• http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124882265902988289.html (the original article – behind a pay-wall)
• http://dealbreaker.com/2009/07/nomura-finding-lehman-employee.php
• http://www.japanprobe.com/?p=11762 (for comments)
• http://www.finextra.com/community/fullblog.aspx?id=3133

Being most familiar with this exact pair of cultures – American and Japanese – I find this clash fascinating. It’s sad and depressing no doubt, and I don’t have much hope for Nomura management to understand what is so wrong teaching 17th century office practices, but there’s a small part of me that’s thrilled this news is making headlines, in a sort of “I told you so” way.

My bet is that Nomura management will only react to the negative press by retreating and decreasing their diversity quotient.

Most Japanese corporate work environments do not value cultural diversity, and are afraid of what they don’t know. If you’ve ever been exposed to a Western work environment, you will not like working in a Japanese one.

Note, I am not saying one is better than the other. Simply that a Japanese work environment takes a very unique soulless personality to actually enjoy it.

This reminds me of a recent research-study anecdote I heard at a lecture last month.

A Chinese student who was working part-time in a Japanese fast-food kitchen was asked if they felt their experience was transferrable globally. The response was a firm “No.” Turns out, the Chinese student was proud of his dish-washing speed when one evening the Japanese kitchen boss came over and told him to slow down. The student was perplexed, and asked why.

“If you finish too early, you will have nothing to do and that will make me look bad.”

Asian regionalism: How does it compare to Europe’s?

(h/t to Gen)

They are Tsukaeru.net, they’re located out in Nagano, and they’re run by an Aussie – which means English support! They have a massive data-center all for themselves, and their prices are comparable to what you find in the U.S.

If you need Japan-local hosting for latency reasons, want price / service ratios you see in the U.S., and don’t mind English service and support to boot, you can’t do any better than these guys.

If you sign-up for a dedicated server now, you even get an iPod Shuffle to boot! :) If you’re as excited as I am about this and feel even an inkling of gratitude, be sure to use the link above when you sign up!

It’s customary as a guest at Japanese weddings to give a special envelope of freshly minted bills. So customary is this practice, every convenience store sells the special envelopes. Here’s one I picked up at the Seven-Eleven around the corner:

Like a McDonald’s kids meal plastic puzzle, there a couple pieces that must be combined. Here are the pieces:

The bills you give must be freshly minted, 10,000 yen bills in odd amounts. An even number of bills is a poor omen, as the amount can be split evenly between the newlyweds. An inner envelope holds the cash.

There are two “greeting slips” depending on the occasion, one for general congratulations:

and one specifically for wedding congratulations:

For my occasion, I picked the wedding one:

The inner envelope with the cash gets put inside the outer envelope …

On the back where the outer envelope is closed, the layering of the flaps makes a difference:

The top half folds under the bottom half if the gift is for a glorious occasion (wedding, graduation, etc.); the bottom half folds under the top half if it’s a condolence gift (funeral, etc.). Don’t want to mistake this one!

About a month ago I got my hands on a new iMac, which meant surfing the web closer to the 100Mb fiber connection the apartment comes with. But this was throttling activity to the in-house NAS I’ve got setup for storing music and movies, so I made an impulse purchase yesterday at Akihabara and picked up a gigabit switch. As it turns out, what I thought was a router for each apartment is just a switching hub, so simply replacing it with the new gigabit switch now gives me gigabit all throughout the apartment. schweet!

For testing the network, I used the HELIOS LanTest. Now my bottleneck is the hard-drive on each end. RAM-disk NAS, anyone? :)

So far my favorite apps have been Exposure, Bloomberg, and Midomi. Exposure’s “Near Me” feature of showing photos taken in your current vicinity is great; Bloomberg’s slick black interface is cool and easy to read; Midomi’s incredible accuracy is fun to say the least (has not been very successful with J-tunes though). Of course, I use Twitterrific regularly, but the lag between button presses is getting annoying. Rotary Dialer is a fun party favor, and Tap Tap Revenge is entertaining when killing time.

Overall I have been quite satisfied with the iPhone purchase. The battery and occasional lag are the most annoying insufficiencies, but can or should be compensated for in due time (there are plenty of 3rd party battery-pack options if you include iPod battery packs; lag I suspect are memory / coding bugs that will be fixed on updates). MobileMe / push of email, contacts, and calendar have been working pretty well for me. Props to the team for extending an extra month for free after the initial hiccups!

So, am I missing any apps you’re enjoying?

But now, there is an ideal way. IKEA started offering a free shuttle bus in one of those nice, “luxury” tour-buses from Den-en-chofu. Den-en-chofu is a 15 min. ride from Shibuya. From there you walk less than 100m to the bus stop, and then you sit comfortably in plush seats with plenty of leg-room for 20 minutes before being dropped off right in front of the IKEA store. The only caveat is timing. Weekdays, the shuttle runs approximately every 90 minutes. On weekends, every hour. This is Japan, so the bus leaves on time. You can check the timetable as a PDF download here.

Faster, cheaper, quieter, and more comfortable. Just the way I like to travel!