Usually Asiajin covers what people are doing and have achieved in Japanese and Asian tech communities, but today I'm writing something about what I and my friends will do for accelerating the communities here in Tokyo.

Takeshi Hirano[J] from TechCrunch Japan[J], Hiro Maeda from NetPrice.com and I will jointly organize a networking event titled "Startup Dating", which aims at giving opportunities to meet start-up entrepreneurs and tech people to them.

Start-up companies are required to have potential business ideas, money and skillful human resources to achieve what they have in their minds. Probably founders already have great ideas, private equities like venture capital firms and angel investors will help them financially. How about human resources? Employment advertising needs high expense in this industry, if you could find a guy, he or she would be not always a person with whom you can share your dream.

On the other hand, tech people are also making their efforts to find good business opportunities. If they meet a good business innovator with whom they can work with cooperativeness, they can enjoy working every day.

In the evening of June 22 at Digital Garage head office, we will have the preliminary edition of the networking event in association with Open Network Lab, the Japanese version of Y Combinator (See this Serkan Toto's TechCrunch article about Open Network Lab.)

If you're interested in attending as an entrepreneur or a developer, please visit the event's website and fill a form placed in the event announcement blog posts.

Tags: Community, Japan by Masaru IKEDA
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Bloomberg reported that Japanese Ministry of Finance posted a silly ad to solicit young Japanese guys to buy government bonds on popular free magazine R25, which is a true story.

To Japanese' credit, many people here were amazed by silliness of the ad project, and got angry against who spent tax for this. The magazine R25, run by Recruit Co., Ltd., distributed half an million copies around Greater Tokyo area fortnightly, is a casual magazine for train commuters in their 20's and 30's.

The bonds editorial ad was inconsiderate as a government ads, but the magazine is not a national quality magazine, and the article seemed to be made with a pun with the same sounds verb ("moteru") which means "able to posses (bonds)" or "be sexually popular".

This is a copy of the ad page (via Orange! [J]),

However, based on the Bloomberg's story, CNBC wrote another news - Using Sex To Sell Japanese Government Bonds, with a photo in which a guy bathing in cash bath tub with two girls.

They attach a pdf file of the ad page as an evidence, with translating some texts to English, but the naked people's photo part apparently does not fit the whole page tone.

When comparing with the original (top of this page), you see the diagram part (which explains how individual can invest government bonds) was used to paste the photo.

The modified page image (before translation by CNBC) firstly (as far as I could search) appeared on an anonymous image upload service and referred from a comment on notorious Japanese mega bulletin board 2 channel.

The cash bathing image may be from "winning strategy of Pachinko" internet marketing brochure. Searching returns even some parodies.

via @aquamarine

See also:

Another Japanese bonds ads with Kabuki actor [J], which copy is "Un, Kokusai"("Yes, government bonds") has hidden double meaning in the same sound "Unko, Kusai"("Crap smells bad"). Now you know in Japan, government sometimes mix punning and friendliness.

[Update] The "Un, Kokusai" ad was also photoshopped one. I did the same mistake...

Tags: Japan, USA by Akky Akimoto
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Uniqlo, Japan based apparel chainstore, who has been releasing your tweets visualization actively, just released another one with sports as its theme, Sportweet.

As usual, your Twitter account name is required. (Last time on Lucky Line, they demanded unnecessary Twitter password and was critisized)

Your tweets are visually designed with some athletes, such like a soccer player, a tennis player, a sprinter, etc.

Your twitter messages are analysed by its activity, popularity, power, spirit and speed and score will be given.

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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Hayabusa (peregrine falcon in Japanese) is an unmanned space mission to return a sample of material from the asteroid Itokawa. The spacecraft launched from Japan seven years ago, and succeeded to land on the asteroid. It is now returning to the earth and will be landing in Woomera Prohibited Area, Australia today.

The final landing process of the spacecraft's capsule carrying the sample will be brought to you on Ustream from the expected landing point by Institute for Education on Space, Wakayama University[J]. The Ustream live programming is available from 10:30pm to 11pm J.S.T., which is 1:30pm to 2pm U.T.C.

Meanwhile, Japan's aerospace arm JAXA succeeded to launch the venus climate orbiter Akatsuki (refer to this related article) and a solar sail called Ikaros last month, and the authority set up a Twitter account for each of these three aircrafts and keep tweeting as though if they had personal characters for engaging people's attention.

• Hayabusa's Twitter Account [J]
• Akatsuki's Twitter Account [J]
• Ikaros-kun's Twitter Account [J]

Tags: Community, Japan, News by Masaru IKEDA
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In case you didn't know: Japan is the only country in the world that has a listed recipe site, Cookpad. After going IPO at the “Mothers” section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange last July, its current market cap stands at a staggering $370 million.

Over the weekend, the eponymous company behind the site reported [PDF] some other noteworthy numbers:

• sales doubled to $24.8 million year-on-year
• operating profit grew 2.6x to $11.7 million
• net income grew 2.4x to $6.2 million
• monthly unique visitors: 8.96 million (up 46.4%)
• monthly page views: 424 million (up 39.6%)

Last summer, Cookpad said it expects $18.5 million in revenues and $3.6 million net profit for the fiscal year, but now we know the actual numbers turned out to be much better.

We first blogged about Cookpad back in 2008.

Tags: Japan, News by Serkan Toto
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