I have a few more interesting and funny images to post from my trip to Japan. Some content may not be suitable for children.

Everyone knows the Japanese are crazy about gadgets. In Japan, you can often find dazzling ways to solve problems you didn’t even know existed. Japan is, after all, home of the heated toilet seat, which I was impressed to see even in public bathrooms. But the gadget below is a brilliant solution to the problem of creating a perfect head of foam on a pint of Guiness. First, you pour the beer into a glass, making sure to use the proper technique for pouring a completely flat beer, which is tough with Guiness. Then you place the glass on the platform and throw the switch. A stream of ultrasonic rays pulse through the beer, and like a flower coming into bloom, the beer suddenly foams and a perfect head settles to the top. It’s a pretty cool bar toy, and definitely makes you want to drain your glass to see it again. And it looks more impressive with each beer your drink. Even the bartender is amazed!

The Japanese are also big on vending machines. There’s pretty much nothing you can’t buy from a vending machine in Tokyo. The contents of the vending machine below aren’t all that unusual, but the title really caught my eye. If you can think of a caption that says more than the image itself…

With all the cheap products coming in from China, it’s almost impossible to tell the knock-offs from the real deal. Almost.

And finally, this was my last snapshot from Tokyo, taken on an escalator in the train station. You see all kinds of crazy phrases in English stenciled on t-shirts in Japan, most of which make no sense at all. But this was oddly poetic, embroidered on the back of a nice shirt worn by a friendly looking woman.   

I’m wrapping up my trip in Tokyo and heading to the airport. I’ll have some more thoughts over the coming days, but in the meantime, I figured no marketing blog about Tokyo would be complete without some images.

Dog Wiz. Your one-stop shop for all your doggy needs. Hmm. What does "Wiz" mean? The tagline posted on the door gives an opaque clue. "The Happy Forest".

Tokyo has some of the best cuisine in the world. Not only Japanese cuisine, but incredible French, Chinese, Indian and other international cuisines. Unfortunately, American cuisine seems mostly limited to chains that are long dead, or dying, in the US. Shakey’s Pizza, Denny’s, Sizzler. Apparently Starbucks is a godsend, however. My partner here tells me that before Starbucks, a really bad cup of coffee would cost you $15 dollars. Now, $7 lattes are a bargain.

How could I write a marketing post about Tokyo without a little bit of Engrish?

I had my first full day of business in Tokyo on Monday–a day full of SocialRep meetings and presentations in Minato, and dinner with a future partner in Shibuya. It was a fabulously successful day by any measure. Our pilot was well received and we’re now negotiating a second round pilot to incorporate new capabilities and potentially new markets. Having a strong business partner with experience in Japan makes a huge difference. Japan is an important global market, and highly influential in the business sectors we serve.

My day started out at Tama, a small station on a local line that feeds into the Chuo line at Musashi-Sakai. I left early to beat the morning rush, and on the local line the train was pretty empty. But the crush at Musashi-Sakai was my first experience of life as a commuter in Tokyo. It’s hard to fathom. You merge with a long stream of commuters at the ticket gates, and stumble along to the platform en masse, where the entire platform is already full of commuters queued in packs for the next train. There are numerous guards with bullhorns keeping order at the edge of the platform. When the next train arrives, it’s already full, with faces and bodies jammed against the doors and windows. The doors open, and nobody gets out. There’s a half-second of hesitation as the people in the open doorway of the train and the masses on the platform size up the situation, and then the whole body of humanity on the platform steamrolls towards the doorway. They look like linebackers, tucking their shoulders and plowing into the crowd already packed on the train. When the bodies inside the train stop giving way, the guards on the platform put their backs to the people in the doorway, and start heaving and pushing more people into the train to the sound of grunting and groaning. As the doors start to close, the pushers focus on shoving loose bags and limbs into the car before the train takes off again.

I literally stood on the platform staring in disbelief. I had gotten up to the edge of the platform and was so dumbfounded by the spectacle of it all, I hesitated and missed my opportunity to be shoe-horned into the train. The train left without me. I had a fleeting sense of relief that now I could catch the next train in a little more peace, but that was put to rest when I realized the entire platform had already filled up with more people behind me. There was no time to figure out an alternative–I was already running late for our key client presentation. The next train arrived a few minutes later, already stuffed with passengers. This time, I was in the front of the line and got swept up in the crush of commuters smashing their way into the train. Once inside, it became so tight that there wasn’t any need to hold on–everyone is so packed, it’s literally impossible to fall over. The entire mass of passengers just sways and leans with the movement of the train, with a few groans and whimpers, but most people just seem to close their eyes and accept it.

I made it to Tamachi station where I met up with my partner, and we walked the few blocks to the headquarters of our client. In an odd twist, the endless concrete corridors of Tokyo felt like an open plateau compared to the claustrophic ride on the train. I guess it’s all relative.

There’s not a lot I can talk about yet with regard to what we’re in Tokyo to do, accept to say that our meetings went very well, and were, in and of themselves, a cultural experience. We met with a couple of the top board membersand a few senior executives of our client, one of the largest businesses of its kind in Japan and well known around the world. They had a very strong grasp of our value proposition and the impact on their business, but what struck me most was their lack of arrogance and hubris compared to their American counterparts. We’re talking about an industry that in the US is famous as much for its historical delusions of grandeur as for its current flirtations with failure. But there was no attittude here, even among the top executives in the firm. There was genuine concern, interest, and an expectation for everyone in the room to accelerate production and deliver real value. It made a lasting impression on me, and I’ll be holding that up against my experience with clients back in the US to see if it holds true, and what it might say about our client’s prospects for success.

There’s a lot more to talk about, but this already a long post and the jet-lag is kicking in. I’ll have to pick up again in the morning with some more impressions. For those of you tracking our progress at SocialRep, we’re coming back to the US with a huge vote of validation by way of new opportunities with a continuing client. We’ve proven the viability of our product from the first trials, which should give us a boost as we ramp up development on Pilot 2–not to mention an extra shot of confidence leading into some of our investor presentations next week.   

I arrrived in Tokyo on Friday, and am only now having a moment to catch up. The flight was uneventful, but I had a scary experience in the first 5 minutes outside of customs. I stopped at an ATM to pick up cash, and the machine swallowed my card. I got a helpful little receipt saying my card was "damaged", and had a sudden sinking revelation of how blithely we place our fate in the hands of a small magnetic strip on a piece of plastic. I pounded a bunch of buttons labelled in Kanji, and after a few minutes, the machine miraculously spit out my card. A flood of despair followed by a flood of relief. I forgot how quickly those switches can be flipped when travelling in a foreign country.

I rode the train into Tokyo at dusk, and met up with SocialRep’s CFO at Ginza Station. We took the subway to his house, picked up his wife and son, and headed out by car for a weekend at their cabin in Gunma, two hours outside Tokyo–the equivalent of a cabin in Tahoe. They’ve had about the same amount of snow this year, a few meters of fresh powder in the last week alone.

My first day in Japan was spent snowboarding. A little odd, perhaps, but how can you turn down an invitation to hit the slopes in fresh powder? Skiing looks remarkably the same anywhere you go, with one notable acception…

Japan is the only place I’ve ever seen a skiing bear. And man, that bear could shred the moguls.

Sunday afternoon we headed back to Tokyo, and I got first real sense for the scope of Tokyo as a city. In a word, it’s endless. Collossal. At least half of the two hour drive was spent driving through the city–not on surface streets stopping at lights, but on elevated freeways speeding endlessly through a maze of concrete and glass. For the first 10 or 15 minutes entering the city, it just seems big. But then you just keep going, mile after mile, and it becomes mind-numbing. And every street you look down on, masses of people on the sidewalks, in the intersections. 53 Million people in the greater Tokyo megalopolis.

Jon dropped me off at Meguro station, where I spent the afternoon with my SocialRep co-founder planning for meetings this week over Sushi and beer. I was a little disappointed that the only Fugu on the menu was Tempura style, but the Tuna was incredible. That evening I rode the trains out to my sister’s house in Fuchu, a quiet little suburb west of Shinjuku, where I’m staying for the week.

I won’t belabor more of the typical Western reflections on Tokyo. I’m sure you’ve heard them all before. What stood out to me on this trip was not the differences, but the similarities with the world we’ve all become used to. Tokyo today feels remarkably similar to New York and London, something I’m sure many will lament. The cars we drive, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, are largely all the same, even if the language isn’t the same. Yet. Tokyo is just much, much bigger. 

I arrrived in Tokyo on Friday, and am only now having a moment to catch up. The flight was uneventful, but I had a scary experience in the first 5 minutes outside of customs. I stopped at an ATM to pick up cash, and the machine swallowed my card. I got a helpful little receipt saying my card was "damaged", and had a sudden sinking revelation of how blithely we place our fate in the hands of a small magnetic strip on a piece of plastic. I pounded a bunch of buttons labelled in Kanji, and after a few minutes, the machine miraculously spit out my card. A flood of despair followed by a flood of relief. I forgot how quickly those switches can be flipped when travelling in a foreign country.

I rode the train into Tokyo at dusk, and met up with SocialRep’s CFO at Ginza Station. We took the subway to his house, picked up his wife and son, and headed out by car for a weekend at their cabin in Gunma, two hours outside Tokyo–the equivalent of a cabin in Tahoe. They’ve had about the same amount of snow this year, a few meters of fresh powder in the last week alone.

My first day in Japan was spent snowboarding. A little odd, perhaps, but how can you turn down an invitation to hit the slopes in fresh powder? Skiing looks remarkably the same anywhere you go, with one notable acception…

Japan is the only place I’ve ever seen a skiing bear. And man, that bear could shred the moguls.

Sunday afternoon we headed back to Tokyo, and I got first real sense for the scope of Tokyo as a city. In a word, it’s endless. Collossal. At least half of the two hour drive was spent driving through the city–not on surface streets stopping at lights, but on elevated freeways speeding endlessly through a maze of concrete and glass. For the first 10 or 15 minutes entering the city, it just seems big. But then you just keep going, mile after mile, and it becomes mind-numbing. And every street you look down on, masses of people on the sidewalks, in the intersections. 53 Million people in the greater Tokyo megalopolis.

Jon dropped me off at Meguro station, where I spent the afternoon with my SocialRep co-founder planning for meetings this week over Sushi and beer. I was a little disappointed that the only Fugu on the menu was Tempura style, but the Tuna was incredible. That evening I rode the trains out to my sister’s house in Fuchu, a quiet little suburb west of Shinjuku, where I’m staying for the week.

I won’t belabor more of the typical Western reflections on Tokyo. I’m sure you’ve heard them all before. What stood out to me on this trip was not the differences, but the similarities with the world we’ve all become used to. Tokyo today feels remarkably similar to New York and London, something I’m sure many will lament. The cars we drive, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, are largely all the same, even if the language isn’t the same. Yet. Tokyo is just much, much bigger. 

I’m heading to Tokyo tomorrow on business with SocialRep. A lot of friends in the SocialRep circle have been asking about the trip, so I’ve decided to blog it as a way of exploring a new line of  public communication, and maybe a new voice, about what we’re up to. 

SocialRep is a startup in the social media space. We’re developing applications for enterprise marketing organizations. Technically we’re still under the radar, so if there are some gaps in the picture I paint about the whole project, bear with me. We’ve just completed our first round of pilots with an international client based in Tokyo. The pilot went very well, and I’m heading to Tokyo to meet up with my partner there for meetings with our client to post mortem pilot 1, and lay the groundwork for pilot 2.

As fate would have it, I’ve got a number of ties in Tokyo now, which will make the trip a lot more fun and interesting. SocialRep’s virtual CFO is an Aussie expatriot based in Tokyo. Like me, he’s heavily into bikes and snow, and he has a cabin in Gunma. So my first order of business in Japan is to try out the 1.5 meters of powder that just dumped in the mountains west of Tokyo. I never imagined I’d ever snowboard in Japan, so this promises to be an experience.

Back in Tokyo, I’ll be staying with my sister and her family, who’ve been living there for two years where my brother in law runs the Tokyo office of OpenWave. I’m looking forward to a home away from home with family. And finally, my former business partner Kenichi is back in Tokyo, working as Creative Director for Landor. Kenichi was co-founder and creative director for Cymbic, back in our heyday doing integrated marketing and branding in San Francisco.

So I’ve got a new partner, an old partner, a key advisor, a client and family who are all opening their doors and promising to show me around Tokyo. It promises to be a great trip. I’ll post impressions and insights over the next week, and find my way in talking more about what we’re up to at SocialRep.