Community programming
also, Zoom event with author James Wright June 21
Friends - I am delighted to welcome
to Substack! I was a fan of his newsletter (on, ahem, Squarespace) and, of course, his Pure TokyoScope podcast with Patrick Macias. At the Japan Society of Northern California, we have teamed up with the dynamic duo of Matt Alt and Hiroko Yoda on multiple occasions, most recently our Manga Mania event with OG Jedi translator / author / interlocutor Fred Schodt in June 2022.
I used excerpts of Alt’s Pure Invention in a Business in Japan class for MBAs in spring 2022, as part of a discussion of Japan’s cultural influence, and, to borrow the Joseph Nye term, soft power. Other readings, such as Ulrike’s Schaede’s The Business Reinvention of Japan, and an AARP special on Aging in Japan, are shown below. This was a reboot on prior Business in Japan classes (2015-2017), which had used David Pilling’s Bending Adversity as the core text.
I had the pleasure of dropping in on Hiroko and Matt last summer while I was in Japan guest-teaching at Waseda University.
Suffice it to say I’m delighted to see Matt on Substack. Hiroko’s columns can be found in the New Yorker, and both of them can be found on that bird-ish network (Hiroko | Matt).
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Back in April I wrote about the re-launch of the Berkeley Asia Business Conference, which I had co-founded way back in the Stone Ages 2001. It really was a different era. China - and Vietnam - had yet to enter the WTO; Asia, broadly, was in the process of recovering from the financial crisis. For that reason, in 2001 we called it Asia Rising.
(With an eye to the semiconductor supply chains being formed during the 1990s, I am now finishing up Tiger Technology, as recommended by
, as prelude to Henry Yeung’s more recent writings on the topic.)The 17th Berkeley Asia Business Conference was indeed held on April 30, and featured various Asia Business Club alumni, such as Brad Bao, co-founder and chair of Lime, and investor Eddy Chan, founder of “Indonesia-only” investor Intudo Ventures.
I had the pleasure of giving closing remarks. I was immensely proud of the team, pictured below, for re-catalyzing a community, which — important point — they themselves were now part of.
Afterward, my daughter (who had come to campus with me that day as guest research fellow) and I went out for a post-conference boba (naturally), and walked the campus, just walking and talking. Truly a day to remember.
Your Berkeley Campanile, circa April 30
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Earlier in April I had gone to the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco. At a time of heightened global tensions, and at an event where geopolitics was certainly a theme, it was a relief to hear John Chambers (yes, *that* John Chambers) - in the midst of a characteristically carefully constructed paragraph during a fireside interview - work in remarks about how trade wars are bad for business. Chambers was seated next to former General Richard Clarke and the tone had just gotten a bit too adversarial for a lifelong salesman. I am pretty sure I sighed an audible sigh of relief - finally, a capitalist was daring to speak like one!
I was reminded of the Chambers era at Cisco when NVIDIA’s valuation broke the 1T barrier. In 1999-2000 it was Cisco selling routers; in 2023, it’s NVIDIA selling GPUs.
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Coming up June 21 - in a lunchtime Zoom program hosted by the Japan Society of Northern California, I will moderate an interview with author and researcher James Wright, author of the recent Robots Won’t Save Japan. Wright conducted ethnographic research at senior care facilities in Japan on the role of caregiving robots. His thesis is captured in the title - that the operational reality of deploying robots in caregiving facilities is rather more complicated than proponents might have hoped.
Thanks in advance to James for joining us from across the ocean! Hope to see you there.
Onward and upward,
Jon