A few months ago, I had the chance to visit Tokyo to work with the DDB office there. Similar to my trip to Australia last year, it was a chance to return to place I'd once lived, visit some old friends and meet some new colleagues. Below are a few pictures from my trip.
If you want to see some more pictures from my trip, check out my Instagram page (I'm ParkerNow there), starting with this image.
Sometime last week I read a news story announcing that "Japan's latest rockstar is a 3D hologram." The star is actually a software package that a company put together that is capable of mimicking a human voice (based on a sample from a voice over artist) and creating songs.
As a devoted sci-fi fan, I wasn't surprised by this. It was more like the feeling you get after a medium-length car trip: "Oh, we're here?" you might say as you put down the magazine and tell whoever it is that drove that it seems like you made good time.
In the 1994 animation movie Macross Plus, one of the main 'characters' is an Artificial Intelligence named Sharon Apple. She sells out stadiums, and appears to be the biggest star in the world.
Similarly, in William Gibson's 1995 book Idoru one of the main characters 'marries' Rei Toei, another performer who is nothing more than an Artificial Intelligence.
I haven't seen the movie S1M0NE, but apparently it has a similar plot line with the added perk of Al Pacino.
How much of our entertainment of the future will be entirely artificial? Its one thing to create robots that can sing like humans, and insert digital characters into movies, but will a computer ever be able to create an actual story?
Image of Sharon Apple above via this site.
The first time I ever owned a cell phone was when I moved to Japan to teach English in August of 2004. With the help of some friends, I picked out a phone that cost one yen (about one cent Canadian) with a fairly reasonable month plan.
It was a flip phone with one large, very bright color screen on the inside and another smaller screen on the outside. The phone was capable of taking photos and video. Similar to a Blackberry, the phone could also send and recieve emails.
The web browsing capabilities were limited only in that I don't think there was much mobile content out there at that time, most of that which was there was in Japanese too complicated for my limited vocabulary and was otherwise difficult to navigate on such a small screen.
The phone was capable of playing mp3 ringtones. I never investigated whether or not it would work as a music player because I had just upgraded my Panasonic Shockwave Discman (!) for a buggy, Toshiba Gigabeat mp3 player.
The point is that this was one of the cheapest, least complicated phones available in Japan in 2004.
Five years later, it doesn't really surprise me that the iPhone isn't very popular in Japan and that carrying one around would be considered "lame."
-Parker
If one feels homesick for the future Japan seems the country of choice. Now you can witness a trend that might be an indicator of how our way of communicating is going to change. As Newsvine reports the PC's role in Japanese homes is diminishing, as its once-awesome monopoly on processing power is encroached by gadgets such as smart phones that act like pocket-size computers, advanced Internet-connected game consoles and digital video recorders with terabytes of memory. Writes Newsvine:
Japan's PC market is already shrinking, leading analysts to wonder whether Japan will become the first major market to see a decline in personal computer use some 25 years after it revolutionized household electronics — and whether this could be the picture of things to come in other countries.
One of the reasons for the decline of the PC market is the increasing popularity of sophisticated mobile devices such as cell phones. According to a study conducted by the Ministry of Internal Affairs more than 50 percent of Japanese send e-mail and browse the Internet from their mobile phones. The increased use of cell phones to access the internet obviously affects the websites itself. From the Newsvine piece:
The fastest growing social networking site here, Mobagay Town, is designed exclusively for cell phones. Other networking sites like mixi, Facebook and MySpace can all be accessed and updated from handsets, as can the video-sharing site YouTube.
If this really is the picture of things to come of course one has to ask how this affects blogging and its use for political campaigns. Content will have to comply to the nature of cell-phones with small screens and users used to short messages due to the lack of a keyboard. Consequently this makes a rise of microblogging likely. Already used by John Edwards and Barack Obama to inform their followers what they are up to at pretty much any given time and post quick event updates it also, as Asbjørn Sørensen Poulsen points out, "does seem to give the debate an edge when you are forced to express yourself in 140 characters".
While microblogging seems certainly seems a good way of keeping one's devotees up to date and very quickly reacting to new developments I think it might be problematic in the way that it adds to a shallowness of the process. It's not really based on exchange. To be forced to express oneself in 140 characters also comprises the danger of reducing politics to even emptier slogans and phrases, simplifying a complicated world.
As a complementary communication tool, microblogging certainly seems like a good idea. Tanding by itself though there are issues and challenges that need to be addressed if we really are following Japan in our communication habits.
(If that's ever going happen. As Parker reminded me by sending me this link to Deep Jive Interests the whole wireless-infrastructure of Japan is way more sophisticated than in North America or Europe and there's no sign – or demand for that matter – that this is going to change anytime soon. At least the "tremendous heritage in other technologies such as console gaming" is gaining foothold with consoles having overtaken PCs as the favorite gaming platforms).
-Jens
If someone asked you to freely associate things with Japan you'd probably think of futuristic high-tech, bullet trains, cyberpunk, anime and all the fancy gadgets we always seem to get years later. But of all countries it's Japan that campaign wise is still stuck in the middle-ages:
It's a first for Japanese politicians — and perhaps illegal. In his bid for re-election, upper house member Kan Suzuki has opened a virtual office in Second Life. He plans to use SL to discuss policy and field questions. Hence, the problem. Japan's fifty year-old Public Office Election limits election campaigns to using only postcards and pamphlets. See, they didn't have Second Life fifty years ago. But! Even recently officials have ruled that web pages cannot be created or updated during campaigns. Suzuki's campaign is venturing into uncharted territory for Japanese politics, which is still based on white gloves and campaign vans.
Makes me wonder how they handle blogs of politically interested citizens who follow the campaigns and publicly exchange their views with others – would updating their blogs during campaigning be illegal as well? Could campaigns pay people to pretend to be independent while they support their agenda? Has Japan heard of astroturfing?-Jens