

Just some thoughts inspired by a conversation about cyclists being run down by Japanese drivers. It's happened to me once, and I doubt I have more than 1,500 lifetime miles of cycling here...while during a 3,500 mile trip through SE Asia, including rides through Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Hanoi, and Bangkok, I didn't even have any memorably close calls.

That's odd, because Japanese licensing is very strict. Before getting their licenses, drivers are required to take long and expensive driver's ed courses that have classroom and behind-the-wheel components and cost around 300,000 yen. For that money in the U.S., you could have Skip Barber teach you how to race stock cars, and (presumably) get competent enough not to embarrass yourself. So why is it that after spending almost $3,000 on driving lessons, Japanese drivers don't perform any better than U.S. teenagers or Vietnamese truck drivers?

"Heck, if the driving schools don't perform any better than that," I thought naively to myself, "they might as well eliminate those requirements." But then I thought some more. Just like the construction industry, the driving school industry is almost totally dependent on government handouts, though in this case the handout takes the form of favorable legislation rather than actual contracts. If the laws requiring driving courses were abolished, I imagine that somewhere over 90% of these schools would go out of business, so they stay on the books to prop up the industry, and as a result the industry has no incentive to offer driving classes that actually make students better drivers.

Just another example of institutionalized Japanese inefficiency, I guess. Come to think of it, it's not so different from shaken, the mandated auto safety inspections, that cost around 100,000 yen.

No wonder there's so many driving games here.

The students of Waseda University, my host institution here, just wrapped up "Waseda-sai," a three-day extravaganza of performances, exhibitions and food stalls. To be honest, I'm not sure exactly what the festival is for (besides getting out of a lot of class - courses were canceled Wednesday-Friday last week so the students could prepare), but it seems that pretty much every student group took advantage of the opportunity to display their skills, recruit new members or raise funds.

For instance, one rather alarming placard reading "Jihad" in two-foot letters turned out to be a recruiting drive for a tennis club by that name. The student group for rock festivals (?) had some freakishly accurate cover bands doing Rage Against the Machine and Guns and Roses. Kind of interesting to see this skinny Japanese guy jumping up and down in a frenzy onstage, screaming "F*** you, I won't do what you tell me!" I also happened to catch a ska/reggae band that had probably the shortest sax section in the history of ska.

The best thing I saw all day had to be the presentation by the film club. They built monster suits (think of the old Godzilla films where the lizard was a dude in a rubber suit) and staged monster wrestling. Granted, this has only a tangential connection to film, but seeing one monster pick up a baseball bat and go after his opponent was one of the best things that's happened to me since I got to Tokyo. No photo, alas.

And now for something completely different...

Seems like suicide is in fashion these days. Jumping in front of a train seems to be the preferred method - I don't even ride the train every day and I know of two incidents in the last week or so. It's sad that someone's whole life gets reduced to a bland little statement "Due to an 'accident resulting in bodily injury,' the train will be delayed, " that shows on the onboard LCD screens or gets played through the speakers.

The Toei subway company has suicide-proofed some of their stations by putting fences and gates on the platforms. There's a solution that would never work in the U.S. - drivers need to make sure that the train doors line up with the gates on the platform, and I doubt very much that U.S. train drivers (engineers?) would be willing to bother.

My first thought when I saw the platform fence was "Why didn't they build up to the ceiling?" But that's not a perfect solution either; I think that would just drive people to find a stretch of railroad track away from a station to take the plunge. It's also sad (maybe kind of twisted too) that the next-of-kin are responsible for the costs incurred as a result of making all those trains run behind schedule.

Anyway, enough of that. Just wanted to post some interesting marketing campaigns I've seen lately. First, Virgin Records here is cross-promoting with Bordeaux wine. "Buy music, get wine." Heh, just imagine how well that would go over in the U.S.

But even so, it would be received approximately 1,000 times better than this campaign: handing out free samples of cigarettes on the street! The little campaign girl was standing there with an open pack of cigarettes in one hand, and a lighter in the other; apparently they weren't interested in giving people smokes for later, they wanted you to puff their product now now now. I asked her if I could take her photo and she looked nonplussed and agreed. I explained "We could never do a promotion like this in the U.S." and she still looked nonplussed.