• 12:20 Today is the last day for SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 Computer Animation Festival submissions... watching the counts, answering emails... #

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Great Optical Illusion (courtesy of GMSV)

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/06/24/the-blue-and-the-green/

Great Product Ideas on YouTube

If you've ever had to deal with British standard plugs, you will apprecitate this a lot!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6DvjKkGT6s

Awesome - Become a Socialist Hero

Have your face painted into a Chinese propaganda poster

Not sure what I think about commissioning all these Chinese art school grads to paint the posters. But the idea is awesome!

Many people wonder what it's like in the Japanese animation industry. While in the 3D part of the industry, where I work, things are slightly better, in general it's quite different from the impression westerners have of working conditions at Pixar or DreamWorks.

A recent Harvard Business School report focused on innovation in Japanese companies looks at three case studies: packaged software, mobile phones, and animation. Their comments about the animation industry are devastating, and accurate. Here are a few select pull quotes, but it's well worth downloading the original from their website to read for yourself.

The Japanese anime market was worth ¥234 billion (approximately $2.3 billiion) in 2005 in revenues.

That is to say, the entire anime market in 2005 was smaller than the revenues of Uniqlo, a single Japanese clothing retailer. Anime revenues have been slowly shrinking, so in 2009 the comparison wouldn't even be close.

Toei Animation, the largest animation production company in Japan, had revenue of only ¥21 billion ($175 million). Whereas Disney and Pixar spend in excess of ¥10 billion to produce one anime movie; Japanese anime production companies’ average budget is ¥0.2-0.3 billion (Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli is an exception: it invests ¥1-3 billion in one production). And while Japanese animes are omnipresent in global markets, Japanese anime production companies have virtually no international business presence.

Death of Newspapers, cont'd

More good (if somewhat rant-y) words on the newspaper industry's accelerating their own decline:

The Newspaper Suicide Pact

The Great Japan Beer Festival

I think Japanese beers taste just fine (especially with Japanese food), but they all taste virtually identical -- light lagers. Since I came to Japan, I've been on the lookout for more interesting beers comparable to American craft or microbrews.

It helped a lot when I found Ushi Tora in Shomikitazawa, which always has 17 microbrews on tap, many of them Japanese product. It turns out that although craft brewing started late in Japan, it has given rise to quite a number of local breweries. Those breweries came to show off their product at The Great Japan Beer Festival.

The festival format is that you pay a fixed fee to get in, receive a small memorial glass, and are then free to sample as much beer as you like. The event lasts four hours, so if you get there early your stomach (or alcohol tolerance) will probably run out before the time does.

The Tokyo version was held in the Ebisu Garden Hall (ironically next to the Tokyo headquarters of one of the big three generic breweries) and it was packed -- in fact, the single worst thing about the event was that getting around the hall was brutally difficult. There was a place to buy food from Dean & Deluca up front, but other than that area the lines waiting for sample crossed all the way across the room. I ran into some people from Otaru and some people from Ushi-tora there, and generally had a pleasant couple hours before wandering back down the hill to home (fortunately the event is held ten minutes' walk from my house!).

I had quite a few tiny glasses of beer, but the best beers I tasted today were:

• いわて蔵ビール / Iwate Zou Beer's IPA
  
• From Gotenba Kogen Beer (御殿場高原ビール), both the IPA and the Aijiwai Ale
  
• and the big winner,
  
• 箕面ビール / Minoh Beer's W-IPA: this was a "real ale", a phrase used in Japan for hand-pumped beers. It was delish!
  

Fantastic Photography Exhibit

From now through July 5, 2009 there's an exhibit called "Press Photographer's Story" at the Tokyo Museum of Photography in Ebisu. It's a great show featuring 5 photgraphers who were all associated with the Asahi Shimbun during their professional careers. Most of the photographers worked during the Speed Reflex era, when press cameras were giant boxlike objects that openly stated the profession of the holder, and that's spirit of the exhibition.

Kouyou Kageyama / 影山　光洋 is the first photographer featured. He worked starting in the militaristic era of the 1930s, but he photographed his family constantly -- he was clearly paving the way for Craig Gilbert and An American Family a few decades later. However, his story is especially poignant as his third son lived only five years, and he collected the photographs taken over this time into a photo album called "Life with Yo-chan", excerpts from which were some of the most powerful photographs in the show.

Gen Ootsuka / 大束　元 is a contemporary of Kouyou's and the second featured photographer. He was heavily influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson and would eventually organize the first shows of Bresson's work in Japan, as well as taking several famous shots in which Bresson appears. Despite the emphasis on the moment of the photo you would expect, his photographs are amazingly well-composed; balance, perspective and focus all coinciding with the perfect moment.

The postwar political photography of Senzou Yoshioka / 吉岡　専造, the 'photographs from high places' of Katsu Funayama / 船山　克, and the striking Vietnam War photography of Keiichi Akimoto 秋本　啓一 comprise the rest of the featured work. As a final section, the Asahi Shimbun archives yielded up a trove of photographs from the Japanese War in China in the 1930s, as well as the paper's coverage of the Vietnam War in the 1970s.

The exhibit is only 500 yen and takes an hour or two depending on your interest level. It's well worth it and recommended for all.

These are the Good Old Days

In discussions of movies, I frequently take the usually-unpopular point of view that the era since I've been in the business (roughly since 1995) have been a relatively good era for movie in general. I was reminded about this today because I noticed that in the current weekend's Top 10 Box Office there are 3 movies rated higher than 90% on Rotten Tomatoes:

• Up, 98%


• Star Trek, 95%


• Drag Me to Hell, at "only" 94%

I can't remember the last time that happened.

Usually, people respond with some variation of, "Oh, they made so many more great movies back in the 30s/40s/50s" (perhaps so, although I'd still dispute whether the number of great films per year was really higher: now we're operating from the benefit of picking things over) or more commonly, "But most films are such crap!" That is true, but in fact most films were always crap: Hollywood made a lot of movies back in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1937 Hollywood released 778 movies, a number that's never been equaled.

In particular, for animation I don't believe there has ever been a 20-year period to correspond to the time from 1989 to now. Not only does that include everything in the Disney revival (Little Mermaid, Aladdin, etc.) and the entire Pixar oeuvre, we get Henry Selick/Tim Burton, Wallace and Gromit, and occasional winners like Kung Fu Panda thrown in as well. Seriously, enjoy the bounty!

P.S. Very interesting statistics page on Wayne Schmidt's Box Office Page.

Flat Out the Coolest Flash Site I Have Ever Seen

http://soytuaire.labuat.com/

It doesn't just enable interactive play, it demands that you play with it. Anyone with an interest in music+interactivity should go experience it now (you may have seen it, looks like its been around since November).

As much as I love the site above, the site of the company that made it, HerraizSoto & Co., shows exactly why I hate Flash. Non-standard UI for no reason, inscrutable navigation, overly clever. But maybe if they keep producing things like the above once in a while...

Design Festa Link Roll

Here's a few links/images for artists I saw at Design Festa today. I'll say that at least all these folks had something interesting enough to make me stop and chat a minute!

Unfortunately, the absolute coolest thing I saw at Design Festa I couldn't get a meishi from (there was no one at the booth and I didn't want to take their one and only remaining meishi). It was a piece with two aquariums that had various pumps in them creating currents in the water. Then, they put these "sea creatures" (I think they were made of strips of rubber folded and attached to themselves to look like fantastical jellyfish) in the aquarium, and as they got pushed around by the water it completely looked like they were living creatures.

From DesignFesta2008

From DesignFesta2008

From DesignFesta2008

From DesignFesta2008

O ½

Debo Factory

闇月創房 / Yamitsuki Soubou (cool handcrafted metal jewelry)

From DesignFesta2008

Hell's Kitchen (I really appreciated this woman because gave me a cool little fan which amused numerous other exhibitors throughout the day. Unfortunately, the website doesn't seem to be working)

Moscow Kogei handmade Very cool highly articulated little wooden animals. The limbs are mostly attached with elastic bands so you can pose them up!

From DesignFesta2008

村上　萌 / Moe Murakami (very ironic that her name is Moe)alternate site

川室　鷹嶺 / Kawamuro Takane

Yorke

Microu

ミつの森のサーカス / Mitsu no Mori no Saakasu (lit. Three Forests Circus) event at Shimokitazawa's Space Sprout 17-22Sep

The ever-trusty B-Side Label from Osaka, my main source of stickers. Their stickers come with a two-year guarantee (to do what, stick?).

ミカジキ / Mikajiki Girlspunk Illustrator

Tosakamania

Dynabite

illustrator INAZUMA

Tyabo "One person with a belief is equal to a force of 99 who have only interests"

Roomscape Order-made furniture

Mitchy Castle

yuuki kikuchi (jojo)

O Project / Ruins Anthem Like the Land's End magazine I found last year, this is a project that goes around taking pictures of ruined and abandoned place in Japan. Totally fascinating, I got their special issue on 軍艦島 / Gunkannjima

がんばれコーポレーション (lit. Going All Out, Inc.) These guys were actually giving away DVDs of their latest video project, which even given the non-profit nature of most things at Design Festa was pretty impressive.

OXOXO "The inifinite creativity in oxoxo toybox"

VIRUS presents Gray Zone A group of seven friends who produce experiential art, alternate link

坂本　道夫 / Michio Sakamoto Totally, totally cool insects made by cutting and folding a single sheet of paper with no tape/tabs/etc

From DesignFesta2008

From DesignFesta2008

mofuwa She cut every one of her business cards out by hand (they have a series of scallops in one corner)!

Coffe Brown Design Stars The only way to explain it is that, it's coffee art.

marco

Cavity vol. 03 Event in Aoyama 21Jun with various live art etc.

Interest Rates, Koushin, and Japanese Place Names

While the bursting of the real estate bubble is helping Americans rethink attitudes to real estate, I've wanted to write for awhile about the weird approach to real estate in Japan, how it's enabled by interest rates, and how it influences place names here (honest).

The image of many famous cities is associated with their traditional housing stock. Whether the sturdy brick buildings of Dublin, the mansard roofs of Paris, or the Victorians of San Francisco, traditional housing has a big influence on the ambience of a city.

Except here in Tokyo. When you first come to Tokyo you're impressed with the skyscrapers, subways, and the occasional truly idiosyncratic building, but if you actually go out looking for apartments here, like I did two years ago, you'll find the strangest thing: there is no such thing as housing more than about 25 years old. This is really not an exaggeration: my building was built in 1988 and is thus considered "old".

This isn't limited to housing: hotels, office buildings, factories, and so on are all torn down and rebuilt about every 20-25 years. The word they use for this is koushin 更新, which means 'renewal'. Interestingly, that same word is also used for updating software or for replacing the display in a department store.

Of course, I find this kind of sad: I like classic old housing, that's why I own a San Francisco Victorian. But after looking around awhile, I realized that sort of thing just isn't an option in Tokyo: either you get recent high-rise precast-concrete construction, or recent poorly insulated, noisy low-rise wooden construction. As much as I had visions of a wonderful Japanese-style apartment, I opted for the high-rise.

But apart from my emotional reaction, it seemed frighteningly inefficient to me: why in the world would you tear down a perfectly good 25-year-old building, and replace it with essentially the same thing? Right now the former Motorola office building down the street from our office is in the midst of being koushin-ed. They tore down the old 7-story office building, cleared the site, and are now building a new 7-story office building. This is quite normal for koushin: whereas in America we might think of tearing something down and building a bigger, taller building on the site, it's quite normal in Japan to tear down a building and build a new building of about the same size. It's just newer.

The builders will say this is because Japanese prefer new construction. Of course, most people in most countries prefer new construction: the question to me was, why is it pervasive here? The key answer lay in interest rates, combined with demographics.

Japan, as everyone has heard, is a very savings-intensive nation. Because of that, interest rates here have been lower than America for many decades, but it became even more true after the bursting of the Japanese bubble economy in around 1990. Since then, the BOJ interest rates (the equivalent of Federal Reserve rates) have been around 0%. Even at the retail level, a normal home mortgage goes for 2-2.5%. In other words, if you can manage to qualify for a mortgage loan here, you won't pay much on it.

Secondly, the population of Japan is actually shrinking. Although the Japanese are very long-lived, the birthrate here is very low (second-lowest after Italy). The birthrate has finally caught up to the longevity, and each year there are fewer Japanese than the year before. Combine this with the fact that Japan does not permit large-scale permanent immigration, and you realize that the aggregate demand for real estate is also falling. This weak demand is most pronounced in rural areas, where real estate is becoming almost valueless, but it's true everywhere.

As you would expect given declining demand for something, that means long-term prices are weakening. Even in Greater Tokyo, the long-term expectation for the growth in value of a piece of real estate is zero. That is, if you've done well, 20 years from now your house or apartment will be worth the same as what you paid for it. If you're unlucky, it'll go down -- my boss lost 30% of his equity on the first apartment he ever owned.

What does this combination of low interest rates and long-term declining real estate prices mean? Well, first of all, it means you have no incentive to view real estate as in investment. You buy real estate to lower your rent (if an individual) or for the sake of the rental cash flow (if an investor). Either way, you look at real estate purely from a cash-flow point of view.

Secondly, Tokyo is famous for real estate being expensive. But mostly what's expensive here is land. The underlying land parcel for a building is expensive, but the building on it isn't considered to be worth much. Why? Well, it's a depreciating asset since everyone wants new construction.

So here's how that all connects to the koushin phenomenon. Let's say you're the owner of a 25-year-old apartment building. It's considered kind of drab, so you're not getting the highest rents in the neighborhood. Let's say the land is assessed at about $10M US, and the building at U$5M. If you've done a good job of marketing, our building is covered its expenses, meaning your getting about U$1M per year in total rent. Here's what the breakdown looks like for koushin vs. not koushin:

Don't rebuild: Your rents continue to slowly decline. You have no new capital expenditure to put in, though.

Rebuild: You have to borrow U$5M to build a new building, but at 2%, that only costs you U$100,000 per year. However, because your building will then be brand new, you can charge among the highest rents in the neighborhood.

So in other words, if spending U$5M to renew the building means you can increase your rents by 10%, it's a good economic deal for you. Given the prediliction of Japanese for new construction, I think 10% is way conservative: new construction easily commands a 20-30% premium here, I think.

But isn't there a third alternative? In America, the owner often choose to remodel: give the building a new lobby, replace all the elevators, repaint the walls. Why isn't that a good option? Well, let's say we could remodel for $1M. That would only then increase interest costs by U$20,000 per year, meaning you only need to justify a 2% rent increase. That's also economically compelling, but the question is, why do that when you could just rebuild? They're both a lot of trouble, and the rebuilding option can get you much higher rents.

For single-family houses, the only thing different from the above analysis is the timing. Most people don't tear down and rebuild their house while they're living in it. However, when the original family moves out, the same tradeoffs apply: a builder can buy the old house, raze it, build a new one, and get a higher price than simply reselling the existing house. Because most of the cost of buying a piece of property is tied up in the value of the land, not the structure, so rebuilding the house just isn't that big a deal economically.

So the unholy combination of declining real estate prices, low interest rates, and a market that prefers new construction (combined with the utter lack of historical preservation or zoning laws -- neither of which exist here) results in the total teardown and rebuilding of everything on the surface of Tokyo every 20-30 years. It's really shocking given how admirably efficient the rest of the society generally is.

And finally, how does this relate to Japanese place names? I noticed when I got here that a huge preponderance of the place names are temples and shrines (and a second major category are the names of elementary, junior high, and high schools). Eventually I realized why: those are the only buildings that aren't torn down regularly. Thus, it makes perfect sense to name a bridge, subway station, or intersection after a shrine, template or occasionally a school: those are the only things you can be sure will still be here in 30 years.

"Bad Videogame Movies" considered redundant phrase

We had been talking this week at work about the difficulty of making good movies from videogames. Apropos to that, Time magazine has a feature on the Ten Worst Videogame Movies, which as they observe, "is like shooting fish in a barrel with a plasma canon."

My observation is that there is actually a specific reason videogame movies are hard to do, which has to do with a fundamental limitation of game characters. In linear narrative, any screenwriting book or teacher will tell you to demonstrate the personality of the characters to the audience by the choices they make. A well-written screenplay continually forces the character to make choices, and from those choices we learn more about who they are. At the beginning of the movie, those choices are small: what do they do after work? Does he remember to buy flowers for his girlfriend? In a well-written screenplay, the choices both become harder to make and larger in consequence as the movie goes on. But the point is, the character is defined by the choices they made.

In a videogame, particularly for the main character, the choices that occur during the game are typically made by the player. Thus, nothing about the character can be defined by those choices. Typically in a videogame, the key choices that have made the character who they are, were all made prior to the beginning of the game. For a game to be fun, the choices made during the game need to be up to the player, meaning they can't define the character since every player plays differently; or, there have to be no meaningful character-defining choices made at all, and the player simply focuses on skills. The second one is actually more common, as it's much easier to develop. Either way, the actions taken by the character in the game cannot define who that character is, as far as the overall property is concerned.

Thus, almost all videogame characters fail the "of course he would" test. With a well-drawn movie character, you should know (by the end of the movie) how they would respond to a whole range of moral dilemnas, whether you saw them face that particular situation or not. Would Luke Skywalker lie on his resume to keep his job, at the expense of a co-worker? Of course not. Would Han Solo? If the money was good!

But can you project that on to most videogame characters? Almost all videogame characters are known to us from the following: their boss/organization/syndicate gives them a job to do. It's hard and there are complications. If we play the game long enough, we finish it. We don't get a chance to learn much about their moral dilemnas because either we're busy shooting aliens or because we rather than they make the choices. Would Lara Croft flirt with a friend's boyfriend? Well, how we would know, it doesn't come up much when killing bears with a pair of pistols.

Anyway, none of this proves that it's impossible to make a good movie from a videogame, it's just that even very well-known videogame characters don't give screenwriters much to go on if they want to craft a story. Personally, my guess is that the good videogame-based scripts (surely there will be some someday) will start by taking the world of the videogame and finding a side story in it; the main characters, the Marios, Laras, and Sonics of the world, are of necessity too shallow to work well.

...but they do have taste

The Economist's obituary this week was for Helen Levitt, a great photographer in the Henri Cartier-Bresson mold. I was lucky enough to encounter some of her photographs when I was in grad school in Boston, but most people have never heard of her. Featuring her or others worthy but not especially known shows the good side of erudition.

The Economist quote #1

From the April 4th issue's leader on "The Rich Under Attack". This is probably more delicious if you know just how pro-business the Economist usually is.

Yet, even a newspaper as inherently pro-business as this one has to admit that there was something rotten in finance: the basic capitalist bargain, under which genuine risktakers are allowed to garner huge rewards, seems a poor one if taxpayers are landed with a huge bill for it all. Hence the anger.