Tokyo, again
the capitol thrives
In late July / early August I visited Japan for the first time since January 2020; coincidentally, that trip was also when the first covid-19 patient was detected in Japan. My reaction then: probably another SARS, or MERS, in terms of duration and global impact. After years of regular travel there, little did I know that it would take 2.5 years to get back!
The occasion was teaching: a summer MBA intensive at Waseda Business School in Tokyo. This was my first time in-person since 2019. Thanks again to Prof. Tatsuyuki Negoro, prolific author on the topic of platforms, who first invited me in 2018 and with whom I initially co-taught the course (ICT Driven Strategy in the US and Japan; some content would be familiar to alums of my Strategy for the Networked Economy course). I had the pleasure of hosting Negoro-sensei as visiting scholar via the Center for Japanese Studies at UC-Berkeley in 2019-2020.
Having taught the course remotely for two years (through a combination of Zoom, Vimeo, Slack and Dropbox; as noted here, the tools and platforms were more broadly available and generally better than, say, in 2011 - post 3/11 - and more than sufficient to make remote work and instruction possible and productive, if not always pleasant), I was excited to get back.
New for this year - the class was hybrid, or HyFlex, as Waseda refers to it, with about half the class in the room, half online. Below is the view during a pre-class room test run. As always, hybrid classes present an additional set of inputs to track and integrate - confidence screens; Zoom chat; did students actually join their breakout rooms; hands up in the room, on-screen; balance between in-room and Zoom cohort attention; etc etc. It’s a cognitive workout. That said, both groups were engaged and it was a fun class.
Measure twice, cut once - testing the hybrid system.
I’ve asked, and received, a lot of question about Japan entry. The process of getting a certificate of eligibility and then visa as visiting faculty was, ultimately, labor and paper-intensive. In sum, to get to Japan right now, whether as student, faculty, employee or group tourist, one needs a receiving organization. (PM Kishida did, in May 2022, state that Japan would normalize entry to be on the same footing as G7 peers, in stages.) What this means to the domestic tourism industry, which hosted 31 million visitors in 2019, and probably would have hosted 40M visitors had the 2020 Tokyo Olympics happened as planned, merits its own post(s). I did have occasion to do some related interviewing on this trip, picking up on my pre-pandemic research. Below is the trend in visitors.
JNTO data, available here.
(As reference, here are two columns from Bloomberg Opinion’s Gearoid Reidy, written in April 2022 - when the doors to non-citizens were still largely closed - and June 2022, the latter at the time limited group tourism - with minders! - was first re-started.)
The Waseda campus remains idyllic, and home to a lot of international students. It was fun seeing them out and about on the streets. My first night there, I walked the campus and listened to the ebb and flow of the cicadas (セミの歌を聴け!) and felt the summer heat.
On that note, it was indeed hot, which is to be expected in August in Tokyo. But still, the heat apparently merited new colors in the weather forecast. This from AltJapan’s (and New Yorker contributor) Hiroko Yoda.
The combination of sweltering days and evening MBA classes and jet lag during the first part of my stay meant early wakeups to get some outdoor activity in before the temperature rose too high. This, in turn, meant a lot of early-morning visits to this old friend - the 100-yen (about 75 cents) coffee grinding machine at the local Family Mart. I found it delightfully tactile and satisfying to plunk down a 100-yen coin - a coin! - and receive clear value in return. Family Mart too had evolved since 2020 - this one was constantly playing reminders to use the self-checkout registers. Automation continues.
Runs 24/7, grinds fresh, no burnt coffee smell
The above grinder is the very machine - albeit at a different Waseda-area Family Mart, in 2019 - that prompted a read of Starbucks’ 10-K (at Starbucks’ description of its own competitive set, from premium brands to quick service restaurants), a look at Japan’s CPI, and an exercise on Risk of Substitution on my undergrad competitive strategy class. (I use it as a warmup exercise as part of a discussion on Red Bull and Risks to Returns, specifically risk of substitution and risk of imitation, the other risks being holdup and slack.) Clearly, I find affordable, workmanlike coffee out of a machine thought-provoking, and, as an aside, a welcome juxtaposition with the over-engineered and thus by necessity human-attended “robot” coffee machines that have made appearances in the Bay Area. Archive photo of such below. This was taken at Circuit Launch in Oakland in fall 2021. As of July 2022, it was no longer there.
Adorably anthropomorphic, but maybe not built to scale
The lead-gen coffee that gets you into the store is indicative of a broader truth - Japan has not inflated since the 1990s. Lunch prices are, still, pretty much the same. I had a lovely lunch with a colleague in the Midori Sushi in Shibuya Station for Y1060, or, around $8 at current exchange. While getting there was more expensive due to the increase in air fares, being there was not.
Arriving in Tokyo in summer 2022 after 2.5 years meant seeing with fresh eyes all the development that had happened in the interim. And there was a lot - not just downtown (Otemachi/Marunouchi/Yurakucho), but also Shibuya, Toranomon, Shimokitazawa, Kichijoji, Tama and more. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Tsukiji Jogai cluster of merchants still thrives, even after the storied fishmarket’s move to Toyosu. The venerable Hibiya Line has a new stop, in Toranomon Hills, to accommodate new development there.
Not all of this was Olympic-driven development. Personally, given the amount of time I spent riding the Odakyu line in the 1990s - and waiting at crossing gates - riding the Odakyu Line back from Tama, and experiencing the dive underground at Umegaoka was striking. My navigational memory compass struggled a bit during a brief visit to Shimokitazawa to walk memory lane. That said, the secondhand clothing stores that nestled the alleys of Shimo are still there.
Shimokitazawa …plaza? What to call this reclaimed space?
Apparently this work was finished in 2013, so clearly my visit was overdue. (Information on the broader project, raising and lowering tracks and removing all traffic barriers, is here.)
I assign excerpts from Edward Glaeser’s book The Triumph of the City in my Clusters class at Haas. It features a chapter on how cities succeed. Tokyo gets high marks for allowing developers to develop up (on the Z-axis); for its superb transit system; and for being surprisingly livable and manageable despite being a mega-city that’s really a collection of smaller cities and neighborhoods. This consolidation of economy and population poses all sorts of challenges for Japan as a country. Most of Japan’s 47 prefectures are shrinking. But, walking and navigating across the extended city over the course of several days, the mega-city felt very much alive and well, and most importantly, evolving.
Next up - a talk on Clusters at Shibuya QWS.