1) YahooBB

YahooBB took off because it was simply cheaper than anything else out there. Forget the fact that they didn’t have the manpower or capacity to handle all the people signing up, they just offered the lowest DSL rates (at the time). When I moved to Tokyo in September 2001, I immediately tried to sign up for YahooBB since their DSL rates were unbelievable. 6 weeks later I still didn’t have any service. There was no way to contact Yahoo to inquire about the status of your application other than to go to a web form, hit send, and pray that they email you back (which usually they didn’t.) So I tried to sign-up for DSL with another provider only to be told that they investigated and found that I already had service with Yahoo (apparently they put a block on my phone line) and I would need to cancel with Yahoo first before I could apply for DSL service from another company. But there wasn’t any way to contact Yahoo besides the aforementioned web form, or a fax number.

Eventually I was able to get them to remove the block on my line, and at the same time the Japanese government issued them a warning for bad consumer practices. After suffering without home Internet for close to 2 months due to their incompetency, even this day I cringe at the thought of YahooBB.

Anyway I guess it comes down to “you get what you pay for” - YahooBB did offer substantially cheaper DSL rates, with substantially worse service - as well as super agressive marketing by Yahoo, which I suppose is rather impressive.

2) Interviewing at Yahoo Japan

Last year I decided to interview at Yahoo Japan just to see what the experience would be like. I was warned by two friends of mine (one Stanford undergrad CS alum who is American, and one Stanford MBA alum who is Japanese) that it was a waste of time to think about working there, but I still wanted to see first hand. I thought they could seriously use someone such as myself to help bridge Yahoo Japan and Yahoo US on a technical, language, and cultural basis.

The interview process was amazingly Japanese. As I had a feeling that they drastically underpaid their engineers, I made clear up-front my minimum salary requirement, and HR insisted that it still was within the realm of possibility. I went through one or two rounds of interviews each time with about 2-3 company representatives interviewing me at the same time. I made it clear to them that I was not interested in a programming position, but rather a technological project bridiging/management position.

Eventually they said I had to come in for a technical interview. What a joke that turned out to be. I was given a computer running the test in a web browser, with a very small screen. The interface was remarkably poor. You didn’t know what question you were on, how many were left, or how much time was left. All you could see was a progress bar giving you a rough indication of what percentage of the test was complete. There was no way to skip back and forwards through questions, you HAD TO DO the test in the order which it was given. You couldn’t skip ahead to the sections you were most confident in and come back and later go to the parts which you were weaker in. You had to do it in their order. The screen was so small that for some questions you constantly had to scroll up and down over and over to re-read the question and the answers. I couldn’t think of a worse designed test system. However for certain one definite problem was that the test was entirely in very technical Japanese, and while my Japanese is quite good, it was not good enough to understand many technical concepts which I have only had to deal with in English; additionally, many questions were of the form “which of the following 5 statements is incorrect,” so if you didn’t understand every one of the 5 statements in complete clarity, you couldn’t answer the question.

I felt cheated. I specifically told them that I was not trying to be a regular Japanese employee, but clearly they had a standard recruitment procedure and it had to be followed. ZERO flexibility. If they don’t have any flexibility on interview style, it made me wonder what kind of flexibility they might have on work responsibilities or pay scale. At any rate, when the woman from HR came back to the test room to notify me that there were only 5 minutes left, I had had it. I told her I didn’t need 5 more minutes, and that they should only hire Japanese people, and stormed the hell out of there. At that point I didn’t care what happened further.

Amazingly, they still called me back in for a final round of interviews, this time with the mobile unit. This time it seemed to go pretty well again, but the last question was to ask me again what my salary requirements were. I had already answered this question once or twice earlier, so I repeated the same answer. The next day they called and said that they did not have any matching positions at the time. I don’t know the reason for their ending of the interview process; maybe I was too independent and they didn’t think I would fit in with their ZERO FLEXIBILITY culture. But I think the salary had something to do with it, as that was the last question, and they asked it multiple times.

Japanese engineers are already paid only a small fraction of US engineers, and it would seem Yahoo is not at the top of that salary scale by any means. But they are still able to create a suprisingly successful company even though they don’t treat their engineers well like they do in the US. It is a mystery to me how this can happen, I think Japanese engineers are just used to grinning and bearing it… little do they know the miserable lives they lead compared to American engineers, in my opinion.

One more item with respect to benefits at Yahoo Japan.. I found out about this new concept called サービス残業, aka Service Overtime. As it was explained to me, Yahoo Japan pays its employees a flat allowance of around 40,000 (?) yen a month, and in return the employees are expected to work unlimited overtime until 10pm. If you happen to stay after 10pm, then you can qualify for real overtime pay, but coincidentally, at 10pm the air conditioning shuts off and the office starts to get really hot… Seems they are asking their employees to go home.

3) Yahoo Japan vs Google Japan

Last year while interviewing at Google Japan I also did a lot of work comparing Yahoo to Google, especially with respect to Japan. Yahoo’s infrastructure and services are noticably inferior to Google’s in most respects. So why is Yahoo Japan so much more popular? First of all, it’s true, Yahoo customizes its services for Japan while Google opted for a 1-size-fits-the-world approach. This has been changing. The Google Japan home page is actually slightly different from the Google US home page now (it didn’t used to be until the last year), featuring several tabs with Google services, broken down by category. I don’t think this goes far enough though. As mentioned in the TechCrunch article, Japanese people are used to very densely populated pages of information. This does not just apply to web sites, but everything .. magazines, newspapers, TV shows, … Also the fact that Yahoo Japan offers everything in one place is nice. Want a weather forecast? It’s right there in Yahoo Weather. (Google finally added a simple weather forecast of the next several days, but if you want any additional info, you had to do a search, which would give you links to other weather web sites.. very user-unfriendly.) Want to check out conditions of ski lifts, and user’s opinions? Just check Yahoo Outdoor. I could go on, and on. Google says that their model is to provide links to information, and not the information themselves, but they flip-flop on this a lot. Like they started providing simple weather forecasts, but not in detail. And now they provide train route search as well. But they don’t provide much other information.

Of course, Yahoo has been in Japan much longer than Google and has been doing Japan focused R&D much longer and much more focused than Google. Only in the last year or two has Google started to do new original R&D specific to the Japan market, and not just porting projects from the U.S. This gives Yahoo a huge lead.

Many people also think that Yahoo does a better job of indexing Japanese web pages. I don’t know if this is true or not though, but it is a statement I heard from some people during my research.

Additionally, I think user lock-in is far more noticable in Japan. Once users are familiar with a certain service, it’s really hard to get them to switch, even if you have a superior search engine. Japanese customers are just familiar with Yahoo. As the TechCrunch article says, many of them associate Yahoo as the Internet. Romanized domain names are very difficult for most Japanese users to remember so they usually search for the top page of other sites by going first to Yahoo. My ex-girlfriend used to go to Yahoo to search for Mixi’s top page, rather than typing in mixi.co.jp into the browser’s URL bar. Yahoo search comes preinstalled on most domestic PCs sold in Japan; my informal survey last year pegged it at around 70% of PCs, Google with say 15%, and others (Goo, Biglobe, etc) with the remaining. Many Japanese users aren’t up to removing the pre-installed Yahoo search and Yahoo toolbar and replacing them with Google.

4) Yahoo Auctions vs EBay

This is an interesting subject to me as I like auctions. When I moved here in 2001 (my memory is a bit hazy here but correct me if I’m wrong) EBay had an extremely poor Japanese site that was basically the US web site with a few help pages in Japanese. Yahoo came along with a fully localized site, fully inferior in terms of functionality. They hooked it into the banking system and made their own payment system similar to PayPal. They charged outrageous rates - to participate in auctions in any way (bidding or selling) you had to pay a 315 yen/month surcharge. (Finally they changed it nowadays so that you only have to pay if you want to sell items, which I still think is robbery.) They offered absolutely inferior functionality. For instance, to this day they don’t offer a way to search completed auctions. (Note: A third party service aucfan.com finally stepped up which offers this.) So at the time, if you were watching an auction (even if you added it to your “watch list”), and it suddenly ended, you couldn’t even find it again unless you had bookmarked the original page, as there was no way to search for it anymore. Simply AWFUL. To this day I am amazed at the extreme poor design of Yahoo Auctions compared to EBay. Features are poor, design is poor, flow is poor, you have to do many clicks to do simple things, although it is slowly improving. And they are still charging me 315 yen a month. I hate them. But liquidity rules.

I heard that EBay hired the CEO of KFC (yes, a chicken restaurant chain!) to run EBay Japan which also didn’t help matters, but I don’t know if that is true or not.

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Outdoor Music Festival

Napping at 3AM Karaoke

After Fireworks Show

Napping in Shibuya

Apparently there is a Facebook group to post photos of people sleeping in crazy or uncomfortable looking positions in Japan… This is actually a really good idea. The group is called simply, “Nobody sleeps like the Japanese do.”

Here are a few pictures which I have taken recently, and another which was recently posted on JapanToday.

Why does this happen so frequently in Japan? I think there are several factors. First, the presence and importance of alcohol in Japanese society. Unlike in America, in Japan you can often buy a can of alcohol (beer or chu-hai) for the same price as a can of soda. There aren’t any crazy open container laws so you can happy drink your can of beer on the street or even on the train. Although the latter of which is considered by many to be bad manners, you can still see many tired salarymen doing it. Cheap all-you-can-drink plans can be tacked on to many dinners, and let’s not forget all-you-can-drink karaoke either. Alcohol serves an important role in Japanese society; it allows an escape from the rigid confines of fitting into the group. When drunk, nearly any act can be forgiven. Simply put, most people need alcohol to left off steam, relax, and say and do things which the rigid Japanese society does not allow them to do otherwise. I could go on about this subject in more detail, but I’ll leave it at that.

Second, the safety of Japan: you can generally pass out on the sidewalk without fear of someone stealing your wallet or attacking you. Third, the tendancy of Japanese to simply look the other way when they see something that does not fit in allows them to simply overlook people passed out around them.

Additionally, as we all know, Japan is a small island inhabited by 127 million people, and there just isn’t enough space to go around, so people are used to living and sleeping in cramped quarters. But I still can’t understand how these positions could be comfortable and so commonly seen.

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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.)

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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!

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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.

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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…

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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.

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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.

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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.

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