Once in a while, people tell me that they want to study in Japan. Most of the time, they speak no Japanese. Fortunately for these people, the Japanese government has been actively pushing a programme that will see numerous top Japanese universities offer full undergraduate courses in English.

Known as the Global 30 Project, the initiative by MEXT intends to bring 300,000 international students to Japan by 2020.

Introduction

Currently, 13 schools have been selected to participate in the project, including University of Tokyo (東京大学), Kyoto University (京都大学), Keio University (慶應義塾大学) and Waseda University (早稲田大学).

Recruitment poster for Kyoto U’s anime interest group, circa 2011

Waseda University actually started its own English degree programmes in 2004, under the School of International Liberal Studies (SILS) and for a long time was the only option for lazy Americans who want to study in Tokyo without knowing a word of Japanese.

Among the rest of the schools selected for the Global 30 Project, the level of commitment appears to vary quite a fair bit, with some schools offering just a few niche degree programmes, while others are attempting to emulate Waseda in establishing a standalone international college.

Most of the schools are offering some form of liberal arts education, but Nagoya University (名古屋大学) is taking in students for the 2011 school year for both undergraduate and graduate research programmes in science and engineering. I believe Nagoya University is also the fastest school (excluding those with existing English programmes) in getting its programme up and running under the initiative, as other schools such as University of Tokyo and Ritsumeikan University (立命館大学) will only start taking in students next year.

Incidentally, a professor from Ritsumeikan will be in Singapore this Friday to explain and promote the school’s new English-based programme.

Lawson at Toudai’s Hongo Campus, complete with Toudai’s logo

University of Tokyo

University of Tokyo (aka Toudai) has come up with a Web 2.0-style logo for what it calls PEAK (Programs in English at Komaba), which is a really fancy way of saying that international students enrolled in its new English degree programmes will get to spend four years in Toudai’s secondary campus, far away from the main Hongo campus with its iconic Akamon and Yasuda Auditorium.

Other than a handful of graduate students, Komaba is where freshmen and sophomores study before moving on to Hongo. This means that foreign students in PEAK will probably be left alone at Komaba after the second year… Not to mention the fact that extracurriculars and club activities mostly take place at the main campus, so it’s going to be a pain in the ass. (See map.)

PEAK will start admitting students in Fall 2012. The application forms will be made available on the website starting from 1 Aug 2011.

Recruitment poster for Toudai’s animation club I found at Komaba Campus this past spring

School Terms

Interestingly, most English programmes such as PEAK are choosing to follow American and European college terms even though school years in Japan all start in April. Toudai is even evaluating the (remote) possibility of moving the entire school to a fall intake system in order to become more internationalized.

Personally, I don’t see how this will ever fly given that the entire corporate recruitment cycle in Japan is dependant on having April as the start of the fiscal year. Toudai graduates would be at a disadvantage if they graduated five months after everyone else in their batch had already found a job. Of course, given Toudai’s awe-inspiring reputation in Japan, it might just end up causing the entire employment system to change to suit its fancy.

Opinions

The main problem with English programmes run by Japanese schools is that they end up being even more isolated from the rest of the school when foreign students have enough trouble fitting in as it is. (Okay, I suppose the real main problem is that most professors in Japan can’t teach in English.) The entire college experience becomes very different for these students, especially when their classes are physically located away from the rest of the student body. It’s almost like a foreigner ghetto of sorts.

Leftist students at Kyoto University protesting the mutual security treaty between Japan and the USA that will lead to Japan being dragged into a war

Entry requirements for undergraduate programmes in English are generally less stringent than their equivalent Japanese-language counterparts at the same school. This is because very few foreigners can score well in the horrifying mess of rote learning known as the National Center Test for University Admissions that Japanese high school students spend their whole lives preparing for while resisting the urge to fling themselves in front of an incoming train on the Chuo Line.

This means that programmes such as SILS generally have some form of stigma attached to them when it comes to seeking employment in Japan, where brand name elitism and social stratification have been perfected to an exact science. In a country that ranks not just universities but every individual faculty of every school on a national level, SILS is not the “real” Waseda.

Of course, employers back home are unlikely to know the subtle difference between Toudai and Toudai Komaba, so PEAK participants will no doubt be able to proudly proclaim that they are Toudai students, drawing loud cheers of adulation from fellow fans of Love Hina.

Bicycles parked on Toudai grounds have stickers that indicate the faculty of their owners

Engineering Diversity

For the Japanese government, the long-term strategic consideration for pushing internationalism and English programmes in school is the country’s rapidly ageing population. The country needs skill immigrants and foreign business partners familiar with its cultural intricacies, but the language and cultural barriers make it a very difficult for foreign students to choose Japan for their college education.

I am kind of cynical about such initiatives. At some level, it starts off as an idealistic pursue of internationalism and cultural exchange mixed with long-term pragmatic goals, but the implementation often degenerates into yet another bureaucratic performance index, where the figures and statistics take on an importance of their own. Global 30 may indeed bring 300,000 foreign students to Japan by 2020, but it’s hard to imagine the quality of education they will receive in English in a country where few can speak the language at the high school level.

Will the English programmes provide meaningful value for the foreign students and the larger Japanese college education system? Or will they serve as a superficial facade of diversity — The equivalent of a token black guy being Photoshopped into a student handbook cover photo to showcase the school’s diversity? I guess we will find out in a decade or two.

For now, the Japanese government can throw a bunch of impressive numbers around, the participating schools can claim to be international education hubs and the foreign students have an easier backdoor into brand-name Japanese schools. Win-win all around, I suppose.

Another poster for Kyoto U’s anime interest group, next to a poster for the Korean student group

Conclusion

Okay, so it’s not all bad if you ignore my cynical asides, which can really be said for most things in life.

In fact, for non-Japanese speakers genuinely interested in studying in Japan, programmes such as Waseda’s SILS are actually pretty nice options to have. You do get the opportunity to live and study in Japan and you will eventually pick up the language during your time there. You will also make friends with a lot of Koreans.

If you are interested in studying in Japan and you don’t speak Japanese, take a look through the official sites:

• JUMP (MEXT’s Global 30 site for prospective students)
• Waseda University SILS
• University of Tokyo PEAK
• Nagoya University’s Global 30 page

Those looking for ways to fund their studies can consider the Monbukagakusho (MEXT) scholarship for foreigners. It’s a full-ride scholarship from the Japanese government with no strings attached.

I guess this post was really just an excuse for me to post the highly irrelevant photos I took at various Japanese universities over the years.

This is the post about my visit to Kagoshima in southern Japan. I am really pushing out these articles at the breakneck speed of a limping three-legged turtle, considering that I was in Japan in early April and so far have written on barely two places. At this rate I should be done around the time I graduate from college.

The central train station

Kagoshima is not a super hot travel destination for foreign tourists, but I really loved it. It used to be rather inaccessible as you had to take a slow-ass 7-hour multiple-transfer train ride from Hakata, Fukuoka unless you take a direct domestic flight there, but now it’s a short 1.5-hour ride on the new Kyushu Shinkansen’s Sakura service.

Trams

Kagoshima prefecture is rather rural and the popular tourist locations (mostly natural sceneries) are spread quite far apart. You really need a rental car or a cab to access many of them, both of which are terribly expensive.

Fortunately, most of the places of interest (mostly historical sites) are located in Kagoshima City itself between the main Kagoshima-chuo station and the old Kagoshima station. There are multiple bus and tram lines serving all the tourist sites in the city, including the aquarium, the Tenmonkan shopping arcade, the Museum of Meiji Restoration and the ferry terminal to Sakurajima.

Kagoshima is similar to Nagasaki in that they both played incredibly huge roles at certain pivotal points of Japanese history and served as vital gateways to foreign influences, but are today rather small and laid-back cities that are not particularly well-known outside of Japan.

Kagoshima was once part of Satsuma-han, one of the many fiefdoms Japan was divided into before it was properly united. Satsuma-han led the Meiji Restoration in overthrowing the Tokugawa shogunate, restoring power to the emperor and uniting the Japan under a modern (for its time) constitutional monarchy modelled after Prussia, the first of its kind in Asia. As a result of Satsuma’s success, a disproportionate number of the important figures of government in the young Meiji government came from Satsuma, despite its relatively small size and its location far from the capital.

Saigo Takamori, one of the leading figures of Satsuma and the Meiji Restoration, and his dog. A statue of this can be found in Ueno Park

Satsuma-han was also the reason why modern Japan had a close relationship to the United Kingdoms up till WW2. During the reign of Tokugawa, Satsuma had a rather nationalist anti-foreigner streak and its members once assaulted and killed a British nobleman in Kanagawa (Namamugi Incident) for blocking the way of a feudal lord’s path. The British demanded compensation, but the Tokugawa shogunate was powerless to compel Satsuma to do anything. The Brits took things into their own hands and sailed from Yokohama to Kagoshima and bombarded the crap out of Satsuma’s technologically inferior coastal defences. After this large-scale equivalent of a drunken bar brawl (Anglo-Satsuma War), the obvious outcome was that Satsuma and the UK became Best Friends Forever.

Pew pew

After the battle, the UK saw in Satsuma a strong political faction that might grow to overthrow the corrupted and faltering Tokugawa government, while Satsuma realized that foreign barbarians had some good ideas after all, such as the technology to make cannons that could actually hit anything farther away than a fat guy standing in front of the barrel.

Statue outside Kagoshima-chuo station commemorating the 17 Satsuma scholars who studied overseas

This begrudging mutual acknowledge soon blossomed into a beautiful full-blown bromance. In a time when travelling to foreign countries was still forbidden by the Tokugawa shogunate, Satsuma secretly sneaked its people out to study at top universities in the UK, hence giving it a virtual monopoly of Western educated elites ready to run the government after the Meiji Restoration.

Interestingly, the Japanese national anthem “Kimigayo” was composed by a British military band officer who was helping Satsuma-han to train its own military band.

Gravestones of loyal Satsuma retainers

Okay this is turning into more of a history post than a trip report, but really the history is what makes Kagoshima so awesome in my opinion. There’s just something magical about how a bunch of people from a small geographically insignificant corner of Japan left such a great mark on the country’s history. And there are many historical and memorial sites scattered across Kagoshima City related to these figures. In particular, the Museum of Meiji Restoration is definitely worth a visit. It’s a rather small museum but its displays are all very informative. Of course, the English descriptions tend to be rather incomplete and you need to read Japanese to get the full details.

The Kagoshima aquarium was actually rather disappointing. I expected better given the city’s proximity to the sea and its location closer to the tropics, but Osaka’s Kaiyukan is many times better. Still, it’s worth a visit if you are into such things. There’s a regular dolphin show.

Similarly, the Tenmonkan shopping arcade is nothing to write home about. It’s a typical cluster of Japanese shopping arcades whose claim to fame is being situated on the ruins of an old 18th-century observatory, hence its name Tenmonkan (literally “Observatory”). Well, there’s an Animate located there too.

Animate is everywhere

Outside of the city, the only place that is really accessible without a car is Ibusuki, a small coastal onsen town about an hour by train away from Kagoshima-chuo. It feels basically like Hakone but next to the sea instead of mountains. Although you get to try sunamushi onsen, which is basically getting your whole body buried in hot volcanic soil for 15 minutes. It’s like onsen without the water. I tried it and it’s not nearly as exotic an experience as it looks.

My room in Ibusuki

A park outside the inn at Ibusuki

Many people can’t figure out what this picture is showing

Awesome dinner

And of course, there is Japan’s southernmost JR train station for those who are as dorky as me.

Come to think of it, Kagoshima is the perfect location for an anime. It has the small-town feel, plenty of scenic spots, electric trams, an aquarium and that huge ass volcanic Sakurajima in the background. Wonder why it doesn’t show up more often…

Japan National Tourism Organization made a simple map showing the locales of some popular anime titles and the major anime retail hotspots across Japan.

While an interesting initiative, the map itself is rather light on details, so this is more of a standard tourism brochure with a twist than an actual guide for people looking for information.

Incidentally, I have been to all the areas indicated in the pink section of the map excluding Sapporo, and there seems to be a lot of marketing hyperbole involved for everything that is not in Tokyo or Nipponbashi, Osaka.

Toranoana at Otemachi, Hiroshima

Otemachi, Hiroshima is a just regular shoutengai that happens to have a few shops like Toranoana (large chain of doujinshi speciality shops) and Yellow Submarine (chain hobby store with outlets selling everything from Magic: The Gathering to anime figures to model trains) scattered across it. You can find such loose shop clusters in nearly every major Japanese city and there’s nothing remarkable about the one in Otemachi. Hiroshima is a nice city to visit though.

Yokohama Landmark Plaza has the mainstream brand-name stores for Ghibli and Shueisha that serve as a convenient focal point for the brochure, but you can find a lot more real anime stuff elsewhere scattered around the main Yokohama station, such as a decent-sized Animate and smaller Gamers (the large anime chain store whose mascot spawned the Di Gi Charat series) and Melon Books (doujinshi speciality chain store) branches hidden away inside random buildings. But ultimately, you are better off enjoying the sights and sounds of Enoshima if you find yourself in Kanagawa prefecture. Save the anime stuff for nearby Tokyo. There isn’t much in Yokohama.

The Animate branch in Nagoya stands alone behind Nagoya Station, but everything else is found in Osudenkigai

I didn’t spend much time at Nagoya’s Osudenkigai, but I thought it was about on par with Eastern Ikebukuro and Otome Road in terms of number of shops and level of activity. It’s worth checking out if you are in Nagoya, but it’s definitely not worth travelling to Nagoya for. Well, basically there is no real reason why anyone should visit Nagoya. It’s a boring place.

Classy underpass at Tenjin

The Tenjin area in Fukuoka is a major shopping area with many large vertical shopping centres. If you are in Hakata, you will definitely end up there. As Hakata is the centre of commercial activities in Kyushu/Western Japan, it has the largest regional outlets for Kinokuniya, Animate, etc. The caveat being that they are the largest in Kyushu, which is not really saying much. As far as I remember, there isn’t really any single location where the anime stores are clustered together, so you will just come across some of them as part of normal tourist shopping.

Look for the giant Melon Books sign to find Ota-road

Nipponbashi, Osaka is definitely worth visiting. It is much smaller in scale than Akihabara, but significantly larger than Ikebukuro Otome Road. The important thing to know is that the main road, where the exit for Nipponbashi subway station is located, has nothing but regular electronics stores. You need to find your way to a smaller parallel street, colloquially known as “Ota-road” to find outlets such as Gamers and Toranoana. I believe that K-Books (nationwide chain stores specializing in second-hand manga, doujinshi, goods and collectibles) is the only one with presence on the main road.

And of course, Akihabara, Otome Road and Nakano Broadway are the classics you shouldn’t miss. I find it interesting that the Akihabara blurb features the maid cafe Mai Dreamin, which seems to have materialized out of nowhere and cornered a huge share of the market with multiple outlets in Akihabara and Ikebukuro. I had always thought that @home cafe was much bigger, given that it has a longer history in Akihabara. Perhaps Mai Dreamin is more savvy at marketing. I did notice that they have an “English” version of the pre-recorded advertising blurb they play at their outlet next to Akihabara station.

When it comes to visiting real-life location of anime settings, it is important that you only do it if you enjoy sightseeing by itself. Most anime titles are set in boring, unremarkable small towns and some of them can be quite mind-boggling rural for an urban dweller. For example, Summer Wars is set in Nagano, an entirely unremarkable prefecture as can be surmised from its Japan Guide article. If you travel there just to visit the anime locations, you’d better learnt to enjoy looking at mountains and fruit farms.

On the other hand, the ones set in easy-to-access parts of Tokyo usually feature no landmarks distinguishable enough to actually visit, other that the standard tourist fare: Tokyo Tower, Shinjuku area and Shibuya scramble crossing. That said, I did enjoy how Durarara!! featured Eastern Ikebukuro — one of my favourite places in Tokyo — with many of its familiar details.

Source: scion_cho on Flickr

Also, I love going to the Starbucks on the second floor of Tsutaya across the scramble crossing from Shibuya station. It was featured in an episode of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex and it just looks so iconic.

This is where Kagami and Tsukasa work as miko

Outside of Tokyo, the easiest locations to visit are probably Lucky Stars scenes set in Omiya, Saitama and Washinomiya Shrine. You can cover both in a day trip from Tokyo. Well, and there’s School Days too.

I have been to Hakone a few times, but I have somehow never made the mental connection to Evangelion. Hmm.

Sharp is releasing an Aquos Android clamshell phone with a 16-megapixel camera running Gingerbread. This is the latest step in Android’s quiet and gradual takeover of the Japanese phone market. I believe that Japan will eventually become a strategic stronghold for Android and in turn this will serve to shore up Google’s historically weak performance against Yahoo in search and online services in Japan.

Japanese Market

The mobile phone market in Japan has always suffered from the Galapagos syndrome. Clamshell phones developed in Japan by companies such as Casio and Sharp can find little demand in other markets, while on the flip-side, international titans like Nokia and Blackberry never had any significant presence in Japan.

Some believe that Japanese consumers simply dislike foreign products because they are not Japanese while pointing to examples such as the Xbox 360, but Apple’s success with iPod demonstrates that that is a superficial argument. The more likely explanation is that Japanese consumers have quirky demands that are often not part of the design considerations for overseas companies.

Most phones in Japan still look like these

The iPhone has found greater success in Japan than any other foreign-made phones, but its presence is nowhere close to the level of ubiquity it commands elsewhere. That is because as much as iPhone and Apple are considered hip brand names in Japan, Apple’s brand philosophy does not allow the iPhone to be customized for the Japanese market beyond adding emoticons to the soft keypad. The poor-performance camera, the lack of Mobile FeliCa contactless payment and the lack of 1seg digital receiver are severe disadvantages in the Japanese market and these cannot be resolved without custom hardware.

At the same time, Japanese keitai phones are rapidly falling behind in terms of software, a traditional area of weakness for the Japanese tech industry. New keitai models being released today are still running heavily modified variants of Symbian, an outdated platform that has been dead for years and recently abandoned by its primary proponent Nokia in favour of Windows Phone 7. The Japanese industry needs a new platform fast but is incapable of creating one.

Android’s Rise

This is where Android comes in. Unlike iOS, Android is flexible enough to be adapted for all the range of hardware required by the Japanese market.

Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 doesn’t even have support for Japanese input yet. Microsoft has traditionally been inept at marketing for Japan and its mobile division clearly does not see Japan as an important market. Furthermore, WP7 also comes with stricter hardware guidelines (e.g. capacitive touchscreen) that are unlikely to fly well with the clamshell phones that Japanese school girls love so much.

Android au KDDI selections

The process has already begun. Android has already replaced Windows Mobile 6.5 in the smartphone market in Japan. Just take a look at the smartphone offerings for the three major providers: Docomo, au KDDI and Softbank. They are dominated by Android, save for maybe one WM6.5 and one Blackberry. The only real competition in this sector is the iPhone, which is doing quite well as Apple products enjoy the cool factor even in Japan.

For the past few months, KDDI has been running a series of Android ads called “Android au” in multiple media formats, a campaign that is reminiscent of Verizon’s successful Droid campaign which is often cited as the reason for the sudden explosion in popularity of the Android platform. The KDDI Android ads include endorsement by boy band Arashi and prime-time TV spots, suggesting that KDDI is rather serious about committing to the platform for the long term.

Android’s Dominance

Last year, it was reported that iPhone took up 72% of the smartphone market in Japan in FY 2009. This sounds very impressive at first, until one realizes this is because a smartphone market didn’t exist and even high-end keitai phones are not considered smartphones. In actuality, Apple’s overall 2009 mobile marketshare in Japan amounted to a mere 4.9%. (Source: MM Research Institute)

In the fiscal year 2010, which had just ended, Android sales exploded and took up 57% of the Japanese smartphone market with 4.91 million units sold, while Apple fell to 38% with 3.23 million units. (Source: Bloomberg) With the support of KDDI and OEM giants like Sharp, Android’s lead in the smartphone market appears to have been secured. But beating Apple is just the first step.

The real battle lies in the keitai market, the vast majority of the Japanese mobile industry, and this is where Android will cement its dominance. The iOS is not even in play here due to its hardware dependency and there is no other competing OS platform with the same long-term potential and developer support that Android has. Furthermore, Japanese users expect their keitai interface to conform to certain norms and Android is really the only modern smartphone OS malleable enough to fit that mould and displace Symbian. Sharp’s new clamshell phone marks the beginning of this process.

Implications

For Japanese keitai manufacturers such as Sharp, Android is the most obvious way to leap-frog their phone firmwares to modern specifications without compromising on the traditional user experiences that Japanese users require.

This also has the long-term benefit of finally making their products export-ready (e.g. Sharp’s Galapagos is heading to the US with Android) and cutting down unnecessary R&D previously spent on replicating modern OS features on Symbian. Sharp’s new Android smartphones, such as the IS12SH with 3D cameras, are basically ready for the overseas market with a simple firmware change.

Sharp IS12SH Android smartphone

In the long run, Android is essentially going to win by default in Japan simply due to the lack of alternatives. One day, Japanese school girls will be buying Android clamshells and they won’t even notice the difference. This transition may also prove to be an excellent opportunity for Japanese hardware makers to re-enter the international market after losing badly to companies like Samsung and Nokia.

I for one welcome our new Android overlords.

A small Japanese start-up called Neurowear is marketing what it calls “Necomimi” — head-worn fashion gadgets that move in response to brainwaves. The company calls it “Augmented Human Body”. Or to put it in simpler terms: goddamn nekomimi cat ears that you can learn to control telepathically with your mind. This is serious science at work.

Videos and more information after the break.

The official site is lacking in polish and the English is lol-tastic, but the live trade show demonstrations look pretty legit:

The technology to measure brainwave is actually not that esoteric, especially when accurate localized readings are not required in this particular case. There are even a few toys that utilize brain-computer interfaces, such as Mattel’s Mindflex. Still, it takes the Japanese to apply it to nekomimi headwears.

There is a polished concept/promotion HD video of Necomimi posted on the site:

The marketing blurb from the website:

People think that our bodies have limitations,
but just imagine if we had organs that donâ€t exist,
and could control that new body?

We created new human organs that use a brainwave sensor.

Necomimi is the new communication tool
that augments the human bodies and abilities.

This catâ€s ear shaped machine utilizes brainwaves
and expresses your emotional state before you start talking

Just put on Necomimi and if you are concentrating,
this catâ€s ear shaped machine will rise.
When you are relaxed, your new ears lie down.

If you are concentrating and relaxing at the same time,
your new ears will rise and actively move.
In general, professional sports players demonstrate this ability the most.

What will happen when people show their feelings
even when they donâ€t express them?
Interesting? Ashamed? Scared?

In the beginning, people may feel strange,
however people quickly become accustomed to controlling their new ears
with their brainwaves. Right now, Necomimi can become a part of your body.

If the sensors in this thing are consistent enough, it is possible that with some focus training, moving the mechanical ears can become a conditioned reflex and a natural part of emotional display, much like how the brains of recipients of robotic prostheses adapt their neural pathways over time to the new interfaces.

The device is being marketed as a fashion accessory, but it still looks too cumbersome in the demonstration videos to excel in that role.

The people in the demonstrations appear to have a rather large and conspicuous piece of sensor pressed against their forehead, which presumably serves as a crude EEG. This ugly protrusion is not seen on the actress in the concept video, although it may have been strategically concealed by her long fringes.

The main body of the device resembles a headphone set with a rather large earpiece. You need plenty of hair to cover that up. That said, this is apparently still not the final retail version, so there’s still some room for improvement. Necomimi will go on sale at the end of the year.

Still, it’s good to know that there are people out there working hard at bringing anime cat girls to life.

This is how it all begins. Pretty soon these things will be surgically grafted onto babies the moment they are born. Transhumanism woot.

So not too long ago, I was in Kagoshima, the southernmost prefecture on Japan’s four main islands. It is a rather backwater place despite the abnormally large role it played in Japan’s contemporary history, but it is very beautiful.

Kagoshima is also the location of Nishi-oyama Station, Japan Railways’ (JR) southernmost train station.

Located in the southern part of Kagoshima with a latitude of 31.11 degrees north, Nishi-oyama Station is not much more than an sheltered slab of concrete with a single wooden bench.

Some JR maintenance people were there doing some work

8 train services per day in one direction. Woot

Facing west at the station gives one a pretty grand view of Mt. Kaimon, a perfectly conical dormant volcano that apparently has the exact same silhouette no matter which direction you view it from. (Taxi drivers are pretty helpful when it comes to sightseeing.)

JR also placed a helpful signboard that indicates the location of its easternmost, westernmost and northernmost train stations. There were actually two Japanese tourists taking photos at Nishi-oyama when I was there. Being a train otaku in Japan is serious business.

There is also a yellow post box that lets you send letters and postcards to your friends and families with a special postmark indicating that it was sent from Nishi-oyama. You can probably send one to yourself and win the race home.

The surrounding area is nothing but farms and hills. Presumably many of the farms grow a variant of sweet potato known as satsumaimo, a speciality of Kagoshima. I bought some satsumaimo-flavoured Kit Kats at the central train station.

A farm right next to the station

The southern part of Kagoshima is divided into two areas by a deep inlet forming the Kagoshima Bay and is hence shaped like a crescent. The left side is known as the Satsuma Peninsula (薩摩半島) and the right side is known as the Osumi Peninsula (大隅半島).

Most of the tourist stuff, including Kagoshima City, Sakurajima (the volcanic island) and the onsen town Ibusuki, is on the Satsuma side, while Osumi is mostly an inaccessible jungle of weird boars and demons. At least that’s what I think it’s like, considering there are basically zero train lines running through it.

But Osumi does play host to Cape Sata (Japan mainland’s southernmost point) and JAXA’s Uchinoura Space Center, which would probably be cool to visit if they were ever made reasonably accessible. Woot.

But I digress.

Scenic spots on the Satsuma Peninsula

Much of Satsuma Peninsula itself is also rather inaccessible and rural, but it does have a single JR train line serving its southern parts. So I guess that is something.

And when I say “train”, I am not talking about JR Yamanote or even your typical subway train. The local Ibusuki-Makurazaki line is served by tiny two-carriage trains that are operated by a single person. JR call these trains ワンマン, literally “one-man”. There are usually two trains per hour.

The white one-man train on the local lines. That’s basically half the train right there

The tourists who take this line are generally headed for Ibusuki (指宿), a small onsen town by the sea more than an hour away from Kagoshima-chou Station. And by “tourists”, I mean old Japanese couples from other parts of Japan.

I could not identify a single foreign tourist during my stay at Ibusuki and my train rides there and back, although I did spot a few in Kagoshima City itself. This can also be observed from Japan Guide’s wholly inadequate section on Kagoshima, which I feel doesn’t do the prefecture/city justice.

But I digress again.

Yamakawa bills itself as “JR’s Southernmost Manned Station”

Scenic spots along the Ibusuki-Makurazaki line between Yamakawa and Nishi-oyama stations

The regular trains on the Ibusuki Makurazaki line terminate at either Kiire (喜入) or Yamakawa (山川). Unforunately, Nishi-Oyama, the southernmost station, is located father down the line and is served by just two direct trains a day from the central station. Due to a lack of prior planning, I did not have time to actually take a train there, sadly.

I want to say that I was hardcore enough to navigate 6km over mountainous terrain to get from Yamakawa to Nishi-oyama (which I almost did because I thought it was at most 2km away in a straight line) armed with only my Android smartphone’s Compass app and no data access, but I was a pussy and took a cab instead (which in retrospect was not such a bad idea).

It turned out to be impossible to follow the track on foot as I had originally planned because it is fenced off and goes into tunnels.

All the stations on the line passed Yamakawa are unmanned, so the train driver has to also act as the conductor at every stop. It’s pretty cool.

The title of this post is kind of a lie because Nishi-oyama is no longer Japan’s southernmost station after Okinawa prefecture built a local monorail line in Naha due to what I presume to be immense spite for JR that I am sure has nothing to do with making life more convenient for its residents.

Hence, Nishi-oyama is now “Japan’s Southernmost JR Station”. You can see the faint red “JR” spray-painted onto the top of the landmark.

Apparently, JR originally changed the sign to “Mainland’s Southernmost Station” in response to the construction of the monorail, which incurred Okinawa’s wrath because it implies that Okinawa isn’t part of Japan mainland. (And I thought the Ryukyu separatists would be happy about that…) JR then changed it back to the original sign with the red word “JR” appended to the front. People fight over everything.

I really loved Kagoshima. Will blog more about it in a future post.

The section of the Kyushu Shinkansen that extents to Kagoshima-chuo Station only came online less than two weeks before my trip to Japan, so it was really lucky that I got to visit Kagoshima with my JR Pass.

P.S. This JR Kyushu commercial celebrating the full opening of the Kyushu Shinkansen is really awesome. Brings a tear to my eyes. Pity they had to stop airing it and tone down the celebrations after the Tohoku quake.

So I am finally back in Singapore. Experiencing post-trip lethargy as usual. I figure I should get started on blogging now before it becomes impossible for me to return to my usual weekly schedule and I fall into the eternal dark void of procrastination.

Nagasaki was the first city in Kyushu I really visited, not counting a short transit at Fukuoka, and it was pretty awesome.

Nagasaki is a great place to visit if you are interested in Japanese history. The port city played an important role in the development of Japan leading up to and beyond the Meiji Restoration because it was more or less the only place in Japan that permitted foreign presence during more than two centuries of self-imposed isolation under the Tokugawa shogunate. Influence from Dutch and Chinese traders can be seen in many parts of the city’s culture and history.

Dejima

Dejima was an artificial island used to house Portuguese traders and later Dutch traders after the Portuguese were barred from the country because their missionary efforts were stirring unrest. The island is more well-known for the period of time when the Dutch inhabited it and therefore it is also called the “Dutch Factory”. The senior Dutch trader in charge of Dejima was called the chief factor. lol.

Dutch bottles for transporting sake and soy sauce

Formal European dinning room…with tatami

The chief factor’s quarters

Wonder if they wore shoes on tatami

A more traditional room inhabited by Japanese Dejima officials

Model of Dejima

A Lefaucheux revolver found at Dejima

I learnt about Dejima in school and thought it was kind of cool. In an age with limited means of communication, a physical moat was all it took to restrict cultural exchange between the foreign traders and the rest of Japan. But despite the forced isolation, Dejima and its Dutch inhabitants still managed to eventually influence the development of academia and knowledge in Japan, to the point that 蘭学 (rangaku, literally “Dutch study”) became a term for the study of science.

Still, I was kind of disappointed to find out that the original Dejima had been long gone by the 20th century after the opening of Japan. The sea around it was reclaimed into the modern harbor area and Dejima itself became just another plot of land. The current Dejima is a reconstruction that resulted from post-war excavations and research and it is a work-in-progress with many buildings not yet fully restored.

Also, I am reminded of that Dutch ambassador character from Samurai Champloo. Heh.

Gunkanjima

What is it with Nagasaki and squeezing people onto tiny islands, I wonder? A mostly artificial coal-mining island-city that once boasted the highest population density in the world, it is today a huge urban ruin and a nice sightseeing spot. Read more about it in my earlier post.

Chinatown

Nagasaki was a port for trading with China for centuries and features plenty of Chinese influences such as its specialty dish Champon. Therefore, it came as quite a surprise to discover that the city’s famous Chinatown is really just two short streets joined in a cross. Although I didn’t really like Yokohama’s Chinatown because it felt like an artificial gathering of tourist traps, at least it was pretty big.

On hindsight, this shouldn’t have been unexpected given that Yokohama has a population of more than 3 million while Nagasaki has fewer than 500 thousand. There are quite a number of wards in Tokyo that are more populated than that…

Not Chinatown, but there’s a Confucius temple nearby

Christianity

Although Christianity landed in Kagoshima first in the form of Francis Xavier, it was in Nagasaki where it really took off due to Portuguese’s mixing of missionary work and trade that eventually led to their expulsion. Initially permitted, Christianity was subsequently banned by the shogunate for inducing subversive sentiments. The converts went into hiding and became known as Kakure Kirishitan or hidden Christians. After the Meiji Restoration brought Western-style religious freedom, these communities came out of hiding and built various churches and Christian monuments in Nagasaki.

Oura Catholic Church

During the years of persecution, many of these Kakure Kirishitan carried with them small statues apparently depicting the Buddhist goddess Kannon carrying an infant in her arms. This was meant to be the Virgin Mary but made to look like Kannon in order to fool the authorities.

And in a somewhat ironic twist, the Urakami Cathedral, built after 30 years of hard work by former Kakure Kirishitan enjoying their newfound religious freedom and the largest church in East Asia at the time, was completely destroyed by the plutonium atomic bomb that detonated just a few hundred metres from its former location.

Peace Memorial

Unfortunately, Nagasaki always seems to play second fiddle to Hiroshima when it comes to atomic history, perhaps because Hiroshima was bombed first or perhaps because Hiroshima today is a much larger city. This difference is also reflected in the resources dedicated to their respective peace memorials. That said, the Nagasaki memorial and its associated museum are still very educational and interesting places to visit.

A replica of one of the statures at Urakami Cathedral

A 1:1 model of Fat Man, the plutonium bomb

Singapore falls

The hypocenter/ground zero

For some reason, the Peace Park near the memorial features a cluster of statures donated by countries that formerly belonged to the Communist bloc, including China, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic. Perhaps it was some kind of Cold War up-yours attempt at reminding the world that as crappy as Communism may be, at least it wasn’t the side responsible for using nuclear weapons against civilians.

This slightly-weird looking stature is the main stature in the park meant to commemorate the bombing. It is rather huge. Its Japanese sculptor intended for it to evoke the features of both Jesus and Buddha. The stature’s right hand points at the threat of atomic bombs from above while its left hand gestures for peace.

Mt. Inasa

Nagasaki’s night view from on top of Mt. Inasa is widely known as one of Japan’s top three night views alongside Kobe and Hakodate. I originally didn’t plan to go up there because the mountain is rather far from the rest of the locations, but a friendly taxi driver offered to take me and my friend up there and to a few other scenic spots for quite a good price. It was quite lucky of us because the view was really breathtaking.

Nagasaki city is located in by a bay surrounded by mountains. Other than the harbour area built on reclaimed flat land, the entire city is built on slopes. This is why almost nobody in Nagasaki rides a bicycle compared to most Japanese cities. Imagine the typical claustrophobic Japanese suburban streets that can barely fit one car. Now imagine them swirling around across the side of a mountain. Many of the houses in Nagasaki are not even accessible by cars and the inhabitants have to walk home from the nearest bus stop.

The flip side of this inconvenient city layout is the awesome night view. From atop Mt. Inasa, you look down towards a flat bay area, where the taller commercial buildings are. Other than the exit to the sea, the bay area is surrounded by mountain ranges and the sides of the mountains are littered with tens of thousands of household lights. Quite a different experience from the usual city night view comprising of high-rise buildings. Unfortunately, my crappy photos don’t really capture the awe-inspiring feeling.

More photos

For some reason, western Japan loves electric trams

The Kinokuniya is smaller than Singapore’s…

Ate soba with wasabi so fresh you have to shave it yourself

The scourge of AKB48 corrupts even Kyushu

Former British consulate

This person seeks election on an anti-Shinkansen platform

A nearby all-girls school…

My only real complaint about Nagasaki is that it is a bloody pain to access. The nearest Shinkansen station is Hakata, Fukuoka and it takes more than two hours by regular express train to get to Nagasaki station from there. The train ride is pretty bumpy and uncomfortable.

Still, a pretty awesome city to visit. Probably not so great to live in considering how hilly it is.

Gunkanjima, officially “Hashima”, is a tiny island just outside Nagasaki Bay. Consisting mostly of man-made concrete-covered landfills, the island was a coal-mining operation run by Mitsubishi Heavy Industry and once boasted the highest population density in the world. Today, the only way to land on the island is by forking out 4,300 yen for a cruise tour that departs twice everyday from Nagasaki Ferry Terminal.

I was there a few days ago and took some pictures.

Hashima is an amazing place in many sense. Today it is known as one of the legends of urban exploration, but not too long ago it was a miniature city with permanent dwellers comprising the coal miners and their families.

The first high-rise concrete residential building in Japan

The population density of the island at its peak was 83,500 people/km^2. In comparison, Tokyo’s is 5,874 people/km^2. It was the site of the first ever concrete high-rise residential building in the whole of Japan owing to its extreme lack of space.

The island is 320m long and 120m wide. It was originally 1/3 its current size. From 1897 to 1931, six separate reclamation projects brought it to its final size. Concrete wave barriers and structures surround the original island, creating the silhouette of a battleship when seen from afar. The island’s nickname “Gunkanjima” means “Battleship Island”. Apparently, the island also resembles an American aircraft carrier when seen from above.

The white building contained the schools

Surprisingly, life was actually pretty good on the island. It had shops, a Shinto shrine, a primary school, a secondary school, a 60-metre swimming pool and high-rise residential apartments with facilities that wouldn’t look out of place in modern Tokyo. The reason is because everything on the island was subsidized by Mitsubishi. For example, every household paid only 10 yen per month for utilities and Mitsubishi covered the rest.

Swimming pool

In the 1960s, every family on the island owned a television and air conditioner in a time when such appliances were rare even in Tokyo households. The annual salary of a teacher on Hashima was about 130,000 yen when the average across Japan was 50,000.

In a way, Hashima was an incredible and extreme example of the vertical natural of Japanese conglomerates and the way they take care of (and/or exert control over) their employees. Even today, when such life-time employment systems are showing their cracks, there are salarymen who never had to file their taxes because their companies have a department that does it for them.

A modern Mitsubishi heavy shipyard nearby

Of course, the Hashima story is not totally sunshine and roses. Coal mines are not pleasant places no matter how much benefits the worker receive. Also, during the war, Koreans were forcefully made to work in the mines just like in many other wartime industries in Imperial Japan.

Still, there is something romantic and almost surreal about the community that once thrived on this mostly artificial island. It is one of those unique crossroads between small-town Japan and the high-tech modern industrial Japan. Kind of like Soukyuu no Fafner or the original Macross really.

As petroleum replaced coal in energy production, the island gradually emptied out and the mine itself was officially closed by Mitsubishi in 1974. The former residents were relocated to all over Japan and various associations exist for them to keep in touch.

Incidentally, most of the information here were covered by the tour guides for the cruise. For those considering the tour, please note that absolutely none of the tour material is available in English. Unfortunately, this is a location that attracts mostly Japanese tourists.

More pictures:

Travelling to Nagasaki was quite a pain due to the lack of Shinkansen, but it turned out to be worth it. I’ll do a write-up for the rest of the city soon.

I expected last year to be my first and last chance to watch Maaya Sakamoto perform live, but I was wrong and my sentiments at the time were rendered somewhat hyperbolic in retrospect. In spite of the recent events in Japan, I managed to make my way to Osaka International Convention Center last night for her “You can’t catch me” live tour.

This time last year, Budoukan was surrounded by a pink forest of cherry blossoms. The sakura trees have yet to bloom this year because of the colder weather.

Last year’s concert was a joyous celebration of Maaya’s 15th anniversary as a singer and her 30th birthday. This year, it came two weeks after the largest earthquake that ever shook Japan devastated Tohoku, and the Sendai and Sapporo legs of the tour were subsequently cancelled. In some ways, the tone of yesterday’s concert reflected the current mood of the nation. Portions of the setlist were changed and Maaya spoke about her feelings as a self-identified Tokyoite of seeing the great metropolis she thinks of as her hometown falter beneath a dark cloud of uncertainty as epitomized by the unprecedented rolling blackouts and the bent antenna atop Tokyo Tower.

LED board at the convention centre

Her performance was enchanting. I actually thought that the acoustics in the convention centre’s main hall was much better than at Budoukan, but my experience might have been slightly enhanced by the fact that my seat was in the 6th row from the stage. Maaya stood literally 7-8m in front of me.

There was a moment where, I swear with all my heart, she looked right into my eyes, our gazes met for a fleeting two seconds, time came to a standstill and the world achieved perfection… Just let a man have his dreams, okay?

Seriously though, it was really a significantly superior experience for me as compared to last year. The premium seat made a huge difference, but the stage also had much better computer-controlled lighting effects and fog machines. The only drawback was that there were no huge LCD screens so the folks sitting far behind were kind of screwed as far as the visual experience was concerned.

My only complaint is that she didn’t sing as many of her oldies as I would’ve liked. Then again, I guess I shouldn’t have expected much from a live tour named after her latest album. The full setlist for Osaka (apparently she tweaks it for every venue) is as follows:

1. eternal return
2. Himitsu
3. KIMIDORI
4. Utsukushii Hito
5. Mizuumi
6. ALKALOID
7. SPICA
8. Tegami
9. KIMI NO SEI
10. Remedy
11. Kanashikute Yarikirenai
12. MOONLIGHT -mata wa “kimi ga nemuru tame no ongaku”-
13. UNIVERSE
14. Kazemachi JET
15. Private Sky
16. Get No Satisfaction!
17. MAGIC NUMBER
18. Hikari Are
19. TOPIA
20. Bokura no Rekishi
21. everywhere
22. POCKET wo Kara ni Shite

Overall, I have to say that Utsukushii Hito was hands down the best performance of the night. It must be a really difficult song to perform live, but Maaya pulled it off perfectly as far as I could aurally discern. Plus, the synchronized beams of light casting streaks of shadows through the fog screen gave the entire scene an aura of mystique that played very well with the piece’s classic oriental vibe. (The song was composed by Yoko Kanno for last year’s Shanghai World Expo to commemorate historical exchanges between the Tang Dynasty and Japan.)

The concert also made me realize that Kanashikute Yarikirenai is a really great song. It is one of the three Japanese classics Maaya covered for a recent single release, and I didn’t think much of it until last night. The song is about sadness so intense that there is no end in sight and tomorrow seems as bleak as today. Other than the fact that it is a cover, the song also differs from Maaya’s usual repertoire in that it is about pure unfiltered grief, whereas most of her songs tend to be hopefully optimistic, neutral or at the very least subtly melancholic. I came to this realization during the performance and really enjoyed the way Maaya sang it. Her sorrowful tone sent chills down my spine.

I think Maaya really did an excellent job conveying her feelings about the earthquake through her words and her songs. She wrote a 4-page message that was included in handouts given to all the attendees. She also took the time to explain on-stage why she chose to make certain changes to the setlist.

She shared with the audience how, some years ago, her elder brother was met with a serious accident and went into coma for a month. Her father told her not to cancel a live performance scheduled for the next day because he believed it was vital for life to continue as per usual for the family so that the brother would have a functional family to return home to.

Maaya also shared a fan letter she received from a young man in Sendai who described to her all the things that he plans to accomplish and the places he plans to visit for the rest of his life because he felt that there is nothing he is not capable of achieving after having survived a life-changing event so terrible.

Maaya brought with her a message of hope and humility. There were plenty of teary eyes that night.

Music has the power to make the world better. It sounds clichéd, but I think that Maaya really tries to do good in her own way. It’s easy to assume that everything performers do is premeditated and profit-driven and it may even be prudent to do so. I know that there is quite a bit of controversy online over Maaya’s decision to not cancel all her upcoming lives.

But considering the fact that Maaya consistently puts in the effort to stay true to her message, I think she deserves an exceptional suspension of cynicism. After all, all that time she spent on penning down her thoughts in the form of numerous essays can’t be explained by mere self interest when she probably made many times more money from Ouran.

One interesting takeaway from the concert: Maaya finally explains the meaning of her cryptically-titled song Kimidori, the topic of much fandom debate in the past. The song is about fondly recalling the past and “Kimidori” is an allusion to the seiyuu-incubator Group Komadori of which Maaya was a member in her early teens. In the song, the words “yasashii kimidori” or “gentle kimidori” are actually meant to be “yasashii Komadori” in her mind. She changed the vowels to obfuscate the origin of the title so that listeners could come up with their own conclusions about the song’s meaning. I guess someone should amend the translation here…

Overall verdict: Probably the most awesome concert experience I’ve had so far. And that’s including the time I had supper with May’n.

I don’t normally like to write about breaking news because generally I find that I have neither the first-hand expertise nor the retrospective hindsight to comment on most real-time events non-trivial. The story would be very different if the earthquake had happened three weeks later when I will be in Tokyo and perhaps Kamakura and/or Tochigi, but it didn’t.

That said, I feel compelled to write something about the largest earthquake ever recorded in Japan after spending the past two days following the continuous Twitter updates and watching NHK and TBS news streams. So here it is.

First of all, I am not very good at expressing emotions through words, so forgive me if my language does not sufficiently convey the gravity of the situation. I hope that people affected by this disaster will find the relief that they need, but I suspect that my words and opinions will make no difference either way. Thoughts and prayers do have the power to effect positive outcomes indirectly but they are not my modus operandi. I can only offer some second-hand perspectives.

I was very inspired by the manner in which the Japanese people conduct themselves in times of crisis. They are clearly well-prepared for this. There are numerous anecdotes on Twitter about the calm and efficient manner in which regular civilians conducted themselves during the pandemonium.

Tokyo (Hiro Komae/Associated Press)

Years ago, AP’s Tomoko Hosoka wrote a story about the millions of office workers who would be stranded hours away by foot from their home in the aftermath of a quake due to the massive commuting traffic in Tokyo Metropolis. This was exactly what happened two days ago when, in an unprecedented event, all trains and metro subway services in Tokyo were suspended. But surprisingly, no one died from exposure, stampede or such avoidable tragedies that one comes to expect in the midst of such chaos. The proposed plan mentioned in the article was put to good use and Google Maps was used on various social network sites to alert people to all the schools and facilities designated as disaster shelter.

In fact, not a single building collapsed and the total death toll in Tokyo is in the single digit, an impressive feat given that, though far from the epicentre, the tremors experienced in the capital would have been respectable headline-grabbing earthquakes themselves had they occurred in isolation. The effectiveness of Tokyo’s contingency plans must be applauded.

A fascinating bit of titbit I learnt in the process: many newer beverage vending machines in Japan dispense for free if you pull an emergency level. I hate to make generalizations about groups of people, but I can think of a mountain of reasons why this would never work in many other countries.

I mean Japan is a country where the yakuza routinely volunteers for disaster relief. The yakuza groups Sumiyoshi-kai and Inagawa-kai are both participating in the on-going efforts and the Sumiyoshi-kai (yes, this guy is an actual yakuza) was providing free shelter for stranded commuters in Tokyo on Friday night.

There is a level of general civility that permeates all levels of Japanese society that is difficult to explain. Perhaps it is the result of the country’s relative cultural homogeneity, a strong emphasis on collectivism and societal pressure, an educated populace or some kind of historical inheritance. Whatever the reason, it serves the nation well in times of crisis such as this.

Oh, and here’s a song Kimi de Ite Buji de Ite (Please be yourself, please be safe) composed and sung by Yoko Kanno, a Miyagi native, for the earthquake victims.

Kesennuma city, Miyagi prefecture (Keichi Nakane/Associated Press/The Yomiuri Shimbun)

The situation in Tohoku is a lot more serious than in Tokyo. One interesting piece of information I learnt from people tweeting from Japan is that many people in Tokyo chose to remain in their offices on Friday because they trust their high-rise office buildings to withstand the earthquakes more than they trust their private housings. I am guessing that the rural areas of Tohoku do not enjoy such luxuries.

UK’s The Independent ran a front-page cover with the Hinomaru flag and the words “Don’t give up, Japan. Don’t give up, Tohoku” in both English and Japanese.

Currently, there are fears of meltdown in multiple nuclear reactors in Fukushima caused by the total failure of backup generators that were hit by tsunami waves that exceeded the planned height. This sounds terrifying because “meltdown” conjures images of atomic mushroom clouds and Chernobyl, but the facts and analysis are not that gloomy. My personal feeling is that the media is colouring the facts with a mixture of ignorance and individual bias.

Still, regardless of the final outcome of the situation, nuclear energy appears to have been dealt yet another fatal blow. Germany’s government is fighting to defend its nuclear policy while oppositions in countries considering nuclear power are jumping at this opportunity to bolster their argument.

In Singapore, The Online Citizen, a prominent alternative pro-opposition news blog, posted a rather transparent remark on Facebook saying “Singapore continues to consider nuclear power” while linking to an article about Fukushima’s reactors. It was a cheap shot and they ought to be ashamed. Of course this was immediately topped by the state media Channel News Asia‘s mass email soliciting for advertisers to buy ad spots in its upcoming intensive coverage of the Tohoku earthquake. Talk about ambulance chasing.

Japan is known as the country with the best nuclear safety standards and earthquake preparations and even it has apparently been bested, or at least that is the narrative that the major media outlets seem to have agreed upon — I suspect that the facts will in the long run demonstrate that the danger was greatly exaggerated due to hyper-sensitivity to the word “nuclear”.

Iwaki city, Fukushima prefecture. (Kyodo News/Associated Press)

As of right now, I still plan to continue with my trip to Japan at the end of this month. The scenes of destruction being constantly replayed on various news networks were taken from Tohoku, a relatively rural region in north-eastern Japan, while most of my itinerary involves western Japan. I will also be spending a week in Tokyo, but I am not too worried about it. I have great confidence in Tokyo’s ability to rapidly recover from huge disasters based on an extensive review of Godzilla- and Ultraman-related materials. Cue the omg-how-dare-you-joke-about-this righteous indignation.

On another note, I just want to say that Twitter has really made me feel like I am truly living in the future. (Relevant xkcd strip.) I follow a wide variety of people, and all of them, including members of the anime community, singers, seiyuu, titans of the English blogosphere, news professionals, politicians, real-life acquaintances, were tweeting in real-time throughout and discussing the same issues from very different perspectives including many first-hand ones.

The conversation threads on Twitter were timely, spontaneous and interlinked in a manner that transcends traditional boundaries. It is easy to dismiss social networking as a hive of egotists and exhibitionists and it has become a popular refrain to question the purpose of Twitter whenever the topic pops up in an online discussion elsewhere, but ultimately I really think that micro-blogging in general has a very important role to play in the future ahead.

I’ll just end this long thought dump here. I wish everyone in Japan the best in the days ahead. 幸運を祈る。