(Japan!, English)

A lot of people whine about how winter is cold, sad, and depressing.
I agree with the cold but if you look at the right places, winter can be great.
The low temperature and clear sky gives this beautiful effect on the night scenery of Minatomirai in Yokohama, Japan.

The skyscraper in the middle is called Landmark Tower, a 60+ story building with the fastest elevator in Japan.
It has a marvelous view at the top floor but they charge you 1000 to do so.
I prefer going one floor higher to the panoramic restaurant and have a beer and snacks for 1500 yen. :p

If you want to take a picture in this same spot, get off at the Bashamichi station on te Minatomirai Line and wait for the right moment with another 30 Japanese enjoying the view. :)

This Monday December 21st, there's a very special event called The 23rd Japan Bowl X League Championship to be held in Toyo Dome and these beautiful ladies came to promote the event on our live show.

They told me that at half time they will have 150 girls like them to have a special cheer.

For more info, go to http://xleague.com
the game starts at 7pm.

Tickets anyone? ;)

This past month the awarding ceremony of the first ever Japan Documentary Festival took place in the Nippon Foundation building lobby in Tokyo, Japan.

This documentary contest is organized by Nippon Foundation to promote 10min documentaries about "dreams" and "hope". Anybody could participate and all you had to do is turn in your 10min video for them to upload it to their YouTube page .

The 80 mini documentaries where judged by
1. Content
2. Page visits
3. Comments left in the YouTube page

There 7 nominees for the Grand Prize, Challenge Prize, and 4 Second place Prizes.

I had entered my mini documentary about Nikkey and multicultural identity in Japan. I had decided to combine my Pecha-Kucha presentation that I had done in Tokyo with the different visits that the Nikkei Scholars had done in Brazilian schools in Japan, to showing how today, you cannot define one's nationality or ethnicity just by their appearance.

It is a strong desire of mine to show that in the world today people not only communicate around the globe but also are mixing. Political geography is everyday less important or even obsolete when talking about people. Is a child who was born in Chile with Japanese parents supposed to be called Chilean? or Japanese? or either? If he had double citizenship, which country would he defend if they went into war? These are simple questions to answer, but in countries with strong uni-racial societies (like Japan) , it is not.

Here is my documentary. :)

So, coming back to the awarding ceremony, the judges were:

Nobuhiko Obayashi, Movie director, screenwriter and editor of films and television advertisements who is well known for his surreal visual style.

Yuko Arimori, professional marathon runner Silver medal Olympian and Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).

Shimon Miura, Director-general of The Japan Art Academy and famous japanese writer.

Kenichi Shimomura, TBS Announcer, director and media advisor for civil media.

Tsuruaki Yukawa, Senior Staff Writer at Jiji Press (he also has twitter!)

Yohei Sasakawa, Chairman of the Nippon Foundation and World Health Organization Goodwill Ambassador.

From the left
Mr. Obayashi, Mr. Shimomura, Mrs. Airmori, Mr. Yukawa, Mr. Miura and Mr. Sasakawa

I couldn’t attend the ceremony so my wife went instead.

After the judges watched all 7 of the documentaries with the rest of the people who attended the event, they made their final pick on stage.
To our surprise, I got the Challenge Award!!!!

Chairman Sasakawa spoke in behalf of the judges for my documentary and congratulated my wife with the diploma and the symbolic ticket for the “world travel ticket”.

Group picture with all of the Nominees and Judges

I would like to thank the Nippon Foundation for organizing such a great event, the nikkei scholars who participated in my documentary (Igor, Gustavo, Hana, Melina), and all of my friends who viewed and/or commented in the youtube page. Thank you sooo much!

About the prize, I am planning on making a documentary about “okigusuri project” done by the Nippon Foundation in Mongolia and Myanmar.

What is Okigusuri(置き薬）? In a rough translation it means, “medicine left for use”.
It started in the Toyama region of Japan where villagers would use the medicine they needed from the medicine box and payed at the end of the month, only for what they had used.

This traditional system is very useful for communities where the individual does not have enough purchasing power. This system works only if there is a strong bond and trust between the communities or villages so I am very interested to discover and show how this traditional japanese system could change the way in which people in need of medicine, and not any kind of medicine, but traditional medicine can get it for a low price.

Stumbled upon this masterpiece which made me remember
how important it is to have fun in life. :)

"I'm Yours" ukulele version.

先週、日本に来日している2人の学生の通訳をすることになりました。
彼らはラオスで9ヶ月間キャッサバ芋の研究プロジェクトを終え、各国に帰る前に、この研修を企画した日本財団の会長に挨拶するため、日本に寄りました。

僕は彼ら2人と会長の面談、広報からのインタビューの通訳を行ないました。
2人共まだ若いのに、もう国レベルの農業改革やプロジェクトを予定している面白いペルー人とパナマ人なのです。

面談やインタビューが終わり、夕飯まで4時間あるので渋谷と原宿に連れて行きました。初めての日本訪問なので、何もかも新しく見えるのかなと思ったら、期待と裏腹に落ち着いて渋谷と原宿の街を楽しみました。

電気屋さんいったり、ゲームセンター、表参道ヒルズ、コンドマニア、おみやげ屋さん、に連れていってもなかなか驚かない。

しかし！一つだけ彼らがとっても驚いたことがあります。それは、僕も予想していなかったのですが、マッサージチェアです。

渋谷の新しくできたヤマダ電気に入り、知ってるかなーとおもい家電のフロアーにいきました。

-アキラさん、これなんですか？
-あ、これ？ちょっと座って見てご覧
-こう？
-そう。スイッチ入れるから見てご覧

- ・・・、あ"ぁぁ〜〜〜〜！！
- びっくりした？
- ・・・、おぉぅ〜！これ、欲しいです。いくらぐらいするの？
- 新しいモデルだから28万円。2,500ドルぐらい。
- えっ！でもさっきみたパソコンと同じですね。持って帰れないかなー。
- カルロス君、これビジネスにしたいんでしょ。
- もちろん。笑

こんな楽しい会話が続き、南米にはこういう機械はすごく魅力的なのだなと思い出せられました。そういえば僕も5年前日本ににきた時もこのマッサージマシーンが欲しかったような。

チリやブラジルのマーケットでもヒットすると思います。

ゲームセンターはほんと燃えましたね〜

表参道

表参道ヒルズ

お陰様で先週、日本動画祭のチャレンジ賞をいただくことができました！ 「希望•夢」をテーマに応募された80点の動画がすべてYoutube にアップされ、訪問者数と動画コメントを参考にトップ7の作品が優勝候補にノミネートされたところ、チャレンジ賞をいただきました!

なかなかブログが続かなくツイッターだけはアップデートしているいま、ちょっと新しいことをやってみてます。 Wordpressアプリを使ってホームページに記事をアップし、もう一つの日本語ブログに連帯できるかやってみてます。日本語ブログ

Yes I confess, I am very much addicted to twitter now. First it was, Mixi, a Japanese SMS, then came Facebook, you know what that is, and now  Twitter, a new microblogging service that’s the hottest net trend in the whole world, EXCEPT for Japan so as to think. Here in Japan, blogs are a huge part of netizens in Japan, but their way of blogging is very different to the blogging elsewhere since they blog in very short articles. So short, that when tweeter came in, nobody saw the need of it since most of them were already microblogging in their own blog! For example,  this photo on the side is Miki Fujimoto’s official blog. One of the top celebrity bloggers in Ameba Blog, and is known to write multiple article in her blog, but each one only consists of 1 or more pictures and a small comment. But like me, there are also many Japanese who have fallen in love with twitter as well, although the majority are IT related people.

Some of the famous Japanese twitters:

@Kohmi(Kohmi Hirose) tweets in Japanese You could say that this lady started the Twitter boom in Japan by accidentally pronouncing “Twitter” as “Twihhihiii” (in Japanese the letter “t” looks like the “ヒ” in Katakana with the sound “hii”. Apparently all of her devoted fans and people who read her tweet loved it and started using the service. She’s a very famous Anime singer and didn’t miss this chance to make her own “Twitter Song” You can listen to the “Twihhihii song” here @kazuyo_k (Kazuyo Katsuma) tweets in Japanese She’s the actual business guru that has revolutionized the way in which businessmen manage their time. She has many best sellers and I could say she’s also a trend setter in all-things business. Since she joined twitter, many 25 – 35 year olds have followed. . . . @dannychoo (Danny Choo) tweets in English Danny Choo is not Japanese but is one of the most famous guys in the Otaku-net world. It all started with his stormtrooper dance, also becoming a successful entrepreneur in Japan.

How Twitter started in Japan

It all started on May 14th, 2007, where an event for hardcore net users called Blog TV  “Twitter Night” was organized. They did an online interview to Evan Williams (founder of Twitter) and that helped to ignite the boom on hardcore users.  You could say it caught fire in April 2009, where interestingly is the time when TechCrunch had announced that Google was going to buy Twitter.(take a look at the Google Trends graph). On 2008, Twitter.com noticed the increment of unique users in Japan and decided to team up with Digital Garage to provide a Japanese version of it (twitter.jp).  remember this being top news on CNET Japan and also pointing out that the Japanese twitter was the only one with a big ad on the right column. Good thing that monstrosity disappeared. LOL As you can see, some of the data shows interesting things about what kind of Japanese use twitter. (Source: Google Ad Planner) Now, check out this Google Trends graph.  It is showing the word “tweeter” as a google trend. It goes parallel to the amount of people signing up for twitter. A: Google in Talks to Acquire Twitter B: Ashton Kutcher Marks his 1,000,000th follower on twitter C: State Dept. urged Twitter to reschedule maintenance D: Tetsuya Komuro’s (famous japanese singer-producer) twitter account turns out to be fake E: Theft of Twitter Documents From Google Apps Raises Cloud Security F: Twitter hit by denial-of-service attack

Twitter vs. Timelog and Mixi

Twitter has strong competition in Japan since it already has a arch nemesis called Timelog a service that was made in 3 days by a Japanese programmer called Tatsuya Hattori (ironically he also has twitter)  who saw twitter and thought it would be a great service to provide in Japan. Turns out that Timelog is a lot more felxible than twitter and is specifically for the Japanese market so that gives it an edge. Mixi on the other hand is a SNS similar to facebook but with a lot more security involved register. You have to have a Japanese phone and an invitation from someone already using mixi to use this service. Once inside, you can make your own profile and join groups as in facebook, but the difference is that, you can make your own blog and mini blog inside it too. Mixi blogs also tend to be short so I think this is a competitor for twitter as well.

Inside Mixi looks something like this:

Top Ten Japanese Twitters

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