Your Japanese textbooks are lying to you
They probably mean well. They are telling you something that is easy to understand and that seems...
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Category: Japanese Culture
How Japan’s forgotten past can stop IoT’s dystopian future
Technology is global, but ideas are local. The same IoT technology is being deployed all over the...
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DJ Selects: Why Men Need Women Founders
Ari Horie has always had a different approach to supporting women entrepreneurs. She doesn’t talk about “empowering” women and …
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Outside of the Bubble with Japan’s Startup Girls: Mone Kamishiraishi
Those of us who spend our lives working with startups live in a bubble. Whether you spend your...
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DJ Selects: The Myth of the Successful Startup Failure
Startup culture has crazy and contradictory views about failure. As founders we are told to fail fast, but also to never give up. We are told to follow our vision, but be ready to pivot. Somehow this macho-bullshit culture of “I never really fail and ‘m not afraid of failure.” has become dominant amount founders. But it’s the result of denial. Trivializing failure is a way of not thinking about it’s effects.
The truth is that failure sucks. Failure is painful. Failure …
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DJ Selects: The Real Reason Uber is Failing in Japan
Uber and Airbnb represent a new very kind of startup, one that could not have existed twenty years ago, and the very thing that make these companies so transformative in the United States ensures they will never succeed in Japan. You see…
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Is There (Finally) a Practical Way for Foreigners to Live in Japan?
For decades, Japan has been struggling with the economic need to attract more foreign residents to...
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What This 330-Year-Old Company is Learning from Startups
The conventional wisdom is that traditional Japanese companies can’t innovate. And...
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How Japan’s Unique Relationship with Robots is About to Make it #1 Again
Japan had been a global leader in robotics for decades, but recently the traditional Japanese...
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How Japan’s evocative machines are quietly creating new startup unicorns
This is a rather personal episode. We have no guests this time. It’s just you and me. Today,...
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Why Artificial Intelligence Is The Key to Fixing Japan’s Rigid Education System
Using artificial intelligence to change the way the education system works seems like a fool’s...
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Why Japanese Design Is So Different & What You Should Learn from It
There are a lot of passionate opinions about Japanese design. From the beauty and subtlety of the...
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