photo by Netafull

Popular blog Netafull reported [J] that Risa Nakanishi (@BuzzTum), who has been serving for Yahoo! Japan for 12 years, sometimes called “PR Diva”, (as Yahoo! Japan has been the champion last decade) one of the center figure of Japanese web industry, left Yahoo! and joined Digital Garage(DG), the most known by its founder Joi Itoh.

On the interview, she told her jobs in Yahoo! Japan, including promotion of early days Yahoo! Auction (which killed eBay Japan), Yahoo! Search, and bloggers relation.

At DG, Risa told that she keep working as PR with projects like DG-assisting imported foreign services like Twitter and LinkedIn, global start-up incubation program Open Network Lab, etc.

As Risa said to Netafull, Digital Garage is a company who has been well known to industry people with long history, but not really popular to Japanese consumers when comparing to Yahoo! Japan. Her join may make the company’s image spread for more people who have not known them.

She also mentioned a little bit on the water server removal issue when she asked why she changed job.

She seems enjoying the buzz caused by this announcement. Here is the list of hundreds messages sent to her [J].

Yahoo! Japan PR Diva Moves To Digital Garage

Haruchan (Haru=Spring, chan=casual form of san, honorific title) is a popular personified Spring character on public broadcast TV NHK’s prime time weather news program. She was made by anthropomorphizing high pressure system in Spring weather. Here is a sample of the weather report program,

On April 4, this virtual character girl began Twitter [J] @nhk_haruchan, and got over 20,000 followers within 24 hours.

Her first tweet was “Long time no see!”. Then she announced that her web page [J] has been reneded.

NHK featured Haruchan on their other advertising program [J],

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

As Haruchan only shows up around Spring, there are of course many other characters on the NHK news. For Autumn, there are Akichan(Aki=autumn),

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTmoGEls684

There are also Natsushogun(“Shogun Summer/Heat”) and Fuyushogun(“Shogun Winter”).

NHK’s another popular Twitter account @NHK_PR by NHK Public Relation section, who has 329,000 followers and is beloved by net users by its exceptionally casual and informal styled tweets, said by seeing Haruchan’s pampered, “I should have beaten her… Haruchan”.

See Also:

Japanese Web Community As Person

Kawaii Security – Over 30 Computer Virus Personified In Japanese Security Book

NHK’s Weather Character Haruchan(@nhk_haruchan) Starts Tweeting

The following interview was held by Tokyo-based Natsuki Yamada who works as an editor and writer for printed and online magazines (for example, Natsuki writes for 10. Magazine). The photos were taken by Tokyo-based photographer and accessory artist Ikumi Mochida (who also does photo work for 10.Magazine).

Should young Japanese businessmen open up more to worldwide markets? The former founder of Japanese advertising startup Oceanize, Hideaki Ota, thinks so.

At the age of 20, Ota has started a college-based advertising service called Tadacopy (background), out of which he eventually established Oceanize. It’s been 5 years since the establishment and the business has successfully spread worldwide, namely to China and the US.

So it was rather shocking when Ota announced this January that he was leaving his own company for a round-the-world voyage, for his next own project, which he called “Samurai Backpacker Project” (Samurai B. P.). His travel officially began last Wednesday (September 15th), and a week before his take off, I got to meet him for an interview. I was simply very curious: Why now? Why round-the-world trip?

“I had always felt the need for me to go out there and learn about business outside Japan and become international myself. I also knew that I have to brush up my English skills. And I think by running the Tadacopy service for 5 years I’m in a good place now to go and actually learn the about how to make business in the world,” says Ota.

― So the project is for you to be a globally competitive, in other words, a “samurai” businessman? That’s why you named it Samurai B. P.?

Yes, that too. But mainly it’s for inspiring those young business men in Japan who aren’t ready yet to open their eyes to the world. I think that what they need is to see lots of role models – and to acknowledge that there actually are samurai businessmen in the world. So I’m going to travel around the world and interview Samurais in each country and introduce them on my blog, possibly in other media too, that have already offered me to do so.

― That is brilliant! Do you already have many people awaiting for you to interview them?
In the States, yes I do. But I still have to look for interviewees in South & Central America, so I’m always open to any leads on Samurais.

― When you say you want to influence young people, exactly what ages do you have in mind?
They can be as young as college students, but I also try to reach young professionals with to 3-4 years work experience.

― So you target a particular age bracket. Why do you think that people in this age bracket aren’t interested in going out there to the world? I mean, we’re already living in the era of internationalization.

First of all, I don’t believe they are not interested in what’s going on outside of Japan. I just think that they never get a real chance to pay attention to the world. You know, if you play sports, maybe you look up to Ichiro for baseball or Nakata for football, right? But if you are just a businessman working in Japan, then we don’t really know any samurais like that in the world. So, that’s why I’m going to find and actually meet those samurais in the world – possibly from all kinds of jobs – and introduce them to Japan!

― What’s your own goal in this project?

My own goal would be, for one, to brush up my English to reach business level. Secondly, when I get back to Japan, I will start a new service / business, and this time it will be international from the start.

Addendum:
Ota has just began his trip on September 15th , and he is now in the US (West Coast). If you have any info about Japanese businessmen overseas that can be interviewed, please post them on the official website of the Samurai Backpacker Project. (The website will get an English version soon).

Guest author: Natsuki Yamada
Pictures: Ikumi Mochida

Founder Of Japanese Startup Tadacopy Goes Off To The World For His Samurai Backpacker Project

Tokyo-based smartphone app developer Pankaku[J] announced Mr. Takeshi Natsuno became the company’s adviser today. He started his career in this industry as the vice president for Japan’s first ad-based free ISP HyperNet, then joined NTT DoCoMo and invented the country’s first cellphone web-browsing platform i-mode. He is currently serving managing director for cellphone ringtone distributor Dwango[J] and the professor of Keio University.

Pankaku allocated new shares to their employees, Mr. Natsuno, Japan’s largest telco’s financial arm NTT Finance and system integrator Image Information Inc.[J] Pankaku has not disclosed how much shares have been newly issued. They are devoting themselves to launching a social app platform for smartphones called Pankia[J] and working on establishing more business partnerships with mobile app developers and game developers in Asian countries.

See Also:

• Pankaku Increases Capital By Allocating New Shares To Cyber Agent

Pankaku Welcomes i-mode’s Father As New Adviser

Japan’s social networks seem to be hitting a ceiling growth-wise, and apparently they increasingly feel the need to go abroad in order to grow.

“Japan’s Facebook” Mixi, which now counts 20 million members, is operating “Mixiu” in China. DeNA, the company behind mobile gaming platform Mobage-town (19.4 million members), has always been more aggressive in terms of internationalization. It operates MobaMingle, a mobile social network that can only be accessed from outside Japan; it launched MiniNation, a social gaming platform for the iPhone last month; it invested in Aurora Feint, a US-based social gaming platform, in 2009; and it also acquired IceBreaker, a US- and China-based maker of “mobile social networking software”, last year.

So far, only one of the big three of Japan’s social networking world has chosen to stay home: mobile gaming startup GREE. But Yoshikazu Tanaka, GREE’s CEO and the world’s second youngest self-made billionaire (following Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg) at 32, today announced some big news via Twitter.

To make it simple, let me just translate his tweet:

“GREE moved to the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange today! But there’s more. First, internationalization. Within the next 12 months, we will open offices in the US and China. Second, we will bring GREE to more devices. Every employee will get an iPad. We will also support iPhone and Android. GREE will start to mass-recruit new employees in order to handle internationalization and smartphone development.”

I heard Naoki Aoyagi, GREE’s CFO, talking about expansion plans into China during a discussion panel at the Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC) last month in Beijing, but the plans for the US come as a bit of a surprise (although DeNA already runs a subsidiary in California called DeNA Global).

Japanese mobile gaming startup GREE to open US and China offices within a year

Sadakazu Tanigaki (official site) [J], the president of Liberal Democratic Party(LDP), which is a political party who had dominated Japanese politics for half an century since the mid-1950s and got debacle at last national election against Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), started Twitter (@Tanigaki_S), with taking back his former remarks that he would never use Twitter in January. [J]

So far, he tweeted 12 messages in four days, most of which are long, close to 140 limit, with no replies(@). He quickly got about 30,000 followers but only follows 44, most of them are LDP represents.

But one tweet [J] is to thank to suggestions to follow his opponent DPJ’s head prime minister Yukio Hatoyama (@hatoyamayukio, and he followed Hatoyama’s account. @hatoyamayukio has about 540,000 followers, which is ranked 2nd in Japanese only behind everyone’s hero @Gachapin.

As we reported on the beginning of this year, LDP’s head, Japan’s prime minister has been tweeting for 4 months now. We may see tweet-to-tweet debates between two big party leaders soon.

The President Of Japan Liberal Democratic Party(LDP) Begins Twitter

Shoko Nakagawa (aka Shokotan), one of the most successful Japanese celebrity bloggers, finally started Twitter (@shokonakagawa) on February 24th with a tweet “I begin to chirp…” [J].

This could have been a milestone for Japanese Twitter to show the centre of the celebrity blogging moving from regular blog to microblog. However, after posting 15 tweets sparsely in 2 months, she posted that she “gave up doing both blog and Twitter” [J].

Her blogging style, which make her very unique among celebrities her early days to become popular, is to post a lot of one line entries and/or photos taken by her cellphone, sometimes makes 50 posts per day. You may see those numbers on the left sidebar’s monthly archives. Her style made a lot of followers of Japanese celebrity bloggers.

In the end, what she did on blog platforms (she has been switched her blog hosting twice) is “microblogging on blog”, and if so, she could not find any advantage on Twitter, which does not have built-in photo upload/show features and the Japanese cellphone version of which has room to be improved.

CyberAgent‘s Ameba blog, which holds over thousand celebrity bloggers including Shokotan, has been running its own Twitter clone Ameba Now, to hope to keep their bloggers within the Ameba sites. And this incident may be a hint that they can lean on and extend their clone, as Twitter will not be able to enhance its functionalities only for Japanese celebrity market.

Japanese Blog Queen Tasted Twitter And Gave Up

An interview to the president of Yahoo! Japan Masahiro Inoue (photo) by Nikkei Business Magazine with a catchy title “Google? I think none of their services are cool.” is getting huge attentions in Japanese web.

To answer the interviewer’s comment “By comparing Google’s services such like Street View and Book Search, Yahoo! seems not to generate surprising services”, Inoue said “Google’s those services are nothing impressive for me. There are tons of things you would do if there are no laws and rules. If you abide laws, your options are restricted. You should not do what you are not supposed to do.”

He continued, “Those Google’s services surprised people are all in gray zone. Advertising on search result was copied from Yahoo!, Street View is kind of peeping, Book Search is violation of copyright law, lots of YouTube traffic are illegally uploaded. You may say that those are cool. But can established company behave like that? In Yahoo! those projects should be stopped by legal section.”

Overall, reactions to the article from Japanese blogs, tweets and social bookmarks are negative to the president. Net-savvy people have been loving No.2 search engine Google and its enterprising spirit. Many comments tell that they have never used Yahoo! in several years.

However, majority of Japanese net users never express their opinions on those social media, or never knew what social media is, and visit huge Yahoo! portal every day, click ads and buy things online. National clients also prefer Yahoo! for their ads maybe because Yahoo! Japan is such a conservative company.

Yahoo! Japan goes oversea?

The interviewer Kei Ogasawara also asked if Yahoo! Japan expands to oversea markets.

Inoue answered that Yahoo! brand is licensed for their activities within Japan, and Japanese web market is promising enough to get more.

Interestingly, he revealed that they were suggested to go abroad by US Yahoo! before, which Yahoo! Japan disagreed with and was not realized.

He also talks on their original developed “Interest Match” ads system, and a plan to license it back to US Yahoo! in future.

“Google Is Nothing Special” Yahoo! Japan President Brags Their Supremacy

Today, J-Magic[J] CEO Takuya Miyata[J] (@takmiyata[J]) unveiled that he had joined Japan’s largest social network service company Mixi[J] as an employee working with the Mixi business department.

As reported here on Asiajin, J-Magic handed over their breed-winning business of the face recognition mobile app to Mobile Factory last month, and they have been said to shut down all business very soon.   CNET Japan asked them how they would be running themselves[J], but no comment was given on that.

Here’s an English translation of what he has posted on his blog:

Besides having announced in our press release that we handed over our mobile app business to our partners, we decided to cut down or close the other all business.   We all thank our shareholders, our partners, our clients and all whom may be involved for their support.

And please excuse me my impoliteness that I tell you suddenly that, I joined Mixi.   Needless to say, Mixi is no longer just a social network service operator, but now leading this country’s entire Internet economy.   By making the most of my experience that I’ve been working in Japan and abroad, I will do my best for the company’s further success.   I appreciate your support.

J-Magic CEO Now Joins Mixi

Winny is a popular P2P file sharing software in Japan. Kaneko developed Winny and released it on notorious 2channel forum on May 6th, 2002.

In 2004, the developer was arrested for abetting copyright infringement. Prosecutor’s office said that Kaneko has created Winny to proliferate copyright infringement to overthrow copyright system in Japan.

However, Osaka High Court concluded that the accused didn’t have a clear intent to proliferate copyright violation. Also the judge decided that he can’t condemn Kaneko for just knowing that copyright piracy is rampant in Winny network.

Disclosure: Shunichi Arai is a vocal supporter of Isamu Kaneko.

News: Winny developer found not guilty