An animated road work ahead sign that looks like a worker waving a growing stick at the drivers. Taken in Japan.

Thoughts: Does Japanese drivers response to humanoid signage better than wordy ones? What is the history of Japanese road work signs? How well does it work in day time vs. night time? Weather? Low visibility conditions?

SPAM Japanese Package

On the classic SPAM luncheon meat can, there is a burger made with a slice of SPAM. However on the localized Japanese version of the package, it is a luncheon meat sushi.

This is an example of branding for culture, where the designer acknowledges the different food consumption habit, that in Asia SPAM is more often served with rice than burger buns. However this SPAM sushi package is only available in Japan, perhaps because the company figured that the Japanese market is more sensitive in cultural difference and would be more receptive to special localized branding? I lived in Hong Kong for years and have never seen similar localized branding in the supermarket.

Wikipedia discribes various SPAM eating habit in Asia in this page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_(food)#Asia

This is a good example of how people from different countries would perceive different meanings on abstract concepts, such as the association between colour and season. However, when I tried to find related data and research on the Internet, there are not too much of them except from the fashion industry. Furthermore, the data is usually:

• Single sourced — a single fashion designer or company “forecasting” the trend of new colour for next Spring. It is not a general choice of many many people.
• Context dependent — in this case only for fashion, but not for general purpose.
• Country/culture specific — usually a preference from western world, but not many other countries.

I want to do a tiny research to find the answer of this question: What Colour Would You Choose to Associate with the Four Seasons: Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. I want to gather the data from people all over the world and discover such patterns. My Hypothesis is that, despite of personal preference, people from different countries should have different general patterns related to their geographical location, weather, culture, custom, history, and so on. I hope that at the end of the research I will be able to publish the data, and allow designers of all sorts to use more suitable colour for specific target audiences.

Stay tuned to future posts with the tag “season colour“.

[2] photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/xerones/141357725/

Here is a sketch of a lady who is reading a book in a train. Some observations:

• Use of book cover is very common in Japan. Possible reasons: privacy and protection.
• Hand covering the handbag on the laps.
• Dress is neatly tucked under legs.
• Sitting posture is perfectly straight.

Regarding book cover:

• Choices of material: traditional Japanese fabric, Japanese paper (和紙), leather, plastic and more.
• Just like iPhone case and phone strap, a book cover is an avenue of expressing personality and sense of fashion. Colour, pattern, handcrafted vs. mass produced, material are all important factors.
• Functionality: other than protecting the book from rain and dirt in order to keep it’s reselling value, I think privacy is also an important reason to use a book cover. Train in Tokyo, especially during rush hours, can be very crowded. It is difficult to define personal space, so using a book cover should at least give you some sense of privacy.

Newsstand in Munich demonstrates the cultural assumption that everybody is fundamentally honest and obedient to the social system. The newsstand design is very simple: a freely openable transparent lid, a tray to put the stack of newspaper, and a simple coin slot on the side. The lid is simply to prevent rain from getting into the tray. There is no lock or any monitoring mechanism in the body.

If you so wanted to cheat, you can just effortlessly open the lid and take as many newspaper as you please. But my German friend describes to me that, “why do you need more than one newspaper? Since it doesn’t make any sense, nobody would do it.” and hence no need to add any anti-theft design to it.

During my week-long stay in Munich, Germany, I also found that the locals are very discipline in obeying the traffic signal. Even when it’s late night with heavy rain and no oncoming vehicle visible at sight, the locals would just stand patiently on the curb and wait until the green walking man signal is on.

In a society that is based on trust and discipline, artifact design would be very different from those that are based on skepticism, cynicism, and the trust-no-one mentality.

Today I discovered a website called Twiyaku which offers Japanese to English translation service for your tweets. The provider mygengo.com guarantees that they have over 900 professional translators to perform high-quality human translations of your Japanese tweets into English. This pricing scheme is as following:

Plan A:

• 25,000円/月 (monthly fee 25,000 YEN or $276.95 U.S. dollars)
• 3ツイート翻訳/日 (3 tweet translations per day)
• 単一アカウント利用 (used by single account only)
• 12時間以内の納品保証 (guarantee translation within 12 hours)
• 追加ツイート： 3円/文字 (additional translation: 3 YEN per word per Japanese character)

Plan B:

• 50,000円/月 (monthly fee 50,000 YEN or $553.9 U.S. dollars)
• 7ツイート翻訳/日 (7 tweet translations per day)
• 複数アカウント利用 (used by multiple accounts)
• 12時間以内の納品保証(guarantee translation within 12 hours)
• 追加ツイート： 2.7円/文字(additional translation: 2.7 YEN per word per Japanese character)

Plan C:

• 100,000円/月 (monthly fee 100,000 YEN or $1107.8 U.S. dollars)
• 15ツイート翻訳/日 (15 tweet translations per day)
• 複数アカウント利用(used by multiple accounts)
• 4時間以内の納品保証(guarantee translation within 4 hours)
• 追加ツイート： 2.5円/文字 (additional translation: 2.5 YEN per word per Japanese character)

2010-6-24 Update: thanks Robert Laing from mygengo.com for pointing out the price mistakes in additional translation)

The service is still in beta right now, so there is a 20% discount for the monthly fee. They even provide a web-service API for easy integration from your companies internal CMS or marketing workflow to their translation engine.

My comment: this is outrageously expensive! 100,000 YEN per month for 15 translated tweets per day is very unreasonable to me, realizing that one tweet is only as long as 140 characters. Also, I am not very confident that these people are capable of translating emotion, attitude and tone of voice (happy, professional, angry, annoyed), as well as keeping a consistent presentation that reflects your corporate image. I am assuming this pricing scheme is targeting mostly corporate clients, who must be very concerned about and protective to their corporate online presence.

In my previous post  ”Tweeting in English? There’s a Book for That“, I talked about a book「英語でTwitter！」that teaches Japanese to tweet about their unsuccessful weight loss progress in English. I thought the idea was quite adorable but never for professional purpose. However a good discussion with my Japanese friends made me realize that, it is not that some Japanese people are not capable to writing perfectly understandable English tweets and articles, but it is the fear of public embarrassment when making a single mistake on the Internet, where everything is so open to the eyes of the world, and where published data is irreversible once it’s out in the wild. This psychology might be explained by 恥の文化 (the Shame Society).

Another thought is that Japanese corporates has fallen victim in the Internet social marketing strategy invented by the western world. In the North America, from giant corporates to local bakery and cafe, most of them now have at least one social network presence: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google…etc. Examples: a bakery tweets when fresh bun is just taken out of the oven. Dell and Comcast has dedicated customer service team to deal with angry tweets about their products and services (this article is written in 2008). Now when the younger generation in Japan are picking up the trendy social networks from the west, the Japanese companies has to follow the food and quickly set up their online presence, even if that means an ad-hoc integration of tweet translation to the existing public relation procedures.

As a consequence of such Internet social marketing strategy, the western corporates begin to hire Online Community Managers, who are special people dedicated to handle tweets, social networks, public discussions and blogs, and all kinds of PR to maintain the online corporate image. Even in the western world, such a kind of industry is still emerging and experimental. I will continue to observe how the Japanese corporates will move beyond ad-hoc tweet translations, and continue to evolve into similar dedicated community management concept.

Credit: the source tweet from which I learned about this service is posted by @HirokoTabuchi.

A walk in a local bookstore is a good way to observe the culture. In a Japanese bookstore I discovered a very interesting book called “英語でTwitter!” (Twitter in English!) It is a book full of short English tweets paired with Japanese translation. The tweets are grouped by categories such as Cosmetic, Work, Relation…etc. Here are some examples:

• Can’t sleep lately.（最近、眠れない。）
• Just had a tooth removed/taken out.（痛み止めが切れて来た。メチャクチャ痛い！）
• Gained 2 kilos this week. Agrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.（今週２キロ増えた．ギャーーー！）

Japan is quite famous for it’s huge variety of manuals, with spectrum of topics including falling love, playing golf, getting married, job hunting, interview, and committing suicide.

While some argue that Twitter is a social network full of useless noise from people broadcasting what kind of sandwich they had for lunch, here is a book full of such examples encouraging you to report every bit of your life that’s very much uninterested to all human kind except yourself. Entertaining cute little book, but not sure if it’s really useful.

Some more self-help manuals:

No smoking, not?

Similar examples:

• Speed limit sign
• Do not jay walk sign
• Motivation / safety message sign in factory

Movitation sign in a Chinese factory. Photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/mksfca/4197900465

Shrink wrapped dinner set observed in a lamb hotpot restaurant in Foshan, China. The package contains a tea cup, water glass, bowl, spoon and plate. The name of sanitizing company and process date are printed on the wrap.

Pros:

• Convenient – staff can distribute a complete dinner set very quickly and hassle free. It can save the valuable few seconds from gathering dinner set and put that into better service time.
• Sanitize – it’s more sanitized to store the dinnerware with individual package then just stacking them, some times while still wet, in open air. Also prevent easy contamination by spills, insects, animals…etc.
• Safety – it seems to be safer to handle a tightly wrapped package then loose dinnerware, especially in a high traffic restaurant setting.
• Effective processing – with centralized processing facility, the soiled dinnerware can be cleaned and sanitized in high cost-performance ratio: with high volume, less labour, less resources like water and detergent.
• Human and machinery resources – it is cheaper to hire and train a dinnerware washing specialist than getting someone with well-rounded ability. Also, the company can invest in specialized cleaning machinery that is not otherwise affordable to individual restaurants.

Cons:

• Sustainability (plastic waste) – this package creates lots of non-reusable, hard to recycle plastic waste. In the case of China, it’s simply cheaper to trash the plastic than recycling them, and most people wouldn’t care so much about eco-friendliness.
• False sense of security / legitimacy - can anyone guarantee that the dinner set is absolutely cleaned and sanitized? Guarantee that it’s from a certified sanitizer company? The process date and company name is accurate? Possibility for fraudulence and fake package? In China, it would be naive not to question the legitimacy of everything.

Further thoughts on disposable culture in China:

• disposable table liner
• disposable chopsticks
• foot bath liners
• disposable toilet seat cover (example company: http://www.cleansis.com/about.html)

What’s your thought? Will talk more about some of these items in future posts.

It is not a full-colour store sign with attractive logo and exciting design. It is a mundane folding gate of an old corner store situated at an aging district in Hong Kong. The gate is made of metal with unique engraving of the store name. This kind of gate used to be very common in Hong Kong, but as technology advanced people chose to use other more attractive ways to promote their identity. To me, the engraved gate expresses the long term commitment of the business to the local market, which is no longer the key to success in a global oriented, fast-pace consumerism society. I sometimes wonder, that when we say the term “Corporate Identity / Identity Rebranding” does it always mean trashing the old, existing assets and introducing the new shiny techniques?

See also “Pepsi vs Coca-cola” logo evolution compiled by underconsideration.com for another example of the rebranding issue.