Chris Salzberg
RSS feed for Chris Salzberg 
Latest posts by Chris Salzberg
28 June 2010
Japan and the World Cup: Silencing the critics
Ranked near the bottom of the 32 teams on the field in South Africa, facing odds estimated at 400-to-1 and four straight pre-tournament losses to boot, Japan was not even expected to win a game in this year's World Cup. But with their convincing 3-1 win over Denmark, perceptions have completely changed, propelling coach Takashi Okada from the butt of all jokes to a national hero.
30 May 2010
Japan: Monozukuri for the Modern Age
The Japanese counterpart of Make Magazine, an American quarterly magazine for DIY enthusiasts, organizes a regular event in Tokyo called Make Tokyo Meeting (MTM). The fifth MTM, held at the Tokyo Institute of Technology on May 22-23, was the largest yet, featuring everything from bicycle wheels with LED lights, to complex wooden ball machines, to mechanical robot birds. Check out reports on the event on blogs, Twitter and YouTube.
23 May 2010
Japan: PacMan, still a hit after 30 years
When it was released in 1980, Pac-Man captured the world's attention and transformed the video game industry. Now Pac-Man is back to celebrate his 30th birthday, and he's popping up in unexpected places. In blogs and on Twitter, Japanese reflect on the game that launched their country to the forefront of the global video game industry.
·
read »
17 January 2010
Japan: For Haiti it may be too little, too late
In an odd twist of fate, the worst earthquake to hit Haiti in two hundred years has erupted within days of the 15th anniversary of Japan's worst earthquake since the second world war: the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995. Given the timing of the catastrophe, one might have expected a strong Japanese presence in Haiti. To the frustration of many in Japan, the opposite was in fact the case.
·
read »
4 November 2009
Japan: Debating the fate of Shimokitazawa
Tokyo's neighborhood of Shimokitazawa is well-known for its complicated spaghetti-like web of shop-lined streets, train tracks and back alleyways, but that web may be in for a big change. Plans to redevelop the area to make way for a 26-meter wide thoroughfare had already aroused opposition among some of the area's fans, but a proposed new design scheme for the local train station has added fuel to the flames. Blogger Hideaki Matsunaga explains why.
·
read »
12 March 2009
Japan: On Twitter, nobody knows you're a bot
“On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.” -- The words of a well-known adage dating back to a New Yorker cartoon from 1993 capture the anonymity people generally expect from online communication. This week a new take on this adage hit the Japanese blogosphere when a blogger discovered that two of his closest friends on Twitter were actually bots designed as part of a programming contest.
·
read »
Next time we will be there again :)