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Why Japan has more old-fashioned music stores than anywhere else in the world 1. For many people, the days of wandering into a store, browsing the shelves, and walking out with music stored on plastic are a distant memory. In Japan, however, the CD is still king. Globally, 39% of all music sales are physical CDs and vinyl, but in Japan, the figure is double that. It helps make Japan the world’s second biggest music market, selling more than ¥254 billion ($2.44 billion) worth of music a year—most of it in the form of CDs. 2. Feeding that demand are 6,000 music stores, according to an estimate from the Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ). To put that in context, the US is the world’s largest music market in terms of revenue, but has about 1,900 old-fashioned music stores, according to Almighty Music Marketing. Germany, the third biggest market, has only around 700 stores. 3. Japan’s odd consumer behaviour is a prime example of the Galapagos syndrome, a business te...

Step up war on plastic pollution 1. Plastic pollution in the world’s oceans poses an increasingly grave environmental hazard. Japan, which relies on the ocean for its survival, is urged to take a more proactive role in international efforts to combat the problem through recycling and cutting back on the manufacturing and use of disposable plastic products. 2. Japan, along with the United States, abstained from signing the “Ocean Plastic Charter” that was endorsed by other Group of Seven members and the European Union at the G7 summit held earlier this month in Canada. 3. The charter set a target of ensuring, in cooperation with industrial sectors, 100 percent reuse, recycling and collection of all plastic products by 2030, thus significantly reducing the volume of plastic waste.  4. The government explained that Japan was not ready for tight regulations on plastic products because it has to carefully assess the impact on people’s lives and its industries. True, J...

Face the reality of racism in Japan JUN 3, 2018 GIFU –  Recent events continue to suggest that discussions of racism in Japan typically prove problematic. This is largely because those discussions typically present it as a “uniquely” Western phenomenon, a matter of black and white or white and nonwhite, from which a mythic “uniquely monoracial” Japan has been spared. Rather, when the issue is broached, as it was recently following controversies provoked by blackface performances, it is dismissed as arising from Japanese racial naivete. And while a conscious antipathy may not motivate some of these acts, a more insidious implicit bias remains. A recent study of implicit bias by Matsumoto University psychologist Kazuo Mori notes that Japanese have an implicit bias against blacks, concluding that “Japanese participants showed an implicit preference for ‘white people’ over ‘black people.’ ” Mori suggests that this bias may be the product of the “media in which white...

Why is hi-tech Japan using cassette tapes and faxes? 1. Japan has a reputation for being fascinated by robots and hi-tech gadgets - a nation at the forefront of manufacturing innovation.  But the technological reality in many offices is strikingly different.  This is a country that uses people to do the work of traffic lights and where big-name companies running 10-year-old software is the norm. 2. There are even tape cassettes for sale in the  ubiquitous  convenience stores for office use, along with fax machines - remember them? Even tech visionaries like Sony still use a fax. 3. "Japanese companies generally lag foreign companies by roughly five-to-10 years in adoption of modern IT practices, particularly those specific to the software industry," says Patrick McKenzie, boss of Starfighter, a software company with operations in Tokyo and Chicago.  "The pace of development is  glacial ." 4. It's a curiosity for any observer of a countr...