Check out the latest promotion for Xbox Japan/Steel Battalion. That's right, after building the largest, most expensive, and arguably coolest controller on the market, Capcom didn't rest on its laurels. The winner of this sweepstakes will choose between a portable soundproofed room (in which he'll be able to play Steel Battalion as loud as he wants without bothering the neighbors), and the "arcade version" of Steel Battalion.

I'm speechless. (Good thing I can still type, huh?) Why am I so thrown by this? Well, I guess what it comes down to is that almost no one in Japan has room for one of these. It would be kind of like Boeing running a sweepstakes in the U.S. in which first prize is an industrial flight simulator built from the cockpit and front fuselage of a real 747. Lots of people would drool over it, but when you get right down to it, hardly anyone would be able to accept delivery. ("Come on honey, we just need to raise the roof in the garage ten feet and park the cars on the street from now on."

It's funny because I thought that Xbox Jp was moving to a focus on grassroots promotions (in fact, I was going to pitch my editor on a story), and giving out honking huge Steel Battalion devices is not really the way to sell more to the mass market. I don't think it is anyway.

The best U.S. analog that I can think of is the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog. We were just talking about this in my direct marketing course: the professor pointed out that very few people are actually in the market for his 'n' hers yachts or million-dollar diamand necklaces, and that Neiman Marcus likely doesn't make much money on those super-deluxe offerings. But those products generate buzz like nobody's business: they drive people to look through the catalog, and they drive catalog subscriptions/requests as well.

As a buzz-generating device, this Xbox promotion makes sense. Totally over-the-top prizes are cool to talk about/fantasize about. But how cool is it when you actually lose your living room to a soundproofed cube? Second prize is playing Steel Battalion with some Japanese pop idols - how much do you want to bet that at least one first prize winner asks for second prize instead?

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This is something I started working on last year and never quite finished, or maybe my subconscious was just helping me save it until the right time.

I had lunch with the assistant dean of Waseda's Commerce Department yesterday. He was a nice guy who'd gotten his PhD in Vancouver BC (and admitted to having spent his fair share of time in Whistler), and we had a good chat. As it turns out, business PhDs have some interesting perspectives - here's two of the things that came up during lunch.

We were talking copyright infringement and file trading, and then for some reason, Viagra came up. He mused: "You know, Viagra was approved in Japan in less than a year, but it took more than 20 years for the Pill to get approved. And everyone says that's due to sex discrimination. But that's not it. It's all about having the Internet versus not having the Internet. The government knew that people would just buy Viagra online from overseas vendors, so they accelerated the approval process."

Hmm. Could be. Of course, none of the three men at the table would admit to any personal experience with the topic at hand...

Then we talked a little bit about the tragicomically bad state of Japanese banks. More specifically, we talked about the relationship between Japanese corporate borrowers and their banks. He pointed out that most of the time, the borrower has to buy a big chunk of the bank's shares in order to get a loan.

"Normally you'd say that an investment makes financial sense if it returns at a higher rate than the cost of capital. Interest rates in Japan now are so close to zero that you'd think that companies would be borrowing like mad. The fact that they're not just goes to show that the true cost of capital is much higher than the quoted interest rate on corporate loans."

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