As the first in its kind (for me at least), there will be a big three-day event in Fukuoka this weekend, which is called Myojo Waraku or just “MJ” in short, where a bunch of celebrities, geeks and techpreneurs from music, online video filming and start-up communities in the city come together.
For those who don’t know much about the city, it’s located in the south-western island of Japan and much closer to Shanghai and Seoul than Tokyo or the country’s capital. That’s why it’s often considered as a gateway to Asian countries for Japanese, not only for its geographical reason, but also for a high reflection from Asian flavor in the city’s local foods.
The city is a little bit away from Tokyo, however, it has a good enough population of techpreneurs and engineers because not a few large IT businesses have set up their headquarters there. So is it for the volume of its local tech start-up community, too.
The event is highly inspired by SXSW (South-by-South-West), a one-week-long festival that happens in March every year in Austin, TX and focuses on making great exposure opportunities for filmmakers, music artists and web media creators. MJ is led by Masanori Hashimoto, the co-founder of Fukuoka-based tech company NuLab, also known as the developer of collaboration-based drawing tool Cacoo, and Taizo Son[J], a serial entrepreneur, angel investor and a younger brother of Softbank Mobile’s CEO, and aims at encouraging local start-ups to go more international and make their services spread out all across Asia.
Visit these webpages for a brief introduction about the event in English, Korean, Chinese and Japanese. Also for more updates, visit the event’s main website at http://myojowaraku.net[J]. (sorry, the latter one is mainly written in Japanese).
Masaru IKEDA