Category: Technology

Japan is the country with the biggest comics market in the world; people read manga in trains, in coffee breaks at work, laying down on the grass in parks… The obsession is such that in the 60’s some cafeterias saw a business opportunity and started to offer a catalog of different manga volumes for which clients had to pay per reading hours.

The business of this kind of cafeterias called Manga Kissa hasn’t stop growing until the Internet arrived, when they had to change and offer more services apart from reading manga. Since around ten years ago Manga Kissa also offer computers connected to the Internet. Nowadays most of them have private booths where the client can surf the net, read, watch movies or play video games with certain privacy.

One time I visited a Manga Kissa with my friend Yamamoto who usually frequents this kind of places. “It’s much cheaper to spend two hours in a Manga Kissa and read 10 manga volumes than buying them” he tells me as we are entering in one of the biggest Manga Kissa in Tokyo, which occupies more than four floors of a building. At the entrance we are asked how many hours we want to stay and we receive the keys to our respective personal booths. Then we walk through several hallways with bookshelves loaded with thousands of manga volumes, DVD movies and video games. Yamamoto chooses five volumes of a classic manga from the 70’s; I feel overloaded with such an amount of information, with so much entertainment to choose from, and walk to my booth without anything to read.

I go inside my booth, it only has enough space to accommodate a seat and a computer in front of it. The seat is a quite comfortable reclining seat in which it would be easy to fall asleep. The computer has some preinstalled video games, not much different from the ones I would find in Europe. But just beside the computer there is also a PlayStation 3, a Wii and a Cable TV set-top box. After five minutes I feel again lost among so many entertainment options and I decide to go out of the booth to check what other options are available. Billiards, ping-pong, massage service, a room to play board games, etc. Eventually Yamamoto and I end up playing ping-pong. When we go out they charge us 800 yen, around €6.5/$9, for two hours. While going out I also realize that there is a locker room with showers!

Since the Japanese bubble burst at the beginning of the 90’s, more and more Japanese people can’t afford to pay rent in the big cities. Many people that lost their jobs ended up homeless living on the streets but others decided that a cheap way to have a place to sleep was to spend the nights in a Manga Kissa booth. Manga Kissa owners quickly realized the new trend and introduced cheaper rates like for example “8 hours for €10/$14”. The trend became even more marked when some of the most important Manga Kissa chains in the country installed shower services. With the current economic woes, more and more people are becoming homeless and spending their nights in a Manga Kissa; they are temporary workers that earn a low wage and can only afford to spend around 300 euros / 400 dollars per month for accommodation. They are cybernomads, the product of the long Japanese economic crisis, that after almost 20 years still hasn’t gotten any better.

Article originally published in the Spanish newspaper El País.

Other articles published in El País:

• Is still Japan the king of video games?
• The Galapagos Syndrome
• Casio reinventing itself with every change
• Sony “secret” labs
• Vehicle to Vehicle Communication (V2V)

When I arrived to Japan in 2004 one of the first things that caught my attention were the cellphones. In Europe I was using a 2G Nokia and suddenly I had in my hands a 3G Casio cellphone.

My brand new Japanese 3G Casio cost me three euros, much cheaper than the 2G Nokia I had just left in Spain, it had a much bigger screen, I could use the Internet without worrying about being charged exorbitant rates, GPS navigation, 3 megapixel camera etc. It looked like a cellphone brought from the future, with functions and characteristics that were going to be seen in Europe in the coming years.

It shocked me that my new Japanese mobile phone couldn’t send or receive SMS, it turns out that all Japanese cellphones use e-mail by default as the way to interchange messages since 1997, something that wasn’t available in Europe until the arrival of the Blackberry and similar devices many years later. It was also confusing that it was produced by Casio; a Casio cellphone? Up until then I had only seen calculators and watches made by Casio; why wasn’t Casio selling cellphones in the rest of the world?

In 1999 i-mode was born in Japan, the technology that allowed the land of the rising sun to leap five years ahead of the rest of the world. i-mode allowed users to access the Internet in mobile devices. The price for using those services was so cheap that it soon became something used by almost everybody, reaching a usage of almost 60% of Japan’s population.

Vodafone tried to enter the Japanese market but failed in the attempt. Nokia also tried and failed as well, their cellphones were too “old” for Japanese standards. Ericsson also tried but eventually Sony “rescued” them. Motorola also tried with worldwide popular cellphones like the Razor but also didn’t succeed. Japan is a strange place with a very peculiar mobile ecosystem, all the industries related to mobile communications have evolved during the years with almost no foreign influence, developing their own telecommunication networks, their own communication standards and their own mobile terminals. Japan’s mobile phone market is something like the Galapagos Islands, isolated from the rest of the world.

Outside of Japan people usually ask me: If Japanese mobile devices are so ahead of their time, why they don’t go out to conquer the world? That is a very difficult question to answer, in fact it’s so difficult to figure out that the Japanese government and the biggest companies in the industry have formed a special committee with the only aim to solve what they have called the Galápagos syndrome.

The two main causes of Japan’s Galápagos syndrome are the extreme control that the phone companies exert over local phone terminal manufacturers and that cellphones are designed from the beginning to be used exclusively in Japan, with Japanese keypads and functions that are only useful in Japan, they are not designed to be used in the rest of the world like for example Nokia cellphones or the iPhone.

NTT Docomo tried to introduce the i-mode to the European market but it wasn’t something as revolutionary as it had been in Japan and we can now say that it was mainly a failure, did it arrive too late? E-mail on the cellphone, push e-mail, also arrived to Europe quite late, but it was not introduced by Japanese companies. American and Finnish companies were the ones that succeeded in incorporating the Internet into cellphones.

The Walkman, the PlayStation and the Wii knew how to go out of the ecosystem where they were born and spread throughout the planet; Japanese cellphones sat comfortably in their local ecosystem and evolved oblivious to external influences for many years. They always knew how to mitigate the entry of non-native new “species”; but lately something is changing with the arrival of the HTC3 and the iPhone; being able to adapt to any environment they have suddenly burst into the Japanese Galápago ecosystem. It seems like something is finally changing, let’s see how the Japanese industry and the Galápagos Syndrome committee react; will the Japanese “native species” go out and conquer the world? or they will stay in Japan trying to devour the “invading species”, like HTC cellphones or the iPhone, as they have been doing up until now?

Article originally published in the Spanish newspaper El País.

Other articles published in El País:

• Casio reinventing itself with every change
• Sony “secret” labs
• Vehicle to Vehicle Communication (V2V)

Tadao Casio founded Casio in 1946, soon after World War II ended. At the beginning the business of the company centered around machines that emitted plane tickets. During the early years they also had to repair some of the first mechanical calculators with electronic components that allied forces installed in the airports of Tokyo and Yokohama. With the first reaped benefits and the experience gained, Mr. Casio decided that he and his brothers could produce better calculators.

Entrance to the main headquarters of Casio in Shibuya.

After several years of hard work, in 1954, Casio launched to the market the first Japanese electromechanical calculator competing directly with the American company Burroughs. The interesting thing is that the new Casio calculator introduced the numeric keypad layout of 10 keys, something that now is evident but at that time was a great innovation. Three years after, Casio commercialized the first compact electronic calculator in history.

The first compact 100% electronic calculator in history.

Casio shop in Akihabara

Casio didn’t stop growing during the 60’s, improving its calculators making them smaller and cheaper. Casio lead the pocket calculator revolution and along the way they erased several computing giants like Monroe, Victor, Burroughs, Remington Rand, Olivetti and Facit. Sharp and Texas Instruments rose to be the biggest competitors in the calculator sector; then Casio decided to innovate and create new markets once again as they had done previously with calculators. In 1969 they created the first quartz watch with LCD screen, they called it Casiotron. During the following two decades Casio watches became the symbol of the technological power of Japan around the world. More than 1,500 clock and watch companies in Switzerland went bankrupt from 1970 until 1988.

During the 80’s and beginning of the 90’s, Casio went through hard times because they didn’t find their place in the Personal Computer revolution. However, in 1995 they brought another big innovation once again, they released to the market the first digital camera with TFT LCD screen that allowed users to view photos before transferring them to their computers. Although it might seem rare nowadays, the first digital cameras didn’t have screens to browse the photos taken! In fact, the technology behind all the TFT LCD screens of every digital camera in the world is patented by Casio.

At the beginning they had it quite easy, because the photography giants like Fujifilm, Canon or Nikon were resting on laurels. Casio was the first company to launch a 3 megapixel camera to the market and during many years they were on the front line of the digital photography industry, making its cameras smaller and thinner, making them accessible to everyone and breaking megapixel barriers.

A Casio cellphone from the beginning of last decade. Casio is one of the most important cellphone makers in Japan.

Casio is one of the companies in the world that contributed the most to the digital photography revolution of the last decade. At the beginning they didn’t have any experience creating cameras but after many years they are still one of the survivors in such a competitive industry.

During the last couple of years Canon, Olympus, Nikon and Pentax SLR camera prices have dropped spectacularly and now they are only a little bit more expensive than compact cameras. This movement of traditional camera companies has severely harmed companies producing compact digital cameras; having more megapixels is not important anymore. What users demand now is better optics that only SLR cameras can offer. One of the biggest victims has been Casio, that is once again in a delicate moment, the digital compact camera market is saturated and there is little margin for innovation; Casio will have to reinvent itself once again if they don’t want to disappear. What new surprises will Casio bring us in the coming years? Let’s hope they can adapt themselves to changing conditions so that we can wear G-Shock watches for a long time.

G-Shock building in Shibuya

Article originally published in the Spanish newspaper El País.

Other articles published in El País:

• Sony “secret” labs
• Vehicle to Vehicle Communication (V2V)