Tokyo Images

[Nigel Kersten]

On Sat, Dec 12, 2015 at 3:06 AM, Peter Korsten <peter at severity-one.com>
wrote:

> Op 28-11-2015 om 06:06 schreef deeplfo:
>
> For fans of Japan/Tokyo on the bar:
>>
>>
>> https://medium.com/@damjancvetkovdimitrov/these-photos-are-why-i-m-trapped-in-tokyo-forever-now-1a0ea980bcc5#.ptsgidwal
>>
>
> There are very few places outside Europe that I'm interested in visiting.
> Japan and Tokyo in particular are two of them.
>
> Still, though, I think the Japanese, like the British, are very good at
> exporting their culture -or more accurately, what others perceive their
> culture to be like- and making everybody believe how incredible they are.
>
> The irony of Japan is that their offices are like 20 years behind the West
> (and most of Asia I'd guess). They still work with fax. They're so afraid
> of failure, that managers are extremely reluctant to introduce change. It's
> like the polar opposite of Silicon Valley and I can't imagine what it would
> be like to be running a software development firm there.
>
> "Say, there's this thing called Agile..."
>

I just spent two weeks in Tokyo a month or so ago, and have spent the last
5 weeks in Australia, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong. My job for the
last 3 months has literally been to study tech adoption across Asia and get
on the ground info from people.

If you think Japan is 20 years behind.... I've been having conversations
with other Asian banks who are really interested in adopting virtualization
on their servers due to finding it too difficult to buy new ones with CD
drives...

It's true though that lots of office and tech culture in Japan is well
behind the West. There's something bitterly amusing about the impact Kata,
Kanban etc have had on modern software development outside of Japan, and
yet they're most places are totally waterfall and rigidly hierarchical.

The big corps are trying to change though. They know it's inefficient, they
know they're behind, and I had a lot of great meetings where senior
managers, VPs and CxOs were incredibly eager to learn how to create change.

There are two megacorps in particular who are working hard at this, and
it's widely acknowledged that everyone else will follow whatever they do if
it's successful.

http://cloud.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/20151105_728677.html

:)

I've quite enjoyed the practice of everyone taking a photo after higher
level business meetings :)

As far as the capsule hotel turning you off ToAD... you've got to put them
in context. There are inhuman hotels in the US that are just as horrifying.
It's not how most people live there at all.

I adore Tokyo. It's incredibly human, it's the cleanest, safest large city
I've ever spent lots of time in, and they adore food and culture. Gangsters
will help you work out where you are when you're drunk at 5am and point you
at the best ramen and help you find an ATM. There's a great hip-hop scene,
a great electronic music scene, and some of the best b-boy and b-girl
dancers I've ever seen.

deeplfo is right. The stereotypes are there, but there's SO much more to
Tokyo. Every time I visit I convince myself I need to move there, and I
suspect if I'd visited in my 20s I'd still be living there, even given the
eventual barrier all non-Japanese folks experience.

Comparatively, after a week in Hong Kong talking to expats I've realized
just how much of an art and culture hole there is in this city. I love
visiting here, it's one of the greatest food cities in the world, but the
relatively artistically empty existence, worship of money and acceptance of
class divisions that seems to go along with expat life here is something I
never want to get used to.

It's been a bloody weird but utterly compelling trip :)
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