Category: Econ & Business

The Viceroy’s many connections in the Orient

Two of the three bloggers at Cominganarchy, who go by the online handles of, Curzon and Younghusband, were in the same university in Kyoto where Adam and I did our undergraduate study abroad exchange program while we were there. Curzon, like Adam and Joe, had previously participated in a one year high school study abroad exchange in a different part of Kansai (and a different program from the one Adam and Joe were on), and even before that-12 years ago now-had done a summer program in which he stayed for a month with a host family in Otsu, a small city in Shiga Prefecture located just across the mountains to the east of Kyoto.

Although Curzon spent his first few months of undergraduate study abroad living in the same international students dormitory that Adam and I later lived in (Curzon arrived before us), and which Younghusband had lived in a couple of years earlier, he soon moved out and into one of the very cheap and very old fashioned dormitories that lie somewhere on the continuum of housing between hovel and tenement, with facilities so bare that they would never even be considered a legal residence back in the United States. I say dormitory because while each resident has an individual room-which cost a measly 13,000 yen (around $130) per month-for that price you got just a room, with only a shared toilet and no bathing facilities anywhere in the building. This sort of arrangement used to be typical in Japan, where neighborhood bath houses are still common in many areas, but has understandably fallen out of fashion in a period when most people can afford better.

When I returned to Kyoto earlier this year, I spent the entire month of April living in the spare bedroom of a friend’s apartment, down in Kyoto’s far southern ward of Fushimi so that I would have a base from which to look for someplace else to live. Since I have another friend who was in fact studying with Cuzon, Adam and I back in 2002-03 who will be moving back to Kyoto in September to engage in some other study program, we had decided that, so we would be able to live cheaply and yet still have a decent amount of space, we would rent a house to share after he arrived. However, not wanting to be stuck with a double share of rent for the intervening months, I decided that it would be best to find somplace both cheap and temporary, and if at all possible also located close to campus.

The biggest difficulty here has to do with the way rental leases are often structured in Japan. Even when the actual monthly rent is low, is it typical here to pay an outrageous reikin (often translated as “key money” equal to several months rent, in addition to a month or two of rent upfront, and a deposit equal to a couple of months rent. I considered living in one of those foreigner guest houses for a couple of months, but I visited one and it seemed fairly lame, and I thought I could do cheaper. And I did. I managed to get very lucky and find a place which is very cheap, very well located, and has a contract that I can leave with no penalty. The building is, rather oddly, owned by a monk who actually lived inside the temple on Hiezan, the holy mountain on the NE corner of Kyoto, who is so seriously monk-y that he spent twenty years engaged in a special Esoteric Buddhist meditation where, although he could interact with people, he did not leave the mountain at all. Needless to say, his grasp of modern technology is rather weak.

The apartment is, while old, low-class, and rundown, is however, unlike Curzon’s aforementioned former place, actually an apartment. A small one, to be sure, (a single 6-tatami room and a 2.5 tatami kitchen area separated by sliding doors) but with a (very basic) kitchen, a (Japanese style) toilet, and a bath. What it lacks, however, is a shower. And the bath tap only produces cold water, so you have to fill it up, heat it up with the gas bath heater-that very annoyingly must be turned on from the veranda- and then wash yourself by sitting next to the tub and pouring water on yourself in a sort of poor-man’s psuedo-shower. But, at least there is an air conditioner. While far from ideal, the price was right. ￥25,000 a month, with no reikin, and only a one-month deposit that the monk landlord promises I will get back as long as there is no extraordinary damage. But considering the ragged tatami and old paint that was here when I moved in, the bar for that was set low. I believe that this is the lowest price you could possibly get in Kyoto for a room with private bath, and while on the shabby side, is still a solid two or three steps above the ￥13,000 room.

The landlord occasionaly drops off various gifts, senbei, expensive chocolates, fancy tea, etc. which I find hanging on my door handle every few weeks when I get home from somewhere. These are most likely gifts brought to the temple by parishioners, which the monks then redistribute for some reason. Two days ago I returned home to find a new treat, with an envelope containing the following note attached.

Mr. Roy Berman

It is my very pleasure and astonishment that you and Mr. Curzon my acquaintance should be good friends from the same province.As you know, he stays in Tokyo now, and orders me to serve you as possible!

Koutai

Naturally perplexed, I emailed Curzon to see how this might be, and it turns out that Mr. Koutai (first name) was a friend of Curzon’s host father from his very first stay in Japan, 12 years ago in Otsu. The hostfather had taken the then-teenaged Curzon up Hiezan to meet the monk, and they met again a couple of weeks ago when Curzon visited the old host father in Otsu.

So much for that idea

Well, I had been planning to take a trip this summer in which I would go by train from Kyoto to Fukuoka, visit a couple of friends there, then head down through Kyushu by train to Kagoshima, from where I would take a ferry to Okinawa, spend a few days, and then take another ferry to Taiwan. Unfortunately, it looks like the only ferry company servicing the Okinawa/Taiwan route has gone out of business. Arimura Sangyo, which had been making the run for decades, is apparently no more. Their website is gone, the phone number is out of service, and an unofficial mirror of their former web page has added a statement informing that they officially ceased service in June, and went into corporate liquidation just on July 11.

So, apparently there is not currently any sea route between Japan and Taiwan, which has probably killed my entire concept for the trip. I may still book a flight for a couple of weeks in Taiwan, and I will probably at some point do the boat trip to Okinawa, but without the ferry connecting Okinawa to Taiwan, there seems to be little point in linking it all into one trip- unless someone reading this has info on another ferry company which somehow doesn’t turn up with any amount of googling.

Although plenty of other ocean routes still seem to be pretty active, ship is certainly long past its prime as a method of passenger transport. But, as fuel prices continue to climb and air travel becomes increasingly expensive after a long period of relative affordability, might we see a resurgence of medium distance (by which I mean a day or two, say between Pacific Islands, but not trans-Atlantic or Pacific) as an affordable alternative?

On a related note, while looking for currently active ferries, I found this rather neat web page on the history of long distance ferries in Japan.

[Update]

Someone posted the following report on Arimura to the Lonely Planet message board.

Arimura Industries, a ferry operator, that is based in Okinawa Prefecture in Japan, plying between Japan and Taiwan, intends to liquidate sometime soon mainly because of the current drastic fuel cost hike. The service has been completely suspended since 6th June. When the operations will resume is uncertain at the moment.

Arimura has been petitioning the Okinawa Prefectural Government to establish a new entity to continuously run the business only to have got an evasive answer. The company will keep on hiring the 120 employees. Its three vessels have been moored idly at Naha Sea Port.

It has been under reconstruction since 1999 based on the Corporate Rehabilitation Law.

Press competition circa 1969

I was just reading a sweet TIME article from May 1969 entitled “Japanese Air Force.” It’s about the fleets of small aircraft which Japanese newspapers used to move reporters and information around at high speeds, back before they had bullet trains or broadband.

This passage is particularly exciting to read, and does a lot to help restore the credibility of a certain everyday newspaper:

Mainichi’s newsmen still gloat about a photo they got of the Rising Sun replacing the Stars and Stripes over Iwo Jima last summer, even though the ceremony marking the return of Japanese sovereignty ended just 15 minutes before the paper’s evening deadline. As the ceremony ended, a Beechcraft took off from Iwo Jima, 775 miles south of Tokyo, and negatives were processed aboard. Another plane sped toward Iwo, received the photos by radio when the planes were 250 miles apart, then turned toward Hachijo Jima, 175 miles south of Tokyo. While still in the air, the second plane radioed the pictures to a ground station at Hachijo, which then transmitted them to Tokyo by undersea cable. No other evening paper pictured that historic event.

I can’t help but think that as technology continues to advance, logistics will become a lost art. Nowadays we can use e-mail and FedEx to get anything done in short time–what will happen when we have, say, networked matter replicators?

Incidentally, a google image search for “japanese air force” turns up the following picture, which according to a humor blog is some sort of Jieitai training:

Another Western family with old ties to Japan

The Asahi English website has a very interesting article entitled “Family planted Japan roots over a century ago“, on the history of the Apcar family, who first came to Yokohama around a century ago.

The family business, A.M. Apcar & Co., was established by Michael Apcar’s grandfather and run by his grandmother, Diana Agabeg Apcar after her husband’s sudden death in 1906. A.M. Apcar was born in what was then Persia and moved to India, then under British rule, and married Diana Agabeg. They were both from well-off Armenian families and decided to settle in Yokohama after spending part of their honeymoon here.

The entire history presented in the article is quite fascinating, but the following section is the one that really jumped out at me.

Life took a terrible turn as Japan moved toward a war footing.

In hindsight, it is curious the Apcars did not join other Westerners who left Japan before fighting broke out with the United States.

Leonard M. Apcar, Michael’s son, recalls a passage from memoirs written by Michael’s mother, Araxe, about an exchange with her husband about leaving Japan. Araxe asked her husband if Japan would ever go to war with the United States.

Michael Apcar Sr.’s reply was: “No, it would be suicide for the Japanese to go to war with the United States. It’s crazy and wouldn’t happen.”

On Dec. 8, 1941, after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, military police surrounded the Apcar home and hauled Michael Apcar Sr. off to prison.

Among the reasons for the detainment was the fact that the elder Apcar was the highest-ranking member of his Masonic lodge in Yokohama.

He was imprisoned for 14 months, during which time he was often tortured for information about his fellow Masons, according to his son.

During his father’s imprisonment, Michael’s sister, Dorothy, died. Her tombstone was made in the United States and he had never seen it in the cemetery until Tuesday.

Life did not get any better after his father’s release. The Apcars were given the choice of moving to either Hakone in western Kanagawa Prefecture or Karuizawa in Nagano Prefecture. They chose Karuizawa because it was thought there was a better chance of bartering for food with local farmers.

“My father knew the war was on and there was no business to be conducted, so he sold everything in the house,” Apcar said, noting that the family moved to a much smaller cottage in Karuizawa.

“(My father) knew he had to get enough money to live on during the war and he didn’t know how long the war was going to last,” Apcar said.

The Apcars lived in Karuizawa for about two years, raising goats and chickens and growing potatoes after clearing land filled with tree stumps.

“The winters would get terribly cold,” Apcar recalls. “If we spilled water anywhere in the house, it would immediately freeze.”

What turned out to be a lifesaver for the Apcars was a makeshift oven for heating and cooking that was put together from sheet metal saved by Apcar’s father from crates he received as an importer of horse liniment.

As the war situation facing Japan worsened, conditions in Karuizawa grew harsher.

“It got so bad in Karuizawa that my father and I had to keep watch because people were so hungry they would come and dig up the potatoes,” Apcar said.

One of the few advantages to living in Karuizawa was the fact it was not a target for Allied bombing raids.

The same could not be said for Yokohama. After Japan surrendered, Apcar found work as a guide and interpreter for Swiss officials who were seeking permission from the U.S. Army to move the Swiss Embassy from Karuizawa back to Tokyo.

He went to his place of birth.

“Yokohama was flat,” Apcar said. “I couldn’t find my way in Yokohama because the house where I was born was gone. All I saw was a bathtub. Everything was burned up, gone.”

Apcar eventually sailed with one of his sisters in September 1946 to San Francisco, where they had relatives.

This particular episode is in stark contrast to another long term expat family who remained in Yokohama during World War 2, which some readers here may remember. Almost two years ago I made a long post on William R. Gorham, an American engineer who moved to Japan for business, helped to found the predecessor to the Nissan Motor Corporation, and eventually became, along with his wife, a Japanese citizen in May of 1941-about 5 months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Gorham children returned to the US around this time, having been raised and educated in Japan but never naturalizing there. William R. Gorham survived the war with no particular hardship, was treated well by the occupation authorities-who he worked for as an advisor-and had a successful consulting firm in the postwar period, which helped such companies as Canon. His son Don Cyril Gorham, who was perhaps the first (or at least among the first) Westerner to receive an undergraduate degree from Tokyo University, served as a translator for the US both during and after the war, and visited Japan as recently as last October, at the age of 90.

The question looms of why one Western family, who as Americans were citizens of the very country Japan was going to war with and had been in Japan only for a couple of decades, was given the royal treatment, while the other, who had lived in Japan far longer and had no ties to the US (although they did move there postwar) were imprisoned like POWs. It seems likely that family connections were key.

While the Apcar family presumably had strong connections to the Yokohama business community, the many overseas contacts needed to run a successful trading company may have alarmed security officials. And as the article points out, membership in the Masons was also a key factor. Foreign-based quasi-mystical secret brotherhoods would not have been well regarded by the militaristic government of 1941 Japan.

By contrast, William R. Gorham’s business interests were pretty much Japan based. He was an inventor and engineer more than a businessman, and seems to have been little involved in any sort of international dealings. The Gorhams moved in high society. His wife studied traditional arts such as ceramics and ikebana with masters of the crafts, and even tutored a princess in English. Mr. Gorham’s close friend and business partner was Yoshisuke Ayukawa, famous for expanding Nissan (which Gorham himself contributed greatly to) into a zaibatsu, and helping develop Japanese industry in Manchuria. In fact, Don Cyril-his son-speculated in an email to me (actually transcribed by his daughter) that Ayukawa used his personal influence to fast-track the Gorham’s unusual eve-of-war application for citizenship.

Temp workers

Yesterday it was reported that Japan is considering a revision of the regulations governing temp workers, including the following section that might be rather difficult for most people to really understand.

The revised law will also tighten regulations on the industry practice of sending workers exclusively to certain clients or setting up a company for that purpose.

The practice allows client companies to use workers as nonpermanent employees because they are dispatched from a temp staff agency, thus cutting labor expenses.

To explain what this means, let me briefly discuss the labor situation at the private university in Japan where I worked for one year, from 2006-2007. In general, workers were divided into three categories: regular employees, contract employees, and part timers.

Regular employees were for the most part those hired through Japan’s so-called “shushoku” system of formalized job hunting that allocates the majority of good corporate jobs to fresh university graduates. In this university, almost every regular employee was hired through the shushoku system, and every regular employee I knew under the age of perhaps 30 or 35 was also a graduate of the same university. Some of the elder employees, such as the middle aged manager of my office, had been mid-career hires, but only after a couple of decades of work elsewhere. Regular employees are, in typical Japanese office style, expected to work long and pointless hours of overtime, and while they are contractually allowed to request overtime pay and use vacation days freely, unwritten social expectations prevent most from doing so. Many of these regular employees will spend their entire career in the same job, being gradually promoted based on a combination of seniority and merit. Merit probably factors in more than in the past but still less than would be desirable, and far more of them will also leave for another job at some point than in decades past. I would estimate that regular employees constituted about 25% of the office staff.

Contract employees are hired on what is effectively a three year contract, but is actually a one year contract with two renewal options. The contract stipulates a modest raise in the second and third year, but after the third year it is over and it is impossible for the employee to continue working there, no matter how much they want to or how good they are at their job. Since contract employeed were approximately half of the staff (at least in my office) this leads to an enormous waste of know-how and causes great inefficiency, as staff turnover is kept artificially high, and forces a lot of wasteful training. I am told that the reason for this system is that the labor regulations would require those modest annual raises to continue year after year, and so the university has taken the route of hiring employees with an expiration date, and then replacing them with fresh employees at the base salary. Contract employees leave exactly when the official shift is over, and if they actually have to due overtime due to excess work, will always request overtime pay for it. They have no long-term prospects, and it is impossible to move from being a contract worker to being a regular worker, no matter how competent or essential the person is. It is in fact possible for a former contract worker to start again on a fresh three year contract-at base salary level-but only after an insulting 6 month cooling off period, during which one is presumably and collecting unemployment insurance (which in Japan covers 3 months of payments after a contract concludes).

Part timers, who are almost all married woman who have young children in school and would have been housewives a generation ago, do essentially the same work as contract employees, but at significantly less pay and without benefits. I have no idea if they are theoretically limited in their employment duration, but without even the contract employee’s meager raises, why would they want to?

Now here is where the above quote comes in. There was a woman working in a different office from mine whose three year contract had expired. She liked her job and her co-workers, and her boss very much wanted her to stay, but under the rigid and bizarre employment system they had, it seemed that there was no way for her to stay. But she was offered an alternative, which involves a bizarre legal three card monty trick.

The university is a private, non profit, educational corporation. But they also “outsource” certain functions to a “joint stock company” (K.K. in Japanese terms) of which all shares are in fact held by the university. Various services such as cleaning, stocking, and certain other things I am not specifically clear about are sub-contracted to this company which is separate on paper, but has an office within the university, and whose board members are in fact staff of the university.

This woman, whose contract was expiring, was told that she could keep her same job, same desk, same duties, continue to work with her friends-but she would in fact be technically hired on a fresh contract by this shady subsidiary corporation and then dispatched as a temp to the university. Of course, being hired as a temp through a “third party” she would be taking a pay cut. Intelligently interpreting this as an insulting and demeaning offer, she declined the “new” position.

This, in short, is one of the types of hiring practice that the proposed new regulations are hoping to address.

Tokyo’s future railway lines

In January 2000, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport released a detailed study on how the Tokyo mass transit network could be expanded over the next 15 years. (Japanese text is here.) Many of the ministry’s suggestions have since been fulfilled, including the completion of the Oedo Line, Saitama Rapid Railway, Tsukuba Express, Nippori-Toneri Liner and Fukutoshin Line. But there are still a number of lines which have yet to be finished, and here are the most likely candidates to be built:

  • Narita Airport Railway
    Under construction – opening in 2010

This is probably the best-known railway project under development in the Tokyo area, as it has been on the drawing board for about 25 years (roughly since the cancellation of the planned shinkansen to Narita) and is finally under construction. It provides a more direct route from central Tokyo to Narita Airport by extending the existing Hokuso Railway line through the outskirts of Narita City. The line is expected to make the Skyliner journey about 15 minutes shorter (36 minutes from Nippori as opposed to the current 51 minutes).

  • Tohoku Line (Re-)Extension
    Under construction – opening in 2013

This extends the Takasaki Line and Utsunomiya Line, which currently terminate at Ueno, southward to Tokyo Station. There will be no stops at the stations in between (Okachimachi, Akihabara and Kanda). The main goal is to draw traffic away from the Yamanote and Keihin-Tohoku Lines, which are both really overcrowded in this corridor. (Joban Line communities are also lobbying to extend their service to Tokyo Station, but this would be logistically more difficult.)

This line actually used to exist but was cut off in 1973 so that the Tohoku Shinkansen could be extended to Tokyo Station over the Tohoku Main Line’s right-of-way. Opening the connection again will allow through service with the Tokaido Line, similar to the existing connection between the Sobu and Yokosuka lines. The main obstacle is (as you might expect) local citizens’ groups, who are calling on JR to “stop the heat island” (whatever that means). Despite their protests, JR started construction earlier this summer and plans to build the line over the next five years (i.e., really really slowly).

  • Yurakucho and Hanzomon Line Extensions
    Proposed for construction by 2015

The Yurakucho Line extension would run from Toyosu to Noda City in Chiba Prefecture, following a roughly northward course through Sumiyoshi, Oshiage and Kameari in eastern Tokyo. The Hanzomon Line extension would follow a similar course (perhaps even using the same tracks) up to Yotsugi, but track off toward the east to terminate in Matsudo.

A few bedroom towns in Chiba and Ibaragi are lobbying to have these extensions built, but Tokyo Metro cut off its construction budget with the Fukutoshin Line project and is not officially planning to extend any other lines, at least for now. I really hope they get around to this, though, because the Joban Line is inhumanely overcrowded during rush hour, even with 15-car trains.

  • Sobu-Keiyo-Keisei Connector
    Proposed for construction by 2015

This would be a line from Shin-Urayasu on the Keiyo Line through Funabashi Station on the Sobu Line to Tsudanuma Station on the Keisei Line, hooking up the three main Tokyo-Chiba railway lines. The main purpose is to divert traffic from the overcrowded Sobu Line onto the less popular Keiyo Line; the main carrot for doing this would be through service with the Rinkai Line (and, by extension, the Saikyo Line), allowing direct service from Chiba to the major terminals on the west side of Tokyo.

This plan is apparently still on the drawing board, but sounds pretty promising given all the development going on around the Chiba waterfront. It would probably be good for foreign visitors to Disneyland and Tokyo Big Sight as well.

  • Asakusa Line spur to Tokyo Station
    Proposed for construction by 2015

The Asakusa Line runs parallel to the JR trunk lines that serve Tokyo Station, but stays a few blocks away inside the financial district. The plan is to build a Y-shaped spur off of the west side of the Asakusa Line which would connect the line to an underground platform at Tokyo Station.

Most significantly, this would open up a new direct route from Tokyo Station to both Haneda and Narita Airport, potentially putting Keisei and Keikyu in even more direct competition with JR for airport-bound passengers. There is some speculation (e.g. among Wikipedia) that the Tokyo government may build additional passing tracks on the Asakusa Line to allow for high-speed direct trains between Haneda and Narita, which would likely become more necessary as regional international flights are moved from Narita to Haneda.

  • Kan-nana and Kan-hachi Lines
    Proposed without a deadline

These two lines would go through the outer wards of Tokyo at a radius of about 10km from the city center, roughly following the paths of Kan-nana and Kan-hachi Streets. The major stops along this route would include Haneda Airport, Futako-Tamagawa, Ogikubo, Tobu Nerima, Akabane, Nishi-Arai, Kita-Ayase, Kameari, Aoto and Kasai-Rinkai-Koen.

The lines would provide train service to huge under-served portions of suburban Tokyo, but would likely be difficult and expensive to construct because of their length. There is also doubt regarding how this line would compete with the proposed Yurakucho and Hanzomon extensions, which would follow a similar routing in east Tokyo. I would vote in favor of these lines since I now live near the proposed corridor, but we’ll have to wait and see whether any funding comes out to build them.

Switching to eMobile for handheld broadband in the ‘burbs

UPDATE: I ditched eMobile after about a year; this post explains why.

So I switched my mobile phone service to eMobile. This was really part of a much bigger jump over the weekend: I moved from a tiny furnished apartment in central Tokyo to a larger and very Japanese-style apartment on the edge of the metropolis. So far, I can’t say it’s been a bad change. There’s plenty of sunlight out the window, a proper bathroom (unit baths suck!) and enough room to accommodate my [laughable] writing, studying and musical efforts.

One problem I had to solve was staying connected to the outside world. All I wanted was an internet connection: I don’t need a home phone (Skype has me covered there) and I don’t need TV. My building isn’t wired for DSL, so the cheapness of broadband would be outweighed by the cost and hassle of installation.

After some head-scratching, I recalled that eMobile’s basic data plan offers unlimited use of mobile broadband at slow DSL speeds for about 5,000 yen a month. Then I realized that I could get one of their phones and plug it into my laptop’s USB port for unlimited internet access at slower-than-DSL speeds for about 7,500 yen a month, about the same as my average DoCoMo bill (basic plan plus “pake-hodai” and a couple of network services). So I went with eMobile’s basic “smart phone,” the S11HT “eMonster.” I bought it on Friday and have been using it constantly since then.

I am quite pleased so far. I wanted to get a phone with a keyboard for a while. I eyed Softbank’s offerings with interest last year, but was put off by advice from several people that the software sucked (I even heard this from a Softbank sales lady in Roppongi). A friend of mine then bought Softbank’s “Internet Machine,” which is packed with features (including television and GSM roaming) but costs more than my laptop did and, like most Japanese phones, has a unique operating system. Overall, the eMonster does a good job of balancing the sort of things that a fast-paced international digital individual (like yours truly) really needs in life.

The upsides:

  • Internet is very fast, both on the handset and on a connected PC. I’m not sure whether I’m actually getting the full 3.7 mbps on this thing, but it sure feels responsive; faster, at least, than the heavily firewalled LAN connection at work.
  • Can access any email account with a POP or IMAP server. I now get my Gmail messages straight to my phone. There is also third-party software which allows syncing with Google Calendar (which I also sync to my Outlook calendar at work) and Remember the Milk, meaning that I can have the same calendar and task list on my home computer, work computer and phone. Awesome.
  • There are multiple input methods. In addition to the slide-out keyboard, there is a Palm Pilot/Pocket PC-style touchscreen with stylus (which you can use to handwrite characters or tap an on-screen keyboard), a Blackberry-style clicking scroll wheel in the corner, and a directional pad at the base of the phone. Although this encourages a lot of fiddling to find the easiest way to accomplish any given task, it also makes it easy to find a control method that “feels right.”
  • Media integration is quite straightforward; just drag and drop folders of mp3s from the hard drive to the device, then Windows Media will pick up the files on a simple directory scan and catalog them appropriately.
  • There is a lot of third party software available for Windows Mobile, like Pocket Dictionary and Pocket Mille Bornes (I hadn’t played that game since I was eleven, and I had forgotten how good it is). No more paying monthly fees or signing up to newsletters just to play downloaded games (as DoCoMo generally requires).
  • I can run Skype on my phone to call people overseas for next to nothing, although so far I can’t get it to work through the phone’s earpiece–only through speaker or headset.

The downsides:

  • eMobile’s network is not as strong as any of the big three providers. In Tokyo, the main place you notice this is on the subway and in basements, as there is never any signal underground (although you can get a good signal above ground anywhere in the 23 wards).
  • No RFID chip for mobile payments. I was quite fond of the Suica chip in my DoCoMo phone, as I could charge it with my credit card and roam the city at will. Now I’m back to using a Pasmo card which I have to recharge with cash–bummer.
  • The GPS seems more erratic than my Docomo phone’s. Usually it’s off by several blocks.
  • Battery life isn’t great when the phone is on 3G and syncing data all day. It’s just about enough: I charged the phone overnight on Sunday and was down to my last bar of battery when I got home from work on Monday. If you plan on spending the night in an atypical location, you’ll need to bring a charger with you.
  • Contact management is really complicated in comparison to most mobiles, since Windows Mobile uses a slightly simplified version of Outlook.
  • No international roaming. Not a huge deal for me, since my DoCoMo phone could only roam in Europe and certain developed countries in Asia. The WiFi feature largely makes up for this anyway, especially since my family’s house in South Carolina has a good DSL connection and wireless router.

Japan’s less-publicized “connection” with African commodities

The Japan-Africa thing might be last week’s news, but better late than never:

This Japan Times feature, ran to coincide with Japan’s hosting of the Tokyo International Conference on African Development did a good job of putting an identifiable and good-natured face on the conference’s goals, whatever they might have been. How better to bring the Japanese taxpayers around to supporting aid to Africa than to emphasize the “connections” between Africa’s sweet, sweet resources and Japanese daily life?

Few Japanese may be knowledgeable about far-away Africa, but the continent’s exports affect daily life here.

With the Wednesday start in Yokohama of the fourth Tokyo International Conference on African Development, one should pause and take a quick glance at facts and figures about the continent’s many valuable and necessary commodities.

Here in Japan, you might start the day with a cup of coffee from Ethiopia, the fifth-largest supplier of raw coffee beans to this nation, after Brazil, Columbia, Indonesia and Vietnam.

…
Uganda and Zambia meanwhile ship cobalt, essential for making batteries that go into computers, mobile telephones and digital cameras.

The off-hand mention of Ugandan cobalt reminded me of a recent NPR report on the world’s largest uranium mine, which is also a significant source of cobalt. The reporter breezily explains, “As mines go, it’s a honey. It has high-quality ore and a history of saving the Allies during World War II.”

Of course, the reporter is referring to the mother of all life-saving American freedom bombs — the two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Perhaps that’s one connection to Africa the Japanese aren’t so keen on being reminded of.

DSL in Japan, update

I mentioned the other day how it takes an entire month of waiting to get DSL installed in Japan, due to control of the local loop remaining entirely with the former government monopoly telecom NTT, while service can be provided by a variety of competitors. One of the interesting side effects of this is that no matter who your provider is, the physical line installation at the home is still performed by NTT. And because installation will be performed not by my service provider KDDI, instead of having the installer bring along the modem and accessories, they mail it in advance. I am not sure if this is because NTT refuses to cooperate and deliver the modem for another company’s service, despite being legally obligated to perform the local loop installation required for service connection, or if KDDI (I think Softbank does the same thing, but I forget) has merely decided that it is logistically simpler to send modems through the package delivery infrastructure.

And speaking of the package delivery infrastructure, I was very impressed by Kuroneko Takkyubin’s service. When I got home last night at around 8:30 there was one of those failed delivery notification notices in my mailbox. Oddly, the time written on it was 10 o’clock, which makes not sense at all, since I was at home until around 11am, and it was still well before 10pm. Regardless, the notice had the standard information on how to contact either the automated phone system, the internet website, or a live switchboard operator to schedule redelivery- but also had a somewhat astonishing fourth option: the cell phone number of the delivery truck driver who had attempted delivery that day. Since it said he was reachable until 9pm, I called up, the call was answered instantly, and once I told him my name and address, he said to stay and wait for him. I assumed I would be waiting for several minute, but there was a knock on my door, literally, at most two minutes later!

And thus is customer service in Japan-a melange of impenetrable bureaucracy and inflexible, pointless rules for some things, but in other areas some of the most helpful and convenient services found anywhere.

Money for the blind

A high-level US court just ruled that American paper money must be redesigned so that blind people can distinguish bills by denomination. Other countries accomplish this through subtle tactile differences or different bill sizes, but all US currency feels more or less the same, at least when it’s fresh off the presses.

When I went to Albany in February to be sworn into the New York bar, I had a number of odd experiences, among them:

  • Drinking Chinese state-brewed beer in a sketchy hotel room while discussing what would happen if they went to war with Japan (this would have led to nothing good had the sole Chinese attendee not decided to “go to bed” early)
  • Sitting in a crowded waiting room next to a lawyer who works literally within eyeshot of my office window in Tokyo
  • Touching a girder from the World Trade Center

But probably the weirdest experience was when I bought a pack of gum inside the New York state government Cloud City.

Everything was normal until I went to the cashier. I put the gum on the counter. The cashier said “Hi, what are you getting today?” For many people, that would merit some kind of sarcastic response. As usual, I bit my tongue, which was probably a good thing because the cashier was blind.

I tried to act as un-shocked as possible, and said “Umm, a 5-pack of Doublemint.”

“OK,” she said, and started pushing buttons on the register. The register read out the numbers as she pushed them. “POINT SIX NINE ENTER. SEVENTY-THREE CENTS.”

“That’ll be 73 cents,” she said.

I handed her a five-dollar bill.

“Out of how much?” she said.

“Uhh, out of five.”

Anyway, I wonder whether she works there all the time. Maybe they just put her there on bar admissions day as an ethics test for new lawyers. Or maybe people really work on the honor system in Albany. Who knows. At least her job will be a bit easier in a few years’ time…