Wendy’s: Burger Wars Casualty The American chain Wendy’s has stopped flipping hamburgers at all its 71 branches in Japan as of the end of December 2009, 29 years after it opened its first outlet in Tokyo’s Ginza shopping district. The seventh largest hamburger chain in Japan had been operated by a franchisee, Zensho Co. Ltd., ...
Monthly Archives: February 2010
THE FUN FACTOR The Lupin Steal Japan Project, which caught the headlines this winter, was a cunning bit of near-subliminal marketing in which a bunch of companies including Nippon Television and Brutus magazine tried to liven up consumers’ recession-weary lives. Based on an anime character, Lupin, and the story of a gang of thieves who ...
Waseda University’s Prof. Kasahara is seeding the next revolution in eco-friendly computing
The ACCJ held its extended Board Planning session on January 15th to outline the leadership lineup, inform (or remind) Board members about their responsibilities and, most importantly, to discuss priorities and agree on our direction and activities for 2010. The 2010 Board has a mix of new and experienced people and represents a good cross-section ...
Very often, just the thought of moving house or shifting offices–domestically or internationally–is enough to freeze one in freight fright. But that’s no reason to stop you from getting a change of scenery or more mileage for your budget; after all, logistical nightmares can quite easily be dispelled by employing the right help. The following ...
German multimedia artist Rebecca Horn is currently being treated to her first large-scale, career-tracing exhibition in Japan, courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. Horn herself was present at the opening, cutting a formidable presence with long pumpkin-colored hair and sporting steel-toed leopard print shoes that can only be described as awesome. Speaking before ...
At 1,000 yen for 150 quickly-digested pages, Hiroyuki Ishii (石井裕之) and John W. Culver’s book on “black cold-reading”—“The Cold Babble: Confessions of a Pseudo-Psychic” or “Aru nise-uranaishi no kokuhaku” (あるニセ占い師の告白) —was an ironic presence on the shelves in 2009. Picture this: A book with the stated purpose of teaching its readers to recognize and resist ...
Joi Ito is at the matrix of a number of Internet initiatives, online social networks and major tech ventures, a position that makes him unique as one of the few truly cross-cultural, Japanese tech innovators able to effectively translate and synthesize the disparate shifts that drive the tech communities inside and outside of Japan. The ...
Most globetrotting American businesspeople are aware that the current chatter in many airport executive lounges throughout the world revolves around predicting the decline of America as the world’s richest nation and standard bearer for the future of business. Of course recent events involving convulsions in the U.S. financial system, massive bank failures and bailouts, and ...