There's Always Someone Coming At You In Tokyo

There is always someone coming at you in Tokyo.

You need to keep your head on a constant swivel. Twitching your head from side to side before taking too many confident strides. You never know when a mo-ped, bicycling hipster, drunk salaryman or teeny bopping ipod nano user will be on a crash course to take you out.

The moment you step out the door, hold your breath and take the plunge.

People come at you when you leave the elevator.

People come at you when you open the fridge.

People come at you when you go to the bathroom.

Flowing, rolling, sprinting, stunting, fronting people, all coming at you.

Too many fishes in this sea. You’re breathing their air. They breathe this air for you. A giant coy pond, everyone waiting for a morsel, waiting for a soda, waiting for a coffee, waiting for a cab, carrying umbrellas and suitcases.

Scurrying, hurrying, furying.

It’s open season on personal space.

Doesn’t exist.

Your space is my space is her space is their space is his space.

Communal personal space.

People come at you when you take a bite of food in a diner.

People come at you when you pick a song on the jukebox.

People come at you when you open a magazine.

If you cut a piece of steak, watch out cause it might end up in someone else’s mouth.

If you hail a cab, look out cause someone else might get in it.

If you pump your fist, hold up, cause someone else might say ‘oh yeah!’

There’s always someone coming at you in Tokyo.

If you make a cutting edge piece of contemporary art, watch yourself, cause someone else may swoop the credit.

If you DJ at Air, hold onto your street cred, cause someone else might do your scratching.

If you’re slurping ramen, clutch those chopsticks, cause someone else might be eating your noodles.

If you’re writing a blog, grab your iphone, cause someone else probably just posted it.

There’s always someone coming at you in Tokyo.

Sketches of Akihabara

I was chillin in Akihabara, or Akiba as the people who want to seem like they know a lot about Tokyo will say, and felt woefully out of place as I was the only person without a Playstation portable in my hands.

I bowed my head, mimicking the body language of the locals and tried to pretend my iPhone was a PSP. But it was just fakery, and not immersion, as I was too aware of my surroundings and conscious not to bump into the other loafing gamers.

Instead I just started to count the number of times I was collided into by a drifting PSPer. (by the time I caught the last train it was around 7. not counting the station madness)

Getting deeper into Akiba, I started popping into random shops, looking for insights into this mecca of geek and tech culture. Most of the bin sized shops I poked around in had barely any offerings that were recognizable. There was never a full computer for sale, but instead shelves and boxes of components. I didn’t know what I was looking at.

In another, more prime time area is was all large A/V shops and maid cafes. Sheepish looking salarymen clustered near the openings to the cafes, taking a pause from their PSPing just long enough to peer around to see if anyone was watching. As soon as they noticed everyone else was fully immersed in slaying dragons they would scurry up the stairs with the frantic shuffling of a classic nerd toting a briefcase.

Maids stood on the streets, with perma smiles, looking like video game avatars, no doubt enticing for the set that calls Akihabara home. I headed past them and into one of the giant A/V megastores.

All megastores I’ve ventured into in Japan have the same feel. The aisles are narrow, the products are many and arranged randomly (rows of potted plants sold next to rows of laundry machines.) and they feature the same audio scape. One sound signature of Japan is lightweight midi music adaptations of 1980’s American pop songs. (Think, the digital symphony of The Legend of Zelda performing ‘Danger Zone.’) Another sound signature is some guy yelling in a shrill voice through a small cone, even if there is a crowd gathered mere feet in front of him.

In the end, due to the assaulting cacophony of sound and the illogical arrangements of product, I forgot entirely what I was browsing for. I think it was a fake palm tree, or at least they seemed really appealing on this night tucked right next to the unaffordably priced washer/dryer/tv/refrigerator hybrid space saver.

I went back out to the streets to find a ramen joint where I would be served by a human being and not a video game character…

iPhone App Review: Kotoba!

I’m often asked what it’s like to live in Tokyo.

I usually say that it is chaotic and inspiring.

Sometimes the chaos is a little too much, and I need to find a way to organize it all. That’s when I’ll make a drawing, make a list or try to learn a little bit more of the language.

My attempts at self teaching myself Japanese have been largely unfruitful until recently. I finally feel like I am making some strides thanks to a great iPhone application.

It’s called Kotoba! (the exclamation mark is a part of the title, personally I refuse to use them for showing enthusiasm, just irony.)

The app is a highly functional English/Japanese bilingual dictionary. You can either start with entering an English word to find the Japanese, or you can enter the phonetical roman character equivalent of a Japanese word, and it will back translate it into English.

If I am out to dinner, or in a primarily Japanese speaking meeting, I have the app running constantly.

Other translators I have tried pale in comparison. Usually they don’t accept romanized Japanese word queries, but require you to have a mastery of the actual Japanese characters.

Once you find the word you are looking for, it shows you the characters that make it up. It also translates the word into Spanish, German and French. And it gives you a sample sentence with how to further use the word.

Fantastic! (damn, broke my own rule…)

Now my constant curiosity about what kind of bad things are being said about me right in front of me can be satisfied in damn near real-time. (keep that in mind coworkers…)

There are two things I would add to improve this application.

1. Include audio recognition. So you could speak into the microphone what you heard, and it would spit back the translation results.

2. Improve the phonetical search. Right now you have to spell the phonetical version of a Japanese word in the exact precise way to get any results. It would be nice if the search allowed you to spell out what you heard, and for the application to give you a range of ‘near matches’ that you could then look through and contextually decide which one you are looking for.

This is the kind of iPhone app I get excited about. It is a lifesaving tool for this fish out of water. It has tangibly improved the quality of life over here. This coupled with the Metro finder and a handy restaurant guide have started opening up more portals in this city.

Grade A technology. A couple tweaks and it earns the A+.

'Advertising' in Tokyo

Sure it’s cliche by now to say that ‘print is dead,’ and for stoic industry vets to lament the ‘end of traditional advertising.’ But these sentiments couldn’t be truer in a place like Tokyo. Kids aren’t watching TV because they are walking around the city 24/7, heads bowed with their cell phones grafted to their hands. And the only people you see reading newspapers are the identically clad salarymen on the morning subway commute. And I know damn well that they aren’t the core target for the Nikes and Playstations of the world.

Creating ‘advertising’ in this new era, in a city that demands uber-newness is an exciting challenge. I like the no rules freedom of it all. There are no predetermined communication buckets to fill at the outset of a campaign briefing these days. Every now and then there will be a specific request like ‘we at least need a web film to communicate this campaign.’ But other than a one-off mandated deliverable, it’s on each of us to dream up some surprises to get ideas out there.

I want to create work that lives in Tokyo and ‘feels Tokyo.’

It is a city filled with interactive intrigue and ever refreshing surprises. There is no space for a dinosaur of a traditional six month campaign roll-out. You need to be tactical, real time and in general just fluid with how you communicate in this town. There should be no formats. An idea could manifest as a gallery show, a pop up store, a digital-to-analog-to-digital stunt.

I like work and ideas that defy classification. I feel like this town is leading the way in that. And I strive to get in on that more.

Art shows and experiments are the talk of the town. I want in on some of that. I want to be a part of making something that is Tokyo Talk worthy. Something that begs to be tweeted about, blogged and re-blogged.

In between all this tangle of jargon and dreams lies something new. Something that we all chase. Something that no one has solved yet. It makes it all feel like a bit of a new gold rush. There is this real stream of ideas and opportunities that need to be panned for nuggets.

Traditional ways of communicating like TV spots and magazine ads should be fallbacks, and only used when they fuel a larger idea. Can you feed people into a new website through them, can you seed the idea of a new iPhone app, can you make something real and not just spew contextless fiction to a black void of anti-communication?

Let us all open up a can of surprise and dig for countless solutions that we might find the best thing to do right now. And we must stay open minded to change, to admit we were wrong, and to have the flexibility to update and improve the ideas we put out there.

With fluidity and unexpectedness, I think we can shake this city and make some noise.

Tokyo demands what it hasn’t seen.

Who else is excited by that?