Vision for Tokyo 2020 Stadium

I wrote up this article to be published in a marketing journal, and after a lot of editing it was whittled down into something quite different, but much more suited to a marketing journal! I have included the edited down version at the end for comparison!

What the 2020 Olympics means for Japan
The 1964 Tokyo Olympics put Japan on the map internationally, gave the country the self confidence to become a global economic and cultural force, kickstarting 3 decades of phenomenal growth. By the time 2020 comes around, 56 years will have passed by and Japan will be more or less 3 decades past its economic peak. Where can Japan get to in the next 7 years and what does this mean for businesses and brand in Japan?

Much of the international reaction to Tokyo being named as host city for the 2020 Olympics has cast the news as a welcome fillip to a torpid economy and ravaged national psyche. Those of us who experience life in Japan first hand have become accustomed to the contrast between the reality on the ground and the Japan-on-the-ropes narrative depicted by international news channels, and so we see the 2020 Games results through a slightly different lens.

There is no doubt that winning the bid is great news for the mood in Japan, and connected to that the economy too, but it is not a prop for a train-wreck economy, rather another positive factor in the developed World’s most consistently performing nation. During the so-called “lost decades” since Japan’s economic bubble burst, the country and its society have not done so bad:

• GDP has been stable at more or less the same level it reached in the early 90s after the post war “economic miracle”
• life expectancy has risen to lead the World (in contrast to the opposite trend in life expectancy  in the US and elsewhere) largely through improvements in healthcare provision
• Japan has clocked up 21 straight years as the World’s #1 creditor nation, owed around $3.2 trillion, enjoying a large trade surplus up until the the Tohoku earthquake
• Japan regularly tops academic quality-of-life studies that factor in prosperity, access to high quality services including but not just healthcare, diet etc
• Japan has retained the relatively small wealth gap so important to a healthy, cohesive and robust society

Better informed voices on the Japanese economy compare its consistent affluence to countries like Swtizerland, only Japan has 127m people and is the World’s 3rd biggest economy. Japan’s GDP vs government-debt-ratio of 220% usually underpins the “bug looking for a windshield” view of its economy, and indeed this is nothing to boast about, but unlike similarly challenged western economies, 95% of that debt is owned by people vested in the ongoing stability of Japan’s currency and finances, namely Japanese citizens. The Japanese banks that intermediate this relationship are closely tied to the government too, so it is no surprise that in times of doubt investors jump on the safe bet that is the Yen.

However, just like all huge, real countries Japan has its issues, a situation finally addressed by government policy with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s “Abenomics” – a policy quiver of 3 “arrows” aimed at revitalising the economy through a combination of investment stimulus and structural reform that will make it easier for international businesses to invest in Japan and catalyse innovation. Introduced early in 2013 and still work in progress, these measures have already succeeded in stimulating a 40% jump in the value of the Nikkei stock index, huge gains to Japan’s exporters as the Yen has been driven down by intervention by the Bank of Japan, accompanied by a wave of optimism in the business community connected to Japan, not least those of us here.

So far the biggest positive effect of Abenomics has been psychological. Despite its remarkably strong performance, not least given the horrific earthquake and tsunami in 2011, there remains a huge amount of untapped potential locked up in the professional know-how, technology, creative culture, inventiveness, diligence and social stability in modern day Japan. But since the goal of “catching up” in the post-war era was more than surpassed, there has been a lack of collective vision for how Japan can be part of inventing the future, and thus that potential remains ungalvanized. Abenomics has ticked all the boxes so far, but it has not put forward a clear and inspirational vision for a common national agenda. There is no broad appetite in Japan for nationalistic aggression, nor does Japan go for the personality politics that refuels the national dream as elections do for the US, so there is a real danger that Abenomics fizzles out into the passive pessimism that preceded it.

From the point of view of the rational observer it is clear that one of Japan’s roles is that of the pathfinder society for demographically mature nations as they adjust to their new found top-heaviness, and everything that comes with it. Far from ‘managing a decline’, the opportunity is to invent the solutions that make this transition a positive experience for young and old alike, and then export those solutions to those nations that follow Japan into the same territory as they are destined to, starting with the US, China and Western Europe. There are plenty of smart business people in Japan who perceive this and are investing in it, but it is not easy to coin a positive collective vision around this, and yes, the politicians here are not groomed as inspirational visionaries.

So it is against this backdrop that Japan accepts the honor of hosting the 2020 Games, rewarded for being the economic and social “safe pair of hands” that the Tokyo bid successfully proposed to the IOC panel. It is no wonder Prime Minister Abe described the result as more joyous than his 2012 election result, since the Olympics provides the motivation for the infrastructual investment program that is already at the heart of Abenomics, but more importantly fills the ideological void in Japanese politics, and can unite the nation around a common theme that is global in outlook.

Aside from promoting and facilitating participatory sport, the Games offers Japan the chance to project a new and positive role for itself in the world, and with it a new national self-consciousness, just as I believe the London Games did for Britain. The benefits for Japanese people will be multi-faceted, and no doubt there will be a queue of construction contractors offering to turn the stunning vision for the new national stadium and other facilities into a reality:
Video: http://vimeo.com/64632869

However, I believe that it is consumer brands that have the biggest advantage to gain from the recasting of Japan. It was Japanese manufacturing brands that changed the perception of Japan during the 70’s and 80’s, and despite the renewed strength of Toyota, NISSAN, Canon and other category leaders today there is no doubt that the decline of brands like Sony and Sharp have become synonymous with the supposed decline of Japan as well.

Much of Japan’s brand strength goes unseen: most of the significant parts of the iPhone are made in Japan for instance, only to be assembled in China; Japan is one of the few countries to have a trade surplus with China, shipping so many of the essential high quality parts and manufacturing machinery used in Chinese labour intensive economy; the fact that Toyota will soon make more from its OEM deals supplying hybrid drives to foreign car manufacturers than it makes from Prius sales; Canon own the patent for the inkjet printer module that is used in 80% of inkjet printers globally.

To an extent Japan has benefited from this stealthiness, but every society needs to invent new icons of its success otherwise it starts to believe in the myth of its own failure. As Japan’s Olympic vision percolates around the World it will provide Japanese brands with the confidence and impetus they need to show themselves in a new light. Among these will be the manufacturing brands already known to global consumers, but I predict a wave of service and retail brands to eminate from Japan under this new halo.

For anyone who has visited Japan well knows, it is the kingdom of customer service and the same attention to detail and incremental improvement to management processes that has underpinned its manufacturing succes is now being applied to retail. The rival 7eleven and Family Mart convenience store networks, both Japanese based companies, now boast 75,000 stores between them, most of them in Asia, and are investing heavily in service innnovations such as home delivery for the elderly and web & mobile based ordering.

The hugely successful fashion retailer UNIQLO is beginning a broad store roll out in the US where it plans to differentiate its service based on Japanese etiquette, bringing every store manager to Japan to be trained UNIQLO’s own brand of curteousness and service attitude.

In digital spheres, the Japan-based social app for mobile LINE, inspired by the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake, is already being touted as Asia’s answer to Facebook rocketing to 230m users in a little over 2 years, and is expanding rapidly in Asia, Europe and South America with its uniquely cute visual appeal. For these brands and those that follow from Japan, the aura of a vibrant, clean, stable and futuristic Tokyo will rub off positively.

The affiliation between Brazil and Japan as host nations will also strengthen the relations between these two already interlinked cultures. Brazil is home to the biggest population of expatriated Japanese after an emigration program a century ago, and the south american juggernaut is so obsessed with Japanese manga and anime that when anime TV show theme song vocalists tour Brazil they play to crowds of 100k people. The consecutive Olympics will reinforce this two way corridor for industrial investment and consumer brands alike that is being pushed strongly by both governments as well as brands and corporations on both sides.

For international brands looking to grow their businesses in Asia, the consumer confidence that was already growing off the back of Abenomics in 2013 will offer the chance of long term sustained growth within a well regulated and increasingly open-for-business Japan. The ones that will succeed will be those that succeed in understanding the zeitgeist as it evolves with renewed urgency and execute with sensitivity to the subtleties of Japan’s fast-progressing digital platforms.

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The draft above was refocused on “What Tokyo 2020 means for Marketers” and featured in the international marketing industry journal MediaPost.

The announcement a few weeks ago that Tokyo is the winner of the bid to host the 2020 Olympic games was a great achievement for Japan — and proof of Asia’s ongoing position as a global cultural powerhouse.

London 2012 was widely recognized to be the most successful games of all time, both athletically and in returns for those brands that chose to buy into its marketing juggernaut. But will Japan, a country supposedly past its economic prime, deliver the same opportunities and potential rewards?

When Japan last hosted the Olympics in 1964, the Tokyo games put the country firmly on the international map. Worldwide attention and investment offered the nation the self-confidence to become a global economic and cultural leader, in the process kick-starting three decades of phenomenal growth.

By the time 2020 comes around, 56 years will have passed since Tokyo ‘64, and Japan will be nearly three decades past its supposed economic peak.
While Japan’s worldview and international reputation have been largely clouded by the idea of “lost decades,” the country’s biggest problem is not a poorly performing economy. In fact, the national economy has performed better and more consistently than any in the developed world over the last two decades, and living standards here continue to improve.

The truth is — Japan has been suffering from from a “where next?” malaise. Having caught up and then some with the rest of the world leading up to the 1990s, Japan’s nationhood seemed to have lost direction. For a country that invented the future in the 1970s and 80s, the fall from grace of national icons such as Sony and Sharp has led to a lack of national self-confidence and increased introspection.

So the Tokyo 2020 win is just the psychological shot in the arm the nation needed, unlocking huge potential for Japan’s businesses and brands on a national and global scale. Although slightly under the radar, the country is still a manufacturing Goliath. It is one of the few countries to have a trade surplus with China — producing most of the significant components of iPhones, for example.

Japan’s service industry is the most refined in the world, and is poised to go global. Indigenous organizations such as retailers like FamilyMart and 7Eleven are already flexing their international wings, and local retail fashion sensation UNIQLO has big ambitions on the global scene.

These globally minded service brands are putting Japanese values of politeness, attention to detail and efficiency at the center of their international brand strategies. These values are spreading — adding to the crucial characteristics that will contribute to a refreshed Japan Inc. image.

History tells us that Japan does not tend to invent new realms of global business like the Web and smartphones. Instead, it has historically caught up fast and added a new dimension of competitiveness to the market, as in the case of the automotive industry.

So perhaps Japan’s time for Web services is coming. Japanese social platform LINE has reached a staggering 230 million global users in just two years — breaking all records in the process, and showing that a digital user experience can be both intrinsically Japanese and have global appeal at the same time.
Based on its growing international interests and pro-growth economic policies, national sentiment is already strong in 2013 and the expected YEN3trn boost to the domestic economy will only strengthen that.

Tokyo 2020 will reveal a stunning image of a sophisticated metropolitan nation, solving first world issues through technology and progressive policy while doing just fine economically. This positivity will offer fantastic opportunities to both Japanese and international brands that choose to associate themselves with it.
Quick off the mark as ever, Coca-Cola has already begun to associate itself with the Games, reminding consumers of a long association with the Olympics — surely just the beginning of a newfound interest in “brand Japan” for many others as well.

Going forward, the greatest rewards within Japan will come to those brands that successfully interweave fresh and relevant narratives into the emerging consciousness and digital landscape of Japan’s new era. The key to success is forgetting what you think you know about the Land of the Rising Sun to embrace one of the planet’s most exciting and forward-thinking countries.

This same process of reimagining is just what Japan’s consumers are now doing themselves, and as Japan takes the center stage, the opportunities to share in this success may be endless.

The post What the 2020 Olympics means for Japan appeared first on James Hollow's Blog about Hybrid Thinking.

Japan & Brazil getting closer together

Although the stereotypes associated with Japanese and Brazilians are poles apart, the two countries in fact share a special relationship based on the very human ties of historical emigration. Now they are starting to explore the potential of combining the mutual strengths of both nations in the future.

Japan’s is arguably the most “progressed”  society on the planet, demographically more mature than any other, and one of the most advanced in terms of technology, infrastructure, healthcare provision and with a massive, capital intensive economy.

In contrast Brasil (spelt the Portuguese on purpose!) has a young demographic, labour-intensive economy destined to grow into a superpower, but lacks many of the technological and infrastructural know-how that Japan has at its fingertips. Today they are becoming ever closer economic partners as they start to realise the potential to trade knowledge, goods and services, and potentially co-create culture too.

In a previous post concerning hybrid families, I came to the conclusion that “new types of humans” may be unique genetically, but it is the fact that they express a unique combination of two cultures that is probably the more interesting characteristic.

Among the possible cultural hybrids you can imagine, the Japan-Brasil hybrid is, for me at least, one of the most interesting to explore, simply because their stereotypical citizens are so contrasting. Personally both Japanese and Brazilian cultures draw me in, but in very different ways,  so this is a topic I am bound to come back to repeatedly.

The company I run, Profero Tokyo, is part of an international network that boasts a strong presence in Brasil, and in connection with that I was asked to pull together a factual summary of the special relationship Japan and Brasil enjoy, an abridged version of which you can see below.

(Many thanks to Chris Beaumont for his contributions to this document)

Historical bonds between peoples

• In 1907 a treaty was signed between the Brazilian and Japanese governments to grant the Japanese the right to live and work in Brasil.
• After 19th century emigrations, today Brasil is home to the largest population of Japanese outside of Japan ~ 1.5m
• Japan is home to 320k Brazilians,  the largest non-Asian group in the country
• Brasilians perceive a significant role for Japan in Brazil’s development, according to a nationwide survey in 2013 (link – Japanese only):
  • “Which country should be the most important partner of Brasil in the future: Japan (50%) came second after the United States (59%), and was followed by China (32%)
  • Regarding the fields in which Brazilians have expectations of Japan (multiple answers), transfer of technology (42%) came first, followed by such areas as the expansion of the import of Brazilian products (39%), increase of employment by factory establishments (38%), investment (21%) and the export of Japanese products (21%)

Diplomatic & bilateral agreements

During a meeting between respective foreign ministers in September 2013, the following points were agreed (source link):

• Both welcomed the advances being made in the two countries’ relations not only in political and economic relations, but also in a broad range of areas such as education, science and technology, cooperation in the international arena and culture and sports.
• Both ministers shared the view that 2015, which will be the 120th anniversary of the conclusion of the Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Navigation between Japan and Brazil, will be celebrated not only by holding a large number of events in both countries, but also by strengthening and deepening bilateral relations further.
• During a meeting between President Rousseff and Prime Minister Abe, Brasil’s President praised the recent investments by Japanese companies in Brasil, welcomed more in the future
• Both premiers looked forward to strengthened cultural ties through future sporting events, as consecutive Olympic host nations, and Japan’s soccer team at Rio2014 (source link)
• A bilateral agreement on sharing Nuclear technology has been restarted having been on hold since the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami (source link)
• In 2013 a waiver of visa requirements has been agreed between the two countries for diplomatic & official passport holders.

Cultural touch points: Soccer

• Soccer has become Japan’s biggest national sport, and there are high hopes for the men’s national team in 2014 after reaching the quarter finals in 2010.
• Soccer is even a topic at summit meetings, as President Rousseff told Priminister Abe that she hoped Brasil would meet Japan in the final of the World Cup!?
• Japan’s women’s soccer team are reigning World champions, helping to expand the appeal and involvement to Japanese women and men alike.
• Japanese consumers are already excited by Brasil’s vibrant culture and the World Cup followed by the Olympics will provide the perfect platform for Brasilian brands to launch broad awareness and acceptance in Japan

Cultural exchange: The arts, entertainment & fashion

• Japan is a voracious consumer of foreign fashion brands, entertainment media and food exports. The culture is extremely dynamic, and brands can rise to prominence here much faster than in other markets.
• An example is the Brasillian flip flop brand “havaianas” that bore the Brazilian flag icon on all its products, which became a sell out success in Japan in recent years
• Perhaps seeded through the Japanese communities in Brasil, the Japanese originated manga (adult comics) and anime (animated TV / film) cultures have become mainstream in Brasil over the last 2 decades. Today Japanese anime song vocalists play to sell out 100k audiences in Brasil, and anime command large TV ratings among young audiences. This has inspired a generation of young Brazilian manga artists and animators, the fruits of which have become major cultural exports for Brasil.
• Brazilian culture is equally popular in Japan. The Asakusa Samba Carnival is one of Tokyo’s biggest summer festivals.
• Japan’s leading social mobile service LINE, today boasts 230m users globally, having broken all records in reaching this number in just 2 years since opening. It’s highly visual and vibrant interface is a natural fit with Brasillian users, and LINE places high priority on Brasil as an international market, and Brasillian portuguese will be one of the first languages to enjoy a localized experience
• Japan’s top EC platform, Rakuten, plans to expand its Brazil operation, opened in 2012, to 1,500 merchants in the 12months from October 2013, and is aiming to grow that number to 20,000 by 2018

Inbound investment from Japan Manufacturing & Technology

• Brasil is seen as a desirable place to invest by Japanese companies. Plans to boost production or acquire a local business in order to build a strong foundation for future growth are regularly announced in Japan.
• Brasil is set to overtake Japan as the world’s third biggest car market, and is the focus of a great deal of investment from Japan’s top 3 makers Toyota, Honda and Nissan:
• In 2011 Japan’s biggest beverage company, Kirin Holdings, took 100% control of Brazil’s second biggest brewer, buying the outstanding 49% of stock for $1.35bn. Now called “Brasil Kirin” the company has 15% market share, and in Nov 2013 Kirin announced a $150m investment plan in 2014 to dramatically increase capacity
• Honda decided in August 2013 to spend ~$450m to build a new assembly plant in Itirapina, Sao Paulo State, doubling its production capacity to 240,000 units / year
• Toyota Motor Corp. in August last year started producing the Etios compact model – tailored to Brasil’s growing car market – at its new factory in Sorocaba, Sao Paulo.
• A Nissan Motor Co. manufacturing facility is under construction in Resende in the state of Rio de Janeiro. Operations are slated to begin in the first half of next year creating 2,000 jobs and 200k units/year in production capacity. See this article for more background on Nissan’s Brazil strategy.
• Japanese business activity is not limited to the auto industry: the Japanese Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Brazil has 354 member companies, the largest number in the group’s history, and they come from a diverse range of sectors.
• An increasing number of presidents running the Brasilian subsidiaries of Japanese companies now double as executive officers of their head offices in Japan, reflecting the strategic importance of Brasil in their international strategies.
• Japan’s leading credit card company, JCB, started issuing credit cards through Caixa in April. JCB already has a network of 1.2m stores in Brasil that accepts its cards.
• Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. and four other Japanese firms plan to join forces to invest in a Brazilian shipbuilder to better compete with South Korean and Chinese rivals in the lucrative market for resource-exploration vessels, buying a 30% stake in Ecovix-Engevix Construcoes Oceanicas S/A for about 30 billion yen by the end of this fiscal year.
• Technology is also an area of common interest and partnership:
  • Telcos will partner to test a global first 8k broadcast system at the Olympics in 2016
  • Japan is set to share its megafloat technology to support Brasil’s nascent offshore natural gas extraction opportunities

Trading & Agribusiness

• Japan’s large trading companies are further expanding into Brazil’s agricultural sector. Some companies are trying to boost their transactions with local producers and suppliers through acquisitions of Brazilian operations. Others are engaging in agriculture or handling logistics distribution.
• “We want to contribute to boosting Brazil’s presence as the world’s leading grain supplier,” said Seiji Shiraki, Mitsubishi Corp.’s executive vice president and regional CEO
• Trading company Mitsui & Co. have taken a 49.9% stake in a joint venture with SLC Agricola, targeting international exports and expansion of production to Africa
• Japan’s government has approved the large scale import of Brasilian pork, as of 2013.

Japan’s economic trajectory

• “Abenomics” – the name given to Prime Minister Abe’s didactic economic policies to stimulate economic growth, have so far proved very successful
• Today Japan’s economy is growing faster than any in the developed world, and consumer confidence is higher than at any time over the last decade.
• A cornerstone of Abenomics is to make it easier for international business to operate successfully in Japan, and for their international employees to live comfortably and prosper
• This goal is supported by the establishment of innovation zones in 5 major cities including Tokyo, with deregulation allowing fast establishment & profitable operation

The post Brasil x Japan: the ideal hybrid? appeared first on James Hollow's Blog about Hybrid Thinking.

Taking the UK as a yardstick, like Japan an island nation that was never colonised by immigrants in the way that say North America was, at least since prehistorical times, but which started its journey of multi-culturalization a good century or two before Japan did, in its 2001 census 85% of the population described themselves as “white british”. So Japan still has a long way to go, but it is on its way.

All immigrants contribute to the cultural diversity of a country, but not necessarily to the creation of hybrid families. Some do though. According this video, in 2010 there were 30,000 mixed marriages in Japan, and ~2% of children born in Japan were of mixed race. Again this is low compared to some countries, but compared to Japan not so long ago, it is clear that steadily things are changing.

Screenshot from video created by Hafufilm.com

Of course this trend is not unique to Japan. In fact, emigration and ethnic intermarriage is by far the most dominant force on the collective human genome. According to the pre-eminent biologist and evolutionary geneticist, E. O. Wilson, “The impact on humanity as a whole, even while still in this current early stage, is an unprecedented dramatic increase in the genetic variation within local populations around the world. The increase is matched by a reduction in differences between populations”.

So while locally variation is increasing, even in Japan as this video describes, statistically the variance of human genes around the world is going down, which worries some population geneticists. This seems to me like a small price to pay for the rest of us to enjoy “local variety”!

For those like myself who struggle with statistical ideas like variance, imagine the distribution of humanity’s genes say 500 years ago as mountainous islands with big stretches of oceans in between them. With modern emigration and intermarriage those mountains are being eroded down and the gaps between the islands are filling in, bridging between them, with a myriad of new racial hybrid humans.

The areas that are being filled in represent uncharted territory for human genotypes – the space between anglo saxon and Japanese for instance is being filled in with each “half” Japanese half anglo-saxon who is born. Multiply that up by all the combinations of race and you have an explosion in the number of ‘types of human’ on the planet.

But if this trend continues to its logical conclusion, the landscape will end up completely flat with no gaps, valleys or mountains anywhere. There will be many more “types of human” around than before, but the variance will be nil.

This eventuality seems a long way off, but it is perhaps not so far fetched to imagine that two cosmopolitan cities geographically separated, say London and New York, could end up the same genetically when looked at as a population.

Why did these isolated islands of genes exist in the first place? Homo sapiens evolved into anatomically modern humans in Africa, and then set out to colonise the entire planet starting a mere 70,000 years ago or so, reaching as far as Australia by 50,000 years before the present, and finally jumping across the bearing straits to the Americas as recently as perhaps 22,000 years ago.

This is very little time indeed for selective evolution to act. Traits such as skin colour are adaptations to varying UV exposures at different latitudes, but actually, the vast majority of the genetic differences between what we call races is not due to local natural selection, but to random genetic differences in the bands of humans that set out from Africa at different times, and then diverged further through genetic drift, a phenomenon which as the term suggests, has no selective direction.

What all this means is that while race and population genetics is a really fascinating area of science on a global level, those of us who have mixed-race children should not try to read too much into their genetic combination beyond what they look like. Obviously, since this would amount to an affirmation of racial prejudice. And in this sense, the way we look at our “half” children is no different in any way at all to the way any parents look at their child who is genetically half them, and half their partner. Every child, every human is a new type of human, wherever they get labeled on that genetic map of the world.

However, where I think us mixed-marriage types do get to think of ourselves and our progeny as special is in the area of cultural hybridisation. What does it mean to be exposed to two quite distinct cultures from birth compared to a more homogeneous cultural upbringing? I am not exactly sure, but more than genes, this is the interesting question.

The post The explosion of hybrid humans, and what it means for us appeared first on James Hollow's Blog about Hybrid Thinking.

Image: A broccoli x cauliflower hybrid sold in Japan

 Welcome to my new blog!

Why now?

I have been writing pretty regularly over the years, some of which has been going up on line, but most of it never gets out of my Evernotes. I have been feeling a mounting inner pressure recently to get more of it out in the open to start some dialogues and share ideas with others. One excuse I was using to not get a blog going with regular updates was the fact someone else owned JamesHollow.com, so once I got hold of this domain I had no excuse to not get it together.

I have also been piecing together the knowledge required to set up and run a blog like this one from scratch so I can be totally self sufficient. I have been frustrated by not being in control of my own publishing before and so for this one I wanted to be totally self sufficient. Thanks to plug and play hosting solutions and the brilliance of WordPress and all the tools and communities around it these days, that required knowledge is pretty accessible all of a sudden.

Why the “hybrid thinking” theme.

Recently it dawned on me that I am living a “hybrid” life, or rather I realised that I could use the concept to pull together a bunch of consistent characteristics of my life. Hybrids are genetic combinations in the original meaning, a bit like my children being half Japanese and half anglo-saxon-celt! But these days the word hybrid has been applied to many things, not least cars and many other types of technology too. My focus however for this blog is on the hybridisation of ideas, behaviour and cultures.

My family life is a hybrid of Japanese and British: igo classes followed by cricket practice; udon for lunch but roast pork for dinner. What does this mean for my kids? I am really not sure, but am definitely in the process of discovering.

Likewise professionally I run a company, Profero Tokyo, which is a hybrid culture. We are about half Japanese, half international including a few international Japanese. A lot of our work is with international businesses and brands that are well adjusted to Japan, not least thanks to our efforts, but are certainly note Japanese in their DNA. One way of looking at what we do is as an interface between Japan and the rest of the world, bringing ideas and their conduit brands in, and taking Japanese brands and their associated ideas out of Japan too. To do this we have to be this hybrid culture that is not one nor the other, but both at the same time.

In this sense of the word we all grow up in slightly “hybrid” contexts, there is no such thing as the “normal British company” or “standard Japanese upbringing” and all companies and families are a blend of influences, but the contrasts that I both enjoy and am challenged by on a daily basis are a little more extreme than most, at least compared to my own previous experiences.

I believe that with highly contrasting hybrid cultures there is a greater chance of creating a really original and special offspring, just like the hybrid vegetable depicted above with its miraculous fractal structure, but also a higher chance the result ends up a bit messed up!

Who would be interested in a blog about my hybridised life?

That is a very good question! I will touch on themes that I believe are relevant to anyone trying to nurture a positive hybrid culture or environment, whatever the mix is. There is no doubt that what I write will be coloured with the context of Tokyo,  as well as the uniqueness of Profero: a company founded in London but with global curiosity at its heart from the outset, but I will be trying to draw generalised conclusions from my local examples.

I also believe that Japan will play more of a pathfinder role in global society, coming up with all sorts of hybrid solutions as it confronts various socio-economic issues before other countries inevitably meet them themselves, and so I intend to proactively imagine what that role will be, pick up examples of Japanese technology and social trends that might be indicative, and based on these rethink Japan’s role in the world.

The post A blog about nurturing hybrid culture appeared first on James Hollow's Blog about Hybrid Thinking.