Blissful Japan

A friend of mine just forwarded this post on JapanProbe about women’s fundoshi. My quickest description of a fundoshi would be traditional Japanese g-string loincloth underwear for men. According to Wikipedia:

Before World War II the fundoshi was the main form of underwear for Japanese adult males; however it went out of use quickly after the war with the advent of new underwear, such as briefs and trunks, on the Japanese market.

I suggest you do a Google image search if you want more graphic details. Anyway, it appears that fundoshi made from very stylish patterns are now being made and marketed to women. Will this craze catch on? (Please note: since there are already pleny of pictures of men’s fundoshi, which have been around for centuries, I am only posting pictures of pendre shorts in this blog posting - sorry, ladies.)

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

I went to Akihabara last month to help my friend buy a terabyte drive (only 17,500 yen now!) and external case (4500 yen for a nice one), where I was of course deluged with cute girls in costumes handing out flyers to come to their stores. Here’s the first flyer that I received, along with my translation.

I should note that this is all just harmless fun. Places like this provide outlets for frustrated and shy single guys to interact with women in an innocent, childlike way. The cultural stereotypes and bias you might expect just aren’t present here. Sure, people may think of it as a bit childish or nerdy, but that’s about it…

Top header:
Refreshing “infiltration-style” spot, as featured prominently in magazines, newspapers, and on TV!
~Let’s play together~
Akiba Girls’ Dorm: Main Building & Annex

Top 3 frames, clockwise from upper right:
Frame 1:
This is Reina, Akiba dorm president. Good day!
And I’m Fujiko, a resident of the dorm.
Frame 2:
For those of you who don’t yet know about our dorm, today we’re going to give you a small tour!
Frame 3:
The inside of the dorm looks like this. The rooms are spacious and relaxing and REALLY cute!
Inside these rooms we’ll get to know you and have fun together!
How to enjoy our dorm? First select a course, then try some options, and finally just enjoy and have fun! It’s simple!

Middle 3 frames, right to left:
Frame 4: As an option, we’ll change clothes from our pajamas to a costume you like.
Frame 5: We’ll take a Polaroid photo together with you. Or read manga about love! We can also wear our school uniform for you!
Frame 6: Everyone please come to play with us! We’ll be waiting for you in our pajamas!

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Sometimes you’ve got to love Japanese commercials.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Speedtest.net has put aggregated statistics for all people using its Internet speed test service - pretty cool. You can view the speed test results from anyone, anywhere in the world. Check out the speed data for ISPs from Tokyo. I’m on USEN which currently tops the upload speeds at 17571kb/s, and is ranked near the top for download at 24465kb/s. I’m not sure where Speedtest.net’s servers are located, but I think if they were in Japan the speeds would be noticeably higher. This also doesn’t take into account the different plans people are using; for instance some USEN FTTH plans are bridged over VDSL within the local building, and some are pure Ethernet straight through… Personally the maximum download speed I’ve experienced has been around 3.5mb/s and about the same for upload.

It’s interesting to compare my 4000 yen a month (approx $40) 100mb/s fiber with my mom’s $55/month Cox cable modem from Laguna Niguel, California, which offers a decent 10258kb/s download but a pathetic asynchronous 631kb/s upload speed.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

My coworker sent this page with 4 videos showing people making popcorn with radiation from their cell phones. Think it’s impossible? Check it out. Apparently if you put 3-4 phones in a circle around some kernels of corn and call them all at once, the corn will pop. I’d try it if I had enough phones…

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Recently I found this article from the New York Times entitled High-Tech Japan Running Out of Engineers. (Warning: free registration and login required to read). It discusses the decreasing numbers of students choosing engineering majors in Japan. I found it particularly interesting because as an American engineer in Japan, I have long fought with the problem of the low levels of salary and pay that engineers get here compared to the United States.

I met this guy who worked at Sony designing the Playstation Portable a few years back. And he said his salary was awful, and even if the product did well, it wouldn’t impact his bonus. He said he wanted to change jobs but needed to think about it first (most people are overly cautious about changing jobs due to historical reasons.)

It seems to me that if Japan paid its engineers competitive salaries (like the U.S.), this wouldn’t be so bad a problem. But the whole situation is far more complicated than that and makes a direct comparison between Japan and Western countries difficult. Japanese companies usually don’t reward new employees with relevant preexisting skills, experience and knowledge with higher starting salary. What I mean is you could be a master programmer, and work for a Japanese company writing software and get the same salary as someone who has no experience whatsoever and has to learn everything from scratch. So for many students there is no motivation to learn anything in advance for one’s career either.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

From Wikipedia’s COBOL entry:

Critics have argued that COBOL’s syntax serves mainly to increase the size of programs, at the expense of developing the thinking process needed for software development. In his letter to an editor in 1975 titled “How do we tell truths that might hurt?”, computer scientist and Turing Award recipient Edsger Dijkstra remarked that “The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense”.

Yet COBOL lives on and is taught to new graduates by a company that is only around ten years old.. in Japan!

A friend of mine graduated recently graduated in March from a prestigious Tokyo university with a degree in economics and went to work for a major Japanese ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software company (the name of which I will not disclose, other than to say that they could use some serious help in their product naming!)

Japanese One-month Summer Internships

First let me give a little background. As a university senior in the summer before graduation, she had a one month internship at this company. In Japan, most students don’t have internships of any kind before graduating, and the ones that do are usually quite short. Unlike an internship in the U.S. where interns do real work, her internship was essentially a one month class. During this time the interns were all paid salaries to essentially attend classes about programming in Delphi (with homework of course.) Odd, I thought, that Japanese companies have to pay salaries to teach their employees skills that by American standards they should have learned in college.

The final assignment of the internship was to design a computer system to be used at a hotel front desk, using Delphi. I helped her brainstorm features for the project, and at the end of her internship, she made a presentation about her program, and based on that she was offered a job to work there after graudation. Since this was a bit ambitious for students who had never written a program, the final program didn’t have to fully work and students were allowed to make presentations highlighting their ideas for features rather than actually implementing them.

As you may already know, in Japan students graduate at the end of March and uniformly start their full time jobs on April 1. It is also typical for Japanese companies to have numerous months of initial training for all entering graduates. In my friend’s case, the training picked up where the internship left off, and started with several skill tests about programming. My friend called them “algorithm tests,” but it sounds more like they were more about control flow (think flowcharts and program logic.) At the end of the first week, the desks of all the new employees were rearranged in order of their scores on the test, and my friend’s desk was the last in the room, due to her receiving the lowest score. People who score well on the tests receive a higher starting salary, quite unusual for Japanese companies, where two people could be hired for a programming job and one could have been writing shareware for 5 years and already know how to program and the other never have touched a line of code in his life, and they both get the same starting salary. (This other facet of Japanese companies, i.e. not encouraging their employees to come in with any existing knowledge or experience relevant to their new job, fascinates me but should be the subject of another post.)

Alive and Well in Japan: COBOL

After the “algorithm tests” came their next subject: COBOL development! The incoming employees were given a 2-page COBOL programming assignment, but were told that they needed to teach themselves COBOL first. No textbook, no office hours, no teaching assistant to help or asking questions, they had to figure it all out. Certainly this is an interesting idea. Also it turns out, no partial credit for programs that don’t work; it’s all or nothing. Trying her best, my friend searched for a book on COBOL. The first store she checked didn’t even have any. Luckily eventually she found one. By the time she asked me for help, she had already spent some time trying to read the book and figure out the assignment, but was basically no better off than when she started.

When she first asked me for help, my reaction was, “COBOL? Someone still uses that?” Even stranger considering her company was started in 1996. How could they possibly have any legacy COBOL code? I’m not sure if they just use it for training, but I still find it odd that they would even use it for that purpose. My friend theorized that maybe if nobody knows COBOL then it’s a good thing since nobody would have an advantage on doing the assignments. But I don’t really agree with that, since people who already know how to program can pick up COBOL pretty quickly. I have bachelor’s and masters degrees in Computer Science (graduating about ten years ago) and I have never had to use or look at COBOL. So I found it amazingly strange that in 2008, a 12 year old company in Japan is still using COBOL.

The actual assignment was a relatively simple program that iterated over records from a work hours database to calculate salaries for employees, keeping running totals by group and division within the company. For anyone with any programming experience, it is not that difficult, except for the strange and outdated syntax of doing it in COBOL. They called it an example of “control break” programming, a term I have never heard used anywhere but here, which essentialy seems to be what in C would be a while true loop with an embedded conditional break statement. In this case, due to the various running totals, it required about 3 nested control break loops, which is definitely some tricky program flow logic for someone who majored in economics and had never touched a line of code in her life.

I tried to explain the basics of how to do the assignment, only to discover that she had no idea of what a function or even a variable was! Apparently the new hires were expected to learn the basics of programming, including COBOL and SQL and control flow, entirely by themselves. Only 10% of the people were able to complete the assignment and the remaining 90% were given a [useless] extension to the due date.

In the end, it proved impossible for her to create a working COBOL program in the given time. I felt bad for all the effort she had put into it (remember there’s no partial credit), not to mention all the time I spent trying to help her by explaining various computer science concepts.

Only in Japan?

What exactly does a system like this accomplish? I always try to respect the different way things are often done in Japan, because often there is (or was) some good reason for doing it the way that they do. But in this case, I can’t see what this really accomplishes. Demotivate some employees who used to be excited to start their first job after graduation? Why doesn’t the university system teach Japanese students skills which they will use in their jobs? If the company wants their new hires to do something which they did not learn in college, why don’t they teach them or give them support to help them learn themselves? So many questions… no easy answers.

I’ve talked to some other friends about this and they say they’ve never heard of training at other Japanese companies that is quite as extreme. But still I can’t imagine this happening anywhere else but here.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

This is a crazy new law being proposed which will give border guards and security personnel the right to inspect the contents of your laptop, iPod, cell phone for content that infringes on copyright laws (music and movies): Crazy ACTA Trade Agreement (Wikileaks)

Apparently they already have in some cases the right to look at anything on your laptop in the pretense of checking for child pornography. This looks more like a fishing trip. First look for something that most people will support, child porn or illegal music, then “discover” something else.

The record industry is trying to make ripping CDs illegal, so they want to have DRM only downloads on an iPod. In other words if it is not digitally signed it is not legal.

Is the next step is the right to enter our homes and go through our disk drives, without a court order or probable cause. It’s amazing that this type of thing is even being considered much less this close to becoming a reality!

According to Slashdot it sounds even worse:

“The proposal includes clauses designed to criminalize the non-profit facilitation of copyrighted information exchange on the Internet, which would also affect transparency sites such as Wikileaks. The Wikileaks document details provisions that would impose strict enforcement of intellectual property rights related to Internet activity and trade in information-based goods. If adopted, the treaty would impose a strong, top-down enforcement regime imposing new cooperation requirements upon Internet service providers, including perfunctory disclosure of customer information, as well as measures restricting the use of online privacy tools.”

And here is a more moderate take on ACTA from Ars Technica.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Today I found out about this lovely law passed in the U.K.

According to Wikipedia:

The RIPA allows the government to access a person’s electronic communications in a very unrestricted manner, thus infringing in the privacy of their correspondance in a manner many would not tolerate regarding their postal communications. The act:

• Enables the government to demand that an ISP provides access to a customer’s communications in secret
• Enables mass surveillance of communications in transit;
• Enables the government to demand ISPs fit equipment to facilitate surveillance;
• Enables the government to demand that someone hands over keys to protected information;
• Allows the government to monitor people’s internet activities;
• Prevents the existence of interception warrants and any data collected with them from being revealed in court

How do all these incredible laws get passed?

Bookmark It

Hide Sites