MoMo

* Off to Mobile Mondays (MoMo) this evening, a monthly meet for the mobile web industry in Tokyo. A couple of talks etc., but hope to get up on the podium myself, in a couple of months from now. Not sure whether to time it before or after the July release, but want to test the waters, meet a few people.
* Went to the previous Mobile Mondays last month or so and DoCoMo Europe were in Tokyo, but the talks given on the day were really run-of-the-mill service explanations that just bored me stiff. Stuff like "the reason why Japanese use their mobile phones more often is that they have long commutes into work from the suburbs and use their phones more". This kind of argument harks back to the days of Japan exoticism of the 1980s, when Caucasian powers esp. the US still found it difficult to imagine people the other side of the world were building up their manufacturing powerhouses, while they remained in the doldrums. It is actually just an extension of the pseudo-theory that as Japanese are the most avid consumers of printed material in the world, and as they have long commutes, they get most of their reading in on trains, hence trains are the environment where Japanese access their information. If this argument is correct, then it should be used for the British too (from my own experience in London) with their long commutes into work, yet this is never considered as a comparable argument, and makes the original Japan-specific argument fall apart.
* The reason why the Japanese use their phones all the time and ubiquitously is because they have a recent post-WWII affinity with technology that transcends functionality, and has its roots in the post-war mech-superstition embodied in Atom Boy and so many other Godzillas. This TV/manga-fuelled urban mech-mythology helped the Japanese society paper over its transition from racist homegrown military-industrial war complex with an emperor, to US-funded race-neutral consumer-manufacture complex with a secular prime minister. In the brave new post-Nagasaki Japan, technology helps protect against the excesses of technology and man. So technology never infuses Japanese communities with its functionality, more so with a belief in its simultaneous supply of wide-reaching "possibilities" and concrete technical solutions.
* Anyway, hope to get something new out of this gathering. Tonight, 7.30pm, Ebisu.