This morning we filmed our first NCCJ forum. I am the chairman of the communications committee of the NCCJ, the Dutch chamber of commerce, and our committee decided to start a panel discussion session which we will film and later publish on the internet. Today’s theme was Dutch design and the 100% Design festival that is currently taking place here in Tokyo.

We have devised a simple formula for the forum: Hans van der Tang and I will talk to 3 guests , a visitor, a long-term resident and a Japanese guest. Rob Oudendijk will film and do the post production work.

Today we had Truc from TTTVO as our visitor-guest. Truc is a Dutch designer who designs very original furniture and is here for the 100% Design festival. Our long-term resident guest was Arjan van Well, the Far East director of the Dutch board of Tourism. Arjan has been extremely active in promoting Dutch design in Japan, and organizing the Dutch part of the 100%. Ryo Nakagawa, a Japanese graphic designer who created the new logo for the NCCJ was our Japanese guest.

I very much enjoyed the discussion that we had this morning, and I am looking forward to see the edited result on which Rob Oudendijk will be working on. It will be posted on this site as well.

Kruk serie by TTTVO.

Yesterday in the Nikkei Weekly there was an article on Japan’s new prime minister Abe and his view towards the future of the growth of the Japanese economy. No doubt about it the economy is growing, however, the population is getting older. This creates a difficult situation for Japan. How to sustain growth when you will not have enough people to do the work?

The answer according to Abe is raising productivity. In the Nikkei article it is mentioned that on a scale of 30 Japan is number 19 in terms of productivity. Banking and construction seem to be doing the worst. Anyone trying to open a bank account in Japan would not dissagree.

Construction is hopelessly unproductive. This morning I was on a construction site since 7:30, at 9:00 the first contractors came. After a lengthy discussion they started in worked until 10:00 and went off for a break for about 30 minutes, and then after some work, it is off to lunch again, in the afternoon another couple of breaks and a whole day is spend on the site (and charged to the client).

Furthermore, the simplest task is being performed by double or triple the number of people actually needed. How many times have I not seen this scene: two “security boys” to direct traffic, two to three “suits” (quite often salesmen) that basically don’t do anything except for watching the work being done, and then a few more to do the actual work. A few “ladder-holders” might be needed as well. I am not kidding, last month at the station in Denenchofu where I live there were, well counted, 7 people busy “changing” the train table. A board of 1×1.5 meters could easily have been changed by one person.

I am not sure yet about Abe politics, but I think he has seen what I see far too often and I am sure that with productivity he is onto something.

(To be continued)

The Japanse town Kakegawa dedicates itself as a “slow city” promoting a slow life:

” Humans live about 700,800 hours (assuming an average life expectancy of 80 years), of which we spend about 70,000 hours working (assuming we work for 40 years). The remaining 630,000 hours are spent on other activities, such as eating, studying, and leisure, including 230,000 hours sleeping. Until now, people often focused their lives on these 70,000 hours of labor, devoting their lives to their companies. However, with the “slow life” principles, we would now like to pay more attention to the 630,000 hours outside of work to achieve true happiness and peace of mind.

The practice of the “Slow Life” involves the following eight themes:

SLOW PACE: We value the culture of walking, to be fit and to reduce traffic accidents.
SLOW WEAR: We respect and cherish our beautiful traditional costumes, including woven and dyed fabrics, Japanese kimonos and Japanese night robes (yukata).
SLOW FOOD: We enjoy Japanese food culture, such as Japanese dishes and tea ceremony, and safe local ingredients.
SLOW HOUSE: We respect houses built with wood, bamboo, and paper, lasting over one hundred or two hundred years, and are careful to make things durably, and ultimately, to conserve our environment.
SLOW INDUSTRY: We take care of our forests, through our agriculture and forestry, conduct sustainable farming with human labor, and ultimately spread urban farms and green tourism.
SLOW EDUCATION: We pay less attention to academic achievement, and create a society in which people can enjoy arts, hobbies, and sports throughout our lifetimes, and where all generations can communicate well with each other.
SLOW AGING: We aim to age with grace and be self-reliant throughout our lifetimes.
SLOW LIFE: Based on the philosophy of life stated above, we live our lives with nature and the seasons, saving our resources and energy. “

In Shibuya I saw this Oxygen bar. Given the air polution problems, I though that this was a neat idea. I could imagine adding some flavoured oxygen in meeting rooms to increase the fow of ideas in a brainstorming session. However, it seems that there is no scientific proof that increasing the level of oxygen acts as a Workvitamin:

“Oxygen fans tout the benefits of oxygen as reducing stress, increasing energy and alertness, lessening the effects of hangovers, headaches, and sinus problems, and generally relaxing the body. But there are no long-term, well-controlled scientific studies that support these claims for oxygen in healthy people. And people with healthy lungs don’t need additional oxygen, says Mary Purucker, M.D., Ph.D., a pulmonary specialist in CDER. “We’ve evolved for millions of years in an atmosphere of about 21 percent oxygen.”

The full story here.

600 yen for 10 minutes, plus 300 yen for the mask.

The menu

People are actually queing.

In Japan we are having one construction scandal after the other.
The revolving door that killed a 6 year old boy in Mori’s Roppongi Hills in 2004. Last year the Aneha scandal, the architect who faked structural data on more than a hundred buildings. An interesting Blog about the scandal here. I wrote an article in the ACCJ Journal about this. My argument was that the system was as much to blame as the architect in question. You can download it here.

On June 3rd Schindler Elevators, was in the news as a 16 year old boy got stuck and was killed. It makes you want to check before entering a lift:
“Schindler Elevator KK, the Japanese subsidiary of the Swiss-based global elevator and escalator maker, said Tuesday there were a total of 320 cases in which passengers were trapped inside its elevators across Japan in 2004. Schindler Elevator said it is in charge of maintenance work for about 6,000 elevators nationwide. This means one out of every 19 Schindler elevators experienced a problem involving trapped passengers that year.” Source: Criss cross Japan
More here and here and a very detailed report in Wikipedia here (scroll down).
Schindler’s home page his this press release.