The day has finally come. I can hardly believe it. In a few short hours, I will be on a flight to…Incheon, South Korea, followed by a long transit before finally arriving at SFO. I will spend the next four years at Stanford and hopefully graduate with a few pieces of laminated paper.

My mind is kind of in a messed-up place right now, so that’s all I have to say for now. In the mean time, watch this awesome YouTube series.

See you in California.

I caught SDN48 live performing in Singapore at Scape last Friday. I was going to wait for the official concert photos to be distributed to the blogosphere before I write about it, but the PR minions are taking forever and my recollection of the event is growing faint as the curse of old age silently obliterates my memory.

So yeah, this is what I think. I’ll just add in photos later if they ever show up.

SDN48, or Saturday Night 48, is AKB48‘s more “adult” sister group. It is the most recent entry in AKB48’s growing idol empire and the only group of the four that is not regional-based. SDN48 members are generally in their 20s and older than the members of the other three groups, with some of them being former AKB48 members.

AKB48 is really the only group with any significant overseas fan-base, so it was rather surprising for SDN48 to hold a live in Singapore. After all, AKB48 itself belongs to a small niche outside of Japan, while SDN48 remains a niche even within Japan. Last Friday’s live was actually SDN48’s first ever overseas performance.

SDN48 posing in Orchard Road, Singapore’s take on Venice’s Grand Canal

The performance was actually rather enjoyable, despite my near-complete ignorance of everything AKB48 and its spin-offs. The songs are standard pop fare, but faster paced, more rhythmic and with more dance beats than most of what I’ve heard from AKB48.

Being the so-called “adult” version idol group, SDN48’s music videos and stage presentations are slightly more risqué than what J-Pop idol groups like Morning Musume usually go for (e.g. soap-bubble bath, revealing costumes and implied lesbianism) but nothing that will incite pitchforks and angry mobs. Might be kind of pseudo-provocative thirty years ago.

That said, one of SDN48’s numbers last Friday had a dance routine that included sexy corsets, stockings with garterbelts and — wait for it — three pairs of black panties being thrown into the audience. I’m guessing you wouldn’t see that at an AKB48 concert. Heh.

SDN48 members who performed last Friday

The interesting part for me was that, of the twelve SDN48 members sent to perform in Singapore, there were Chen Qu, a native of Shenyang, China, and Sayaka Kondo, who grew up in Detroit, Michigan. Between the two of them, they had both English and Mandarin Chinese — the two main languages spoken in Singapore — covered. Heck, SDN48 has a main single whose title is partially Korean (Ai, Chuseyo) and one of their other songs has Chen Qu doing verses in Chinese. Talk about market research.

It’s quite clear that the whole 48 franchise is just raring to make it big in the international (ala East Asian) market and a lot of groundwork is being done by the producers attempting to pull it off. SDN48’s dance routines and presentation styles are noticeably influenced by the current tide of Korean pop dominating the market, which in turn draws on international and Western influences more than past Japanese idol groups. Yasushi Akimoto has definitely been taking notes and learning from Japan’s past successes and recent failures.

Still, the inclusion of two Chinese members did not save Morning Musume from its free-falling descent into obscurity and niche-dom, and I think it’s still too early to tell if AKB48 and its sister groups can successfully become J-Pop’s new messiah and growth engine in the international market, a position that has been unfilled since Ayumi Hamasaki.

The Caucasian guy is a metaphor for the overseas market

I estimated about 800-1000 seats in AKB48’s permanent live venue in Singapore. At 50 SGD a pop, that’s $50,000 per gig at the maximum, which is probably barely enough to pay for return Business class tickets from Japan for 12-16 girls and their entourage of manager(s) and make-up artist(s). Yasushi Akimoto is definitely investing for the long-term here.

Frankly, now I am thinking of catching one of the upcoming AKB48 lives in Singapore, purely out of academic curiosity. This could be (pop culture) history in the making.

Oh, one more thing: I am kind of obligated to inform you that Animax Asia is holding a contest called “AKB48 Watch & Win” to give out AKB48 Singapore live tickets, merchandises and meet & greet opportunities. From now until 26 August, a name of an AKB48 member will be shown on Animax between 8pm to 12am everyday from Mondays to Fridays. You have to submit the correct name to the official site to enter the lucky draw.

Kids, this is what happens when you sell your soul.

P.S. I still think Momusu was better in its heydays. D:

A short press conference was held today for the opening of AKB48’s official merchandise store in Singapore and their first permanent theatre outside of Japan. There was also a short photography session with Misaki Iwasa, Mika Komori and Miho Miyazaki from AKB48 who were present for the opening ceremony.

AKB48 Singapore is a project consisting of a permanent theatre, a merchandise store and a theme cafe (to be opened late June).

Members of AKB48, along with their sister groups SKE48, NMB48 and SDN48, will be performing at the theatre twice a month on a regular basis. The first public performance will be held tomorrow, May 15, and the performers consist of a mix of Team A, K and B members.

Meet and greet

AKB48 actually performed in Singapore last year as part of AFA X. Presumably the reception was good enough for the business end to decide to establish a permanent presence in Singapore.

Crowd of photographers blocking the view

There was a queue of fans waiting for the official store opening today. Probably because there is a handshake session with the three girls for customers making purchases of 15 SGD or more. I didn’t have to queue because I was with the media people, but I didn’t buy anything and only took a quick look around. The store is pretty standard for an official merchandise store of its type.

Blind overhead shoot

Everything is located within the *SCAPE complex located behind Cineleisure. The entire building was playing AKB48 songs for the store opening.

The queue goes around the building

AKB48, despite its origins, has become incredibly mainstream in Japan in the past two years thanks to aggressive marketing, perhaps even exceeding the former glory of Morning Musume. When I was in Japan last month, there were AKB48 posters put up by the Tokyo metropolitan government telling people to vote in the elections.

Posing for photos

That said, the Asian pop market is quite a different game altogether and holding two concerts a month in Singapore seems like a rather intensive schedule to keep for an overseas location, just considering the logistics alone.

This looks like a huge strategic push to make AKB48 part of the mainstream consciousness in the overseas J-Pop market, which in recently years has grown stale, partly due to a lack of a new generation of flag-bearers, and has been severely under-performing compared to its Korean counterpart. It’s a gamble but it can potentially pay off huge for the entire industry if it establishes a new wave for similar J-Pop idol groups.

Also worth noting is that Singapore has a rather large Japanese expatriate community for its size.

Maybe one day there will be a Singapore franchise. SGP48.

AFA X, the third Anime Festival Asia, will be held on 13 and 14 November at its usual venue at Suntec Convention Centre. As per usual, a small press conference was held this morning to announce some of the details. Here’s the quick low down on the most important bits that I sat through two hours for:

Confirmed guests

• Milky Holmes
• Kana Hanazawa
• Kaname (cosplay competition judge)
• Danny Choo
• Gou Nakanishi (attending the industry event)

New programmes:

• Screening of Gundam 00 movie and Suzumiya Haruhi no Shoushitsu
• Butler Cafe

Confirmed performances

• May’n
• Ichirou Mizuki
• angela
• JAM Project
• Scandal

There’s also some unannounced exclusive COSPA merchandises, but the rest of the line-up appears to be SOP (standard operating procedure, not Sons of Patriot) — maid cafe (though it’s now a school uniform cafe), merchandise showcases, cosplay competition, etc.

I have to say that the biggest coup this year is probably either SCANDAL (the next ZONE?) or JAM Project. Personally, I absolutely adore angela ever since Uchuu no Stellvia. I had a hunch that they were one of the guests when Gou Nakanishi (producer of Soukyuu no Fafner and producer for angela) was listed as one of the speakers for an industry networking event that takes place one day before AFA proper.

The concert itself is split into two days as per last year, with JAM Project and Ichirou Mizuki on day 1 and the SCANDAL, angela, May’n on day 2. I suspect the two movie screenings will also be similarly divided, with Gundam 00 on the first day (to fit in with the whole manly robot theme), but that’s just my speculation.

Ticketing information is all up on the official site. It seems that this year the organizer is breaking the tickets down into even more tiers. I’m currently eyeing the concert ticket for the second day… SCANDAL is pretty cool (I mean really, it’s basically a real-life corporate-owned K-ON!) and angela is just incredible all the time.

And here’s a cover of K-ON!’s “Don’t say lazy” by SCANDAL.

Still no Maaya Sakamoto of course. Just as yosou.

I missed the EOY (End Of Year) cosplay event last year as I was in Japan for a month. Little did I know that it was to be the last EOY ever, as the organizers had run out of people to keep the thing running.

Fortunately, the event name was acquired by a new group of people and given new life. Under the new administration, a lot has changed from the familiar practices of past EOY events, some for the better.

The most prominent change is of course the venue this year: the Drama Centre on the 3rd floor of the National Library. While I can see the advantage of moving the event from the Singapore EXPO, located at the eastern tip of the island, to a more central location in the city area, the National Library just seems to be an odd place to have such an event. For one thing, cosplay events are always very noisy and flashy.

The Drama Centre consists of a decent-sized theatre, where the on-stage programmes were held, and a rather spacious lobby area, where the cosplayers and doujin booths were located. Of course, while the lobby was more than roomy enough to serve its primary function, it was wholly inadequate as a cosplay area. Walking space was extremely limited and there was very little room for any photo-taking. In the end, most of it spilled outside to the first floor, which I think the librarians were not too happy about.

The event area does have pretty good natural lighting, but unfortunately it turned cloudy and started to rain immediately after I arrived. And as I had predicted in my AFA09 post, I once again did not have in my possession an external flash for my camera. Maybe next time.

Due to the unholy trinity of the stage programmes in the fully-packed theatre, the overcast sky and lunchtime, there was pretty much nothing for me to take pictures of when I got there. Fortunately, the sky cleared later in the afternoon and all the cosplayers came out of hiding.

For some inexplicable reason, the organizers invited Yui Makino to perform and sign autographs at the event. It just seems so out-of-place and bizarre for a cosplay event. Perhaps the new committee has greater things in mind for EOY…

The Gundam was too huge to fit into the event area and had to stay around the open area on the first floor.

Interestingly, I applied for a media pass for this event which was supposedly approved. When I asked for it at the entrance, the guy gave me the pass without verifying anything. This seems very easily abusable, and considering the fact that the normal entry ticket costs S$15…

I want to say that EOY this year felt more professional than the previous ones, but I think professional isn’t the right word. It feels more commercialized, despite the organizer’s assurance that EOY continues to be a fan-organized event for fans.

With the new SOY (start of year) cosplay event being organized by Ngee Ann Polytechnic’s Japanese Cultural Club next year, there are now four annual cosplay events in Singapore: Cosfest, Anime Festival Asia, EOY and SOY, all of them taking place within a short span of half a year. Does anyone else think that this is getting a bit out of hand?

I just woke up with a throbbing headache. I feel like I’ve spent the past two days walking. Of course, this comes nowhere close to the time when I queued overnight in the winter rain for Comiket 73 and fell asleep on Big Sight’s ice-cold wet concrete floor. That was just crazy.

AFA 09 has finally come and gone. I went for both days of the event and managed to get a decent feel of the whole thing, though I did end up spending most of that time chatting with people and taking pictures of cosplayers outside the event hall. I also managed to catch the concert by May’n and Yoshiki Fukuyama, a pretty worthy climax for my AFA experience.

On the whole, I think AFA 09 improved from last year. The use of space in the event hall was much better and the level of industry participation was also noticeably higher.

Unlike last year, there weren’t any odd empty spaces in the booth layouts this time, partly because the stage area was expanded and isolated from the rest of the event hall. This made the concerts more professional and authentic, but on the flip side made the whole event seem less lively. On-stage events in the afternoon, such as the regional cosplay competition and the live-dubbing session by the K-On! cast (most of it anyway), drew considerable crowds away from the main event hall.

Ideally the huge black curtain separating the stage area from the rest of the event should only be there for the evening concerts, but I guess that’s logistically infeasible.

Bandai had a pretty prominent exhibition area celebrating the 30th anniversary of Gundam. There were some event-exclusive and early-release Gunpla models too. I spent 15 minutes watching a video on the construction of the 1:1 Gundam that was recently assembled in Odaiba. It’s pretty amazing to watch these engineers and technicians put something like that together from scratch. Watching them fine-tune the speed of the Gundam’s head rotation and adjust the positions of the jet exhausts makes me feel kind of funny inside. I think the next closest thing I can think of is watching Disney Imagineers at work.

You know, the feeling that after these people have grown up, gone through college and become professional engineers in various fields, they can take the serious stuff they have learnt and use it to create something born from childhood wonder. It’s magical.

Danny Choo had a booth collaboration with Good Smile Company where all the usual (figurine) suspects could be found. He was also helping to promote Otacool, a book published by Kotobukiya that compiles photos of “otaku rooms” from all over the world. It’s like a printed copy of the internet! I think it’s about time someone did something like this for epic 4chan posts that are of historical significance to serve as primary sources for future O-level source-based questions. (“What is Anonymous and what do they not do?”)

I have this one. Yay!

Interestingly, COSPA has decided to set up a South-East Asian branch, COSPA SEA. Damn it man. It’s already hard enough as it is to wear a COSPA shirt to a local event without bumping into someone else wearing the exact same shirt. Back in the old days we had to physically fly to Japan to get our COSPA shirts and they were like rare Epic loot. Young anime fans these days have it too good. *Swings walking cane around wildly*

I hereby proclaim Shirt.Woot the next indie mass-market apparel trend for geeks. Considering they still do not ship to Singapore and will unlikely do so in the near future, our bought sense of individuality should be safe for some time.

Tatsunoko Production

Local comic Freedom Formula — soon to be a major Hollywood production

Hottarake no Shima — Production I.G.’s new family-friendly box office release

During Production I.G.‘s presentation on Friday, the speaker mentioned that the studio was founded by people who, having seen how girls are drawn to men who do sports, poetry, etc., decided that they want to make anime that can help them score with chicks. (I imagine telling a girl that you were responsible for a scene in Kill Bill can be quite a turn on.)

And having successfully achieved their primary goal, many of them are now happily married and starting families. Hottarake no Shima (Oblivion Island) is the result of that transformation. Heh.

Summer Wars — coming to a Cathay cinema soon

Storm Lion booth babes

Animax Asia live broadcasting

Doujin merchandises

Doujin posters

Moe Moe Kyun maid cafe

Danny drew quite a crowd when he went into the maid cafe in his Storm Trooper armour. All the maids were fighting to serve him. ;)

Reine Hibiki (illustrator for Marimite light novels) autograph session

And finally, the cosplay photos. I know I say this after every cosplay event, but AFA 09 has finally made me decide to buy an external flash for my Canon 400D. Eventually. Yeah.

A familiar face

GO GO POWER RANGERS

Hetalia will be the cause of WWIII

She’s Japanese

That reminds me. Speaking of K-On!, there was a live on-stage dubbing demonstration by the seiyuu cast on Sunday. Four of the girls were present. Guess who was missing? It was Yoko Hikasa, the voice of Mio. The audience was noticeably shocked and confused when this was finally revealed.

The session still went great and watching the voice actresses do their job was pretty interesting. The fans, once they got over the initial shell shock, responded quite positively. As a bonus, I found it amusing to observe the reactions that took place immediately following the unexpected revelation. In fact, I was kind of waiting for it to happen. I am a bad person. :(

Okay, so we all know that I’m probably never going to buy an external flash and when the next cosplay event comes around, I’ll be back here posting under-exposed and out-of-focus photos again. Damn my lack of willpower.

I missed the concert on Saturday but managed to catch the one on Sunday. Although better than last year, the acoustics still left much to be desired this time. Most of the vocals were hard to make out over the loud synthesized pop tracks and the booming bass speakers that were pointed right at me.

May’n performed a few of her latest non-anime songs before ending off with Northern Cross, Lion and Iteza Gogo Kuji Don’t be late. The crowd, being who we are, reacted much more favourably to her Macross F songs. Yoshiki Fukuyama’s performance was more audible, partly because he has a louder voice and partly because he played his own chords on a guitar.

The best part of the concert was of course the two duets May’n and Fukuyama performed for the encore. Fukuyama did an impressive rendition of Diamond Crevasse on his guitar and sang along with May’n during the chorus, and May’n did a surprisingly good job with Dynamite Explosion from Macross Dynamite 7. Personally, I was looking forward to a Totsugeki Love Heart duet, but I guess I shouldn’t be greedy. Music — the one good thing about Macross 7.

That about concludes my AFA 09 coverage. Now I shall pray to the great Cherokee gods for Maaya Sakamoto to come to AFA 10.

Having been to similar conferences in the IT industry, I didn’t have high hopes for this one. Often, it’s a bunch of really boring people in suits talking about how Asia is an emerging market and Singapore is poised to be a regional hub. AAC on the other hand turned out to be a rather pleasant surprise.

I stepped into the Suntec Convention Centre auditorium on Friday morning with great reservations. I was nearly half an hour late and the keynote address by Mr. Tsuguhiko Kadokawa, CEO of Kadokawa Group, was already coming to an end. I entered quietly through the back door, just as I did the numerous time I was late for lecture in school, and resigned myself to inevitable death by boredom which, no disrespect to Mr. Kadokawa, was only made more certain by the last few slides of his presentation.

The first speaker was Mamoru Hosoda, the director of Tokikake and Summer Wars. A prior glance through the list of speakers had given me the impression that he was going to be one of the few interesting speakers for the day. This rare spot of optimism was quickly overturned when it became apparent that instead of a personal presentation, the format was going to be a mock interview conducted by ANN’s Justin Sevakis.

I was puzzled by this arrangement because all it did was to add an additional layer of interpretations to the whole process as Justin was asking the questions in English… The interpretor was pretty bad and half the time Hosoda was answering different questions from the one asked. It wasn’t the engaging presentation I had hoped for.

Justin Sevakis and Mamoru Hosoda on stage

Hosoda mentioned that Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo was made for Japanese high school students and he didn’t expect it to do so well overseas. His main sources of inspiration are Hayao Miyazaki and Disney and he sees Pokémon to be the first to show that anime do not need to be adapted for local tastes in order to succeed globally. I’m not so sure about that one…

Edmund Shern, CEO of local media company Storm Lion and the founder of the ever popular Imaginary Friends Studios, went on stage with a few guys from Production I.G. to talk about their latest collaboration, Titan Rain.

Titan Rain

Given that Storm Lion was only incorporated last November, it’s pretty amazing that their comic series Freedom Formula has already been picked up by New Regency to be made into a live-action title distributed by 20th Century Fox. And considering the large number of collaboration requests from Hollywood studios that get rejected by Production I.G., Edmund must really know his stuff. Mitsuhisa Ishikawa, president of Production I.G., mentioned that he decided to do this with Storm Lion because it presented a creative vision as opposed to a profitable business proposal. Hollywood, take notes.

Edmund Shern and the Production I.G. guys

Of course, while it’s great that a Singapore media company has managed to find a place alongside the big industry players, I suspect this has more to do with Edmund’s personal experience than the local scene as a whole. Time will tell.

Mr. Phoon Chiong Kit, deputy chairman of Imagi International Holdings Limited, gave a talk about why he believed Astro Boy has failed rather badly in the box office. The title of his talk is “Distributing Animation Across Markets and Cultures” and frankly I thought it was going to be a real dozer, but I was proven wrong. It was actually pretty interesting.

Apparently Astro Boy did pretty good in China, flopped in the US and was dead on arrival in Japan. Over 80% of the viewers in the first week of its release in Japan were older men instead of the targeted teenage audience, which on hindsight is not that surprising. He speculated that the movie didn’t do well in US because it is an unknown franchise and looks kiddish to older audience but is perceived to be too violent and full of adult themes to actually draw in kids. It did better in China because Astro Boy is a recognized classic there and the audience does not have the same expectations that the Japanese audience has when it comes to staying true to source materials.

Astro Boy adapted for Hollywood sensibilities

I think the fact that Imagi is a Hong Kong company may have something to do with it too. Given that Chinese authorities have an annual quota of twenty on the number of imported foreign films, there’s a artificial lack of competition when it comes to box office sales. I wonder if Astro Boy was considered a local film and given certain preferential treatment.

Shiro Sasaki, CEO of Flying Dog (a division of Victor Entertainment), gave what I feel was the best presentation of the conference. Flying Dog manages many of the big names in anime music production, such as Yoko Kanno, Yuki Kajiura, Akino Arai, ALI PROJECT, Round Table and my all-time favourite Maaya Sakamoto. Looking at the number of titles for which Sasaki is credited as music producer (Ghost in the Shell, Akira, Cowboy Bebop, Noir to name a few), it is no exaggeration to say that he basically shaped our entire perception of what anime music is all about.

He did a presentation on Macross Frontier where music plays a particularly important role. For each Macross title, Flying Dog looks for fresh voice talents so that the audience associates the songs with the characters instead of any established singer. The talents are then developed in parallel to their fictional counterparts using various real-life promotional events that mirror those found in the anime until eventually they become established enough to release their own work. This is standard industry practice now, but Sasaki and Victor have been doing it since the original Macross.

Sheryl Nome’s blog

I think the commercial success of Sheryl and Ranka in Macross Frontier points to the inevitable future of all-digital idols. When a future iteration of Hatsune Miku eventually successfully navigates its way through the uncanny valley to emerge on the side of ultra-realism, real idols will be out of work for good. Considering how precious little is real when it comes to idol marketing, it’s really the next logical step.

Danny Choo did a presentation on his Mirai Gaia ecommerce platform which is interesting as usual, but I think I had already heard most of it before.

Kotaro Sugiyama, creative czar of Dentsu Inc., presented on Dentsu Japan’s past and recent unconventional advertising campaigns, including their recent idea to build a giant Gundam in Odaiba to commemorate 30 years of Gundam and the viral Big Shadow campaign for Blue Dragon on Xbox 360. Their folllow-up plan is to build another Gundam in Paris(?!). Although most anime fans would not have heard of the advertising company Dentsu, they are actually a huge player in the industry. AFA itself was created by Dentsu’s Singapore branch.

Vince Shortino, president of Crunchyroll Kabushiki Kaisha (their operations in Japan), talked about how Crunchyroll managed to convince Japanese right-holders and turn itself from an illegal den of pirates to a fully-licensed online business model.

The Crunchyroll presentation was very thought-provoking, mainly because it mirrored my views from two years ago at the time when the Odex crackdown appeared to be a foreshadowing of a wider industry backlash against fansubbing. Unfortunately, Odex, despite its wealth of industry connections, was and continues to be stuck in the comforts of the status quo and did not have the right combination of ideas, resources and luck to take advantage of what it saw as the doom of creative media. Crunchyroll, a California-based startup with all the right experience (or lack thereof) and can-do optimism that has been the heart of the Silicon Valley’s numerous successes, managed to do just that in spite of having to start from a difficult negotiating position, given that they were perceived to be a huge source of piracy back in 2007.

I pitched this exact idea (online streaming of the latest shows paid for by a combination of subscription and advertising) to Peter Goh, the CEO of Odex, back then and was given a long lecture on how it was impossible to obtain such concessions from the Japanese studios and how I was young and naive (or something to that effect). This seems to be a problem with the mindset of a lot of local businesses — we as Singaporeans are just too used to toeing the line. It was “impossible” to get Japanese support for an online streaming service, but only because no one seriously tried it until Crunchyroll. I hope Odex learnt a lesson from this, but I doubt it.

Crunchy roll iz in ur industry, destoyin’ ur bizness model

Interestingly, there was a short discussion after Vince’s presentation and one of the invited participants was Mr. Steve Tan, a digital IP lawyer from Rajah & Tann LLP. The very same law firm that represented Odex in its aborted crusade against illegal downloaders. It doesn’t take a genius to imagine what his main points were. He started going on about how right holders can only successfully defend their properties if they band together and launch a legal “blitzkrieg” against illegal downloaders, a transparent reference to Odex’s failure due to it being perceived as acting on its own accord. Vince tactfully shot him down by pointing out that it is the advancement in technology that has made past distribution models obsolete and not any intentional evil on the part of the consumers. Forcing fans to return to less convenient means of obtaining anime through legal threats will only drive them away from anime and the only way to discourage illegal downloads is to make legal ones available. It’s a self-serving argument to be sure, but it’s a valid one.

However, I do find it somewhat ironic that Crunchyroll offers anti-piracy tools to the content owners that indexes other video-sharing sites looking for infringing materials. It makes sense from a business perspective because it gives added value to its corporate customers, but the elephant in the room is that such tools would’ve been used against Crunchyroll itself had they been made available to the studios in 2007.

Enforcement essentially prevents any new competitors from following its footsteps, giving Crunchyroll virtual monopoly over the streaming model, and I think there is some conflict of interest for Crunchyroll to take an active role in targeting infringements on competing sites. It’s not necessarily a bad thing and in the long run, should this new model prove viable, established distributors with sufficient capital can still enter the market (like how Microsoft successfully forced its way into console gaming). It’s just too late for the rest of the garage startups.

AFA preview event during the lunch break. Photo provided by Alafista

AAC was on the whole a very meaningful experience with quite a few pleasant surprises. Well, I’m off to AFA now. Hope it will continue this positive trend and outshine my humble expectations. ;)

This is one of those rare posts I make about my personal life so that one day I may look back at this blog and realize that I was once a young and naive idealist. It is the cumulation of a train of thought that has been running on and off for the past six months and a snapshot of me at what I consider to be the first major crossroad in my uneventful life.

I was offered the Public Service Commissionâ€s Overseas Merit Scholarship (Open) earlier this year (2009). While it was an honour to be given one of the most prestigious scholarships in Singapore, I ultimately resolved to turn down the offer. It is a decision that few of my peers (and perhaps even myself) fully understood at the time.

Seeing as we are once again approaching the end of the year and a new batch of A-level graduates will soon be going through the same things I did, I thought itâ€s about time I finally put my thoughts down in words.

The Scholarship

PSC OMS (Open) is one of the many scholarships administered by the Public Service Commission, a state organ that manages and grooms public servants. It is given to Singaporean A-Level graduates selected through a standardized IQ/personality test, a psychological interview and a panel interview. It covers tuition fees, housing and allowances for the duration of the studentâ€s overseas undergraduate studies in exchange for a 5- to 6-year work bond with the government under various ministries or statutory boards. It is also an open secret that OMS scholars enjoy faster career advancement and better work opportunities than local scholars and non-scholars working in similar capacities within the civil service.

Just to make my position clear, I am of the opinion that OMS (Open) is an excellent opportunity in many ways (job stability, competitive pay, fast-track promotions, prestigious brand name) and that people intending to enter the civil service should definitely take it up. But unfortunately, it turned out that I was not one of these people.

The Commitment

There are many passionate arguments surrounding the merits and demerits of the work bond that comes with government scholarships. Here are what I feel to be some important points to consider.

A government scholarship is not just a simple exchange of goods and services, but a complete career package. It requires one to make a major commitment that will last well into oneâ€s early thirties. Many people I know see the scholarship as a simple work contract or even a form of student loan, but this view misses the bigger picture. The purpose of the scholarship is to develop future leaders of Singapore and its sponsorship of undergraduate education is but a portion of an extensive talent-grooming programme designed to produce future top-level management. If oneâ€s intention were to leave the civil service after having served the work bond, then the bulk of development would not have achieved the intended positive outcomes, both for the organization and for the individual.

While it is often said that the civil service (in Singapore) serves as an excellent platform from which recognized talents (i.e. scholars) can enter equivalent high-paying private sector jobs with ease, this is only true if we only consider management positions. Despite what the PSC claims to be a diversified career offered to its scholars and the highly corporate nature of Singaporeâ€s government, the civil service is ultimately an enclosed ecosystem populated by its own performance benchmarks and cultural oddities. Beyond corporate management positions that mirror those found in government ministries, there are few other careers into which one can easily transit, after having spent 5-6 years in this unique environment.

Therefore while it is true that an OMS (Open) award may not necessarily tie one down to public service, it does at the very least make things very difficult for one to move out of corporate management. That is, unless you are willing to start again from scratch at the age of 29-31 in a completely unrelated field, pitting yourself against fresh graduates who have yet to forget the things they learnt in their major. This is of course irrelevant for people who intend to remain within the eco-sphere made up by government-linked organizations and semi-private companies, but should be a major consideration for those who see scholarship as merely a mean to pay for college.

I personally cannot see myself either as a bureaucrat or a politician in the long run. I am not very good at following rules.

College Experience

This brings me to my second point: your college major. The fact that you want to spend four years studying something (presumably in a decent college overseas) should mean that you have at least some interest in the topic. (You should reconsider your choice of major if you donâ€t.)

The college experience, particularly an overseas one, is a catalyst for great change in a personâ€s life. New sights, new sounds, new people and new experiences will change you, no matter how impervious you are to external influence. Many of the famous startups of our time came from ideas incubated during their founders†years in college. During the four years of undergraduate studies, you may end up falling in love with journalism, philosophy, physics, politics or bio-tech. Most of these studies are unlikely to be put to any significant use during your time in government service.

My point is that a scholarship commits you to a bureaucratic career (albeit a well-paid high-flying one) at a stage of your life where you have probably next to no idea what your real talents are and what you truly want to achieve with them.

Although many would probably disagree, college to my naive mind is supposed to be where we find that certain elusive purpose that aligns with our natural and nurtured talents and interests. When I enter college, I wish to spend four (or five) years discovering and affirming my purpose in life, and I do not wish to commit blindly beforehand.

If one is lucky enough to discover that purpose and if it happens to lie outside the civil service, then the six-year bond that comes after graduation can only be seen as an unpleasant obligation, bringing us into the politically-incorrect realm of bond-breaking and all the passionate arguments it engenders.

Breaking Bond

I am personally against bond-breaking, but I do not subscribe to the blind patriotism message, nor do I believe that it is acceptable to accuse people who break scholarship bonds of being “immoral”. To me, bond-breaking is merely a pragmatic decision and a formalized part of the contractual agreement signed when one receives the award.

The whole of Singapore can be summed up by the word “pragmaticâ€. Every government decision has to be backed by facts in the form of spreadsheets and pie charts. Indeed, many of the talented scholars recruited by the government are put to use to churn out these reports and statistics on which critical decisions are made. The end result is a highly technocratic and prosperous nation, a classic success story that has instilled in the people a strong belief in the power of pragmatism.

Bond-breaking is therefore a natural outcome of such a fact-intensive system. If one stands to earn significantly more working in the private sector, then bond-breaking is the obvious logically-sound option after one weighs the facts. It is as simple (simplistic?) as the reasoning that if we raise our corporate taxes to provide better social welfare, foreign investments will run off to other countries — the government-promoted idea that we should not sacrifice pragmatism for sentimental reasons.

But if one, in spite of being a product of the system, happens to be a believer in the importance of the intangible irrationalities in life, such as compassion and social justice, then bond-breaking does seem like an unpleasant last resort. Of course, such a hypothetical person may not be best suited for the pragmatic culture of the civil service in the first place. After all, it is difficult to quantify compassion as a KPI in a PowerPoint bar graph. Stop me before I get too bitter. Heh.

While I personally see bond-breaking as a necessary evil that should not be encouraged, I find it offensive that bond-breakers are put in such a terrible light by the media when they are merely practising what has been preached. I mean even ex-PM Goh Chok Tong apparently broke his bond, so what gives?

All in all, the whole bond issue just seems to be a huge schizophrenic doubespeak mess that I donâ€t want to get myself into, so I decided not to.

Big Picture

At the end of the day, the intention of the PSC Scholarship is to recruit talented individuals to work in the civil service. The emphasis should therefore be on public service and not career advancement.

Unfortunately, the core purpose of the scholarship has been long lost in translation through all the glitzy publicity, scholarship talks and peer pressure. A lot of talented JC students become caught up in the idea that securing a prestigious government scholarship is the way to success, even though they have no prior interest in civil service and little understanding of what policy-making entails. Some may argue that this is an intended feature of the scheme: attract the talent first and then make them interested enough to stay on.

I personally find the merit of this methodology somewhat questionable. Given a limited pool of talents, the success of the PSC Scholarship in attracting talents will always come at the expense of something else. For every IPhO winner absorbed by the civil service, Singapore loses a potential future Nobel Prize winner. There is always a trade-off involved, a fact that is often overlooked when we talk about “grooming the next generation of leaders”.

If the PSC Scholarship becomes too effective in attracting top-tier talents, then what effect will that have on the rest of Singapore? The PSC Scholarship should therefore ideally strive to attract not merely talents, but talents whose passions coincide with its core purpose of public service.

It was once said that the economic boom of the nineties drew so many talented mathematicians and physicists into financial engineering that it might have statistically delayed the emergence of the next Albert Einstein by half a century. That may be a wildly simplistic guesstimation, but it describes the invisible economic balance behind talent management.

Before people accuse me of proclaiming myself the next Albert Einstein, my point is simply that I decided that the best I can achieve lies elsewhere. PSC can decide if a person is suitable for the civil service by offering him/her a scholarship, but it cannot determine whether the person might be better suited for something else. That is a decision that has to be made by the individual.

And from a larger perspective, I believe that Singapore would be better off as a whole if the best talents excel in the fields that match their abilities than if they were all concentrated in the government, even if we buy into the (debatable) basic assumption that the government is the most critical entity in ensuring Singaporeâ€s long-term success.

Conclusion

The extensive bond-based scholarship system in Singapore is both a blessing and a curse. It gives poorer students the opportunity to study overseas and richer students the added incentive to join the civil service, but at the same time it also serves to discourage organic growth and innovation in Singapore. Creativity and entrepreneurship thrive in uncertain environments and the comforting and calculated certainties offered by scholarships to our top talents are, in my opinion, not entirely beneficial to Singaporeâ€s efforts in cultivating future leaders. They grow averse to taking risks and that can only lead to complacency.

Having been through the system, I arrived at the conclusion that my life so far has been too smooth and well-planned. Though I do not come from a well-to-do family, my academic performance and luck have brought me to the top of the rat race that is our education system. I saw the PSC Scholarship as an opportunity offered to me to continue riding this boat to the end, and I decided that itâ€s time to try something else.

But ignoring all my personal ramblings about the macro-economics of scholarships and my somewhat unrealistic expectations of life in general, the overall take-home message is that it’s always a good idea for one to take a step back and seriously consider the personal motivations behind taking up a bonded scholarship. The excuse “everyone else is doing it” doesnâ€t work for drug abuse, and it wonâ€t work here either.

Of course, reality is always imperfect. Parental pressure, peer expectations and financial constraints are ever present in the decision-making process of every scholarship applicant. The reasons for taking up a scholarship are sometimes beyond the individualâ€s control, occasionally resulting in unfortunate situations where both the scholarship sponsor and receiver end up unhappy… That’s life I guess — a reality which may yet catch up with me. Heh.

A Tale of Interest

Let me end off with an interesting anecdote.

In Japan, there is a bond-free scholarship for foreign students called the Monbukagakusho (or Monbusho) offered by the MEXT. The undergraduate award covers tuition fees and expenses for five years of studies, including one year of language and foundation courses.

Singapore sends around one to two Monbusho scholars to Japan every year. The Japan embassy in Singapore conducts selection tests here but, until last year, the applicants were pre-screened by PSC to only include PSC scholars selected to be sent to Japan. The end result was that these PSC/Monbusho scholars were bonded to the Singapore government even though their education was actually paid for by the Japan government.

This amusing system, which as far as I know existed for decades, was abolished last year (at whose volition I have no idea) and the Monbusho in Singapore is now opened to all local applicants. (The deadline for 2010 is over, by the way.)

I think thereâ€s a moral-of-the-story in there somewhere about differing philosophies of scholarship in the two countries and Singaporeâ€s brand of ultra-pragmatism. Iâ€ll leave you to decide what exactly that is. :P

P.S. Longest blog post ever?

So all the cards are finally on the proverbial table. In addition to whatever was announced during the first press conference, the final details for Anime Festival Asia 09 was released this Wednesday (or last Wednesday depending on your preferred usage) during a blogging conference (hurray new media?). Being really short on free time these days, it naturally took me three whole days to write this post. You know you are getting old when you no longer care about first post.

Refer to my previous post for the prior announcements. The new details are as summarized below:

• “Live” performance by Hatsune Miku. You can see how it will look like here.
• Live dubbing by K-ON! seiyuus
• Showcases by Tatsunoko Productions and MADHOUSE Studio
• COSPA retail presence
• Weiβ Schwarz Grand Prix (it’s a moe anime TCG game)

In addition, the anime song performances will be split between the two days of the event, with Ichirou Mizuki, Shoko Nakagawa and Hatsune Miku on day one and Yoshiki Fukuyama and Mayâ€n on day two. The concert tickets are priced at S$188 for two days and S$108 for one day. You can also purchase regular entry tickets to the event for S$15 for one day or S$25 for two.

I think the most interesting thing to me is probably the joint performance by Yoshiki Fukuyama (who performed as Basara, the lead singer of FIRE BOMBER, in Macross 7) and May’n (who performed Sheryl Nome’s songs in Macross Frontier).

Think about it: quite a few of FIRE BOMBER’s songs are duets. The AFA organizers aren’t wiling to confirm anything, but it’s not inconceivable for May’n to assume the role of Mylene and perform a few classic Macross 7 pieces with the great Basara himself. That’d be awesome. If it happens anyway. Planet Dance!

Still, the ticket prices have gone up this year. Since I have effectively zero income right now and still have an expensive college education to save up for, choices will have to be made with the utmost prudence. Hmmm…

My last post turned out a lot heavier than I intended. Rest assure that while it is probably not an isolated incident, it will be some time before I recharge my energy enough to churn out a similar piece.

So anyway, Animation Nation is upon us once again. An annual event organized by the Singapore Film Society, Animation Nation showcases animation (duh) from around the world to a local audience who only watches Bleach and Naruto. I kid, I kid.

Of course, Japanese animations, the elephant in the metaphorical room, are always a stable for the event and this year is no different.

This year, we get Mamoru Oshii‘s latest brainchild Musashi: The Dream of the Last Samurai, cult classic Barefoot Gen and Studio 4°C’s Genius Party Beyond.

Of the three, Mamoru Oshii’s new work probably has the most mainstream appeal considering his landmark Ghost in the Shell movie adaptation which became the direct inspiration for the Matrix. Though Studio 4°C’s Kouji Morimoto did make the trip down to Singapore for AFA 08 last year.

Personally, I am rather interested in catching Barefoot Gen, a WWII story dealing with the Hiroshima bombing. It’s one of those easy to appreciate but hard to watch oldies. Hard to watch in the sense that hardly anyone knows about it and the lack of peer-originated incentive to watch it leaves in obscured in the back of one’s mind, far away from the limelight under which the new and the cool gloriously bask.

Still, I’ve been wanting to watch it for quite some time now. I am always intrigued by how differently people view the atomic bombings, an issue that remains polarizing to this day. Maybe I’ll write a paragraph or two on that topic someday…

Waltz with Bashir, an Israeli title, looks like it might be interesting too. You can find a full list of the films being showcased at Animation Nation 2009 on the official site.