Regina Glei's Blog, page 22

Of Hippos and Other Animals

I feel like I’ve been drowned in buzz words this week, since I attended two seminars on agile working methods and next week it will even continue in the “Scrum Master” course I’ll be taking.

So, two buzz words already, “agile” and “scrum”. (Scrum is an agile working method originally from software development that is spreading into other areas as well. The term comes from rugby, describing a big team effort to get hold of the ball again.)

All these methods are more or less desperate attempts to streamline our ways of working in order to be more effective or efficient depending on the philosophy behind it. There is a lot of talk that you need “self-organized” teams in order to survive in the VUCA world, with VUCA standing for “volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous” that our world has become since maybe the Financial Crisis of 2008 and 2009 (or did it start earlier? – maybe). VUCA is of course another buzz word and companies are looking for the holy grail of answers how to survive in our “volatile” market environment.

The best term I came across this week is Hippo – “highest paid person opinion”. Oh yeah! We got a lot of that in big organizations. The Hippo has the most weight (very befitting, isn’t it) and sits there fat and big in the middle of the organization. You can’t move it easily, but once it runs, it can trample you to bits. Even though its “solutions” might be wrong, there’s nothing much you can do about the power of the Hippo. Because of Hippos we are firefighting, break out into whatever “initiatives”, have to drop other tasks, since the Hippo suddenly prioritizes differently…

Yes, Hippos can be a mess, but there is another mess, which I think is even worse. Many people desire Hippos, because the Hippo sometimes also has to take the fall. They say that in every organization of a certain size there are roughly 20% achievers (engaged people) 60% followers (not engaged people) and 20% blockers (actively disengaged people (I just love that term)). The 20% achievers are of course often Hippos. The problem with the 60% followers is that they often don’t want to be responsible for anything, they don’t want to be “empowered” to use another buzz word. They want to be told what to do, to follow orders and to be able to lean back and say, oh, it wasn’t me, I’m not responsible…

So, in big organizations being “agile” has its limits in my humble opinion. You can be agile, networked, empowered and what not in a small startup environment that consists of mostly achievers, but in big companies you’ll always have the drag of the 60% followers, not to even speak of the 20% blockers who you’d like to fire.

I wish all of us big company members good luck with being agile. And, always beware of the Hippos!

My Friends’ Account of Kyushu Earthquakes

The island of Kyushu is a good 1000 km away from Tokyo and the trouble there has so far no influence on us here in the Kanto area. However, I have a special relationship to Kyushu, since I studied at the University of Kyushu in Fukuoka for a year and two months with a scholarship from the Japanese Ministry of Education. I have come to love Kyushu a lot and the great time I had there was one of the factors for why I thought to want to live in Japan for a longer period of time.

I still have two close friends in Kyushu, one is living in Fukuoka, one is living in a town called Isahaya in Nagasaki prefecture. I am in frequent mail and also phone contact with them now.

Isahaya is only 85 km west of the epicentre of the quakes in Kumamoto, if with water in between, the Isahaya and Shimabara bays. Fukuoka lies 120 km north of Kumamoto.

My friend in Isahaya has two small children of 4 and 2, a boy and a girl. They are yet too young to understand what’s going on but were panicking and crying when the first quake hit out of the blue on Thursday evening local time. It shakes heftily in Isahaya, but so far there is no damage to houses or people. Funnily, I “fled” the great East Japan earthquake of 2011, commonly known here as 3/11 because it happened on the 11th of March, to Isahaya and stayed a week there with my friend, who was pregnant at the time.

My friend in Fukuoka has more trouble despite being farther away from Kumamoto. Also in Fukuoka there is no house or people damage yet, but… My friend has two boys of 12 and 10 years and those two know what’s going on. It shakes frequently all over Japan, but it’s the first bigger quakes experience for the two boys. While the older one plays it cool, the younger one is freaked out. There have been over 250 quakes since the first one on Thursday night, many of them big. On Friday night, the younger boy was sitting in the bathtub when it shook again more significantly. He panicked, jumped butt naked and dripping wet out of the tub and ran crying through the apartment looking for his mother. His older brother, still playing it cool, is now teasing him with that… the poor kid! My friend has her hands full with getting the boys under control.

Then, last night, there was a huge quake of more than 7 on the Richter scale at around 1:30 in the morning. My friend was still up and scared, but guess what, the two boys slept (thankfully) through that one!

So, even where there is no destruction, people are stressed, on edge, and kids get traumatized.

I dearly hope that things calm down quickly now in Kyushu so that people can start taking care of the damage and move back to normal, but alas, they are predicting some sort of spring storm for Kyushu tonight with heavy rains and high winds, what will make the situation for many much more miserable. I hope the storm is not getting too bad and that the shaking finally subsides and that Mt. Aso doesn’t freak now too. Mt. Aso is one of the many very active volcanoes of Japan. Even before the quake it was puffing along and you were not allowed to get within a mile of the crater. I’ve been at the crater during my student times, but got sick from the sulphur smell after five minutes and stumbled gasping down the mountain…

We truly are sitting on the Ring of Fire here, yes, we all know that, but nevertheless it’s hard when we get so many reminders of just how alive the Earth under our feet is, which, by the way, makes Japan also a very beautiful place. I hope my lovely Kyushu will calm down soon!

The Decline of NHK

NHK, the Japanese national TV has always been a joke, but now it has become an even bigger pile of junk.

In Japan the new fiscal year starts 1st of April and thus some programs change as of that date.

The more or less only two programs I still watched on NHK, apart from occasionally switching in to the main news broadcasts, were “close up gendai” (gendai means – “present day”), which ran on most weekdays 19:30-20:00, and the “news web” session from 23:30-0:00.

“Close up gendai” took up all sorts of hot topics, national as well as international, from, for example, the rise of depression of regular Japanese office workers to the migrant crisis in Europe. “News web” tried to be “modern”, presented news flashes of the day, dug deeper into one current topic, checked tweet comments of viewers and analyzed “big data” of trending tweets of the day. Both programs were presented by “normal” news presenters, in respectable journalist fashion.

Now, “close up gendai” is moved to after midnight it seems and silly game/talkshow nonsense replaced its slot at 19:30. “News web” has been cancelled entirely and replaced by let me call it “what the fuck – WTF?” Whilst “news web” happened in a regular news studio, somehow designed, with sofas and some decoration in the background, WTF happens in what exactly? A backroom? A storage room? A sound recording room? It looks shabby, small and completely unprofessional. The new “news casters” are show masters rather than news casters, waving silly, making thumbs up and other hand signs, “pop up in front of the camera”, etc. and are totally unworthy of being called serious news casters. They giggle inappropriately, then try to be serious to announce floods in Pakistan, a moment later giggle again and reduce the news to a farce. The camera angles are underlining the idiocy by showing the faces of the happily smiling dipshits from below or other awkward angles.

I do not understand the concept of this “show”. Why the shabby backroom? Why the giggling and waving? To whom is this style supposed to appeal? What happened to serious journalism and news reporting? What the fuck is NHK doing? On which planet do they live?

It’s a shame, as plain and simple as that. It’s outrageous that NHK is forcefully collecting money for their broadcasting. I don’t want to pay for this unprofessional bullshit anymore. NHK is anyway the propaganda channel for Premier Abe, but there were two glimpses of serious, respectable journalism left that are now gone as well. I will check whether I can refuse NHK payment. Poor Japan, with NHK doing its best to further dumb down its populace…

Revenge for Hannibal under Black Sails

These three series don’t belong together, but they left an impression on me.

Hannibal

I didn’t even watch the entire pilot episode and yet I have to say something about this thing and that is: “no thanks”.

I watched all of the movies around Hannibal Lecter and The Silence of the Lambs remains one of the scariest movies I have ever seen. But in the new Hannibal series, seeing a naked woman pierced on deer antlers with her lungs missing, then seeing Hannibal squeezing around those lungs preparing them for a meal… no thanks, I don’t need to watch this. I have no problems with gore and am a great fan of the Walking Dead for example, but naked women pierced on deer antlers and lung cooking are beyond what I want to watch. In Walking Dead you root for the humans who are fighting against the zombies, but there was nobody to root for in Hannibal, at least not in the first half hour of the pilot. In any story cruelty must serve a story purpose, here I saw none.

Black Sails

Pirates! Yeah, pirates are cool. Black Sails is fun and I’m enjoying it and am now in the latter half of season two. It has some nice quirky characters and the anarchy on display is interesting. One aspect strikes me very much though about Black Sails and that is the “desperate” attempt to add “strong” female characters to the story. It’s the policy nowadays to have strong female characters and I’m all for it being a girl myself, but in Black Sails it does feel kinda forced. Let’s face it, pirates is a men’s world, there weren’t that awfully many female pirates. So the writers of the series faced the dilemma how to integrate strong female characters into a pirate story. They offer us four women, Ms. Guthrie, the not so credible lady who rules the island, the pretty and witty whore (the most believable of the characters), Mrs. Marlowe who has that thing going on with captain Flint, and that strange Ann girl. All of them are interesting in their own right, but that “how do we get strong female characters into a pirate series” aspect always lingers in the background. The stories constructed around the women all seem kinda constructed and don’t flow naturally like the stories around Flint and Charles do.

I like the side characters in this series, the pain-intolerant coward, the half-witted cook, Charles’s comic relief quartermaster. They are fun to watch. The series is interesting and I wish they’d add some Alestorm music to it. Rum!

Revenge

I am usually not the soap opera type, but I do confess to having watched all of the Desperate Housewives. With all the blood, gore, sex and swearing nowadays on TV it was kind of a “break” to watch a series with minimal blood and no “fuck” anywhere. But alas, the Desperate Housewives are done and gone. I started watching “Revenge” now as sort of compensation and so far it remains interesting (I’m nearing the end of season one). Its style is pretty much the same as Desperate Housewives: people are being mean to each other

The Two Parks Mystery

There are three parks in my bike-able vicinity, the biggest (and nicest) being the Ikuta Ryokuchi to the north that has a quite respectable size and contains several museums. South of my place are two small parks (that don’t have websites), which are a mere five minutes away from each other and there is something mysterious going on there.

While park A is flat and has a large children’s play structure in its center, park B is on a hillside and sports no such play structure. Apart from that both parks have a central lawn surrounded by trees and are pretty much alike. Whenever I take the southern park route, I bicycle through both parks and no matter what the season, park A is always well filled with playing children and their families and park B is utterly deserted. Again, the two parks are a mere five minutes walking distance from each other.





I have no clue what’s wrong with park B or why the people living around it shun it and go to park A. Sure, there is the playing structure for kids in park A and it’s flat, but I suspect that cannot be the only reason. I bet that some mystery shrouds park B, ghosts perhaps? A crime committed twenty years ago? There is a washed out sign saying beware of bees in park B, though I haven’t encountered a single one in the seven years I live close to these two parks. Park B is crow domain. There are always quite a large number of them sitting in the trees watching you. Is it the crows that scare people away? Is it the lovely bamboo grove in park B? Something is spooky about park B, crows, unconfirmed bees, bamboo grove, nobody there… needless to say that I like park B much better than park A.

I wonder if I’ll ever find out what park B’s story is, but a part of me doesn’t want to know, since as soon as you do know, the mystery, the speculation, and the story making is gone

Bakugai – Explosive Shopping

We’ve got a new term in Japan – bakugai, which is composed of the Chinese characters for explosion – reading baku in Japanese, and “to buy”. Since explosive shopping sounds better than explosion shopping, let me use the former term.

What’s bakugai? There is a long article in wikipedia – it’s only available in Japanese and Korean languages though. And these are some photos Google gives you when you google the characters 爆買い。

Explosive shopping refers to mostly, but not exclusively, Chinese people, who come to Japan to shop till they drop. The term is around since 2014 it seems, though I got aware of it only recently. Well off Chinese fly to Japan and go on a shopping spree to get their hands on Japanese high quality goods, which are either not available in China or are actually more expensive there, since they are being imported. Exchange rates of course also have their part in this business. Rice cookers seem to be among the most popular things to buy, but also high tech Japanese toilet seats (I kid you not). Then of course a wide range of electronics. Not to forget cosmetics though, which are in strong demand too.

I live in the greater Tokyo area for around 16 years now and I’m working in the heart of Tokyo, at Shibuya, for 13 out of those, for a good ten years I am going nearly every Friday to Ikebukuro for music lessons (at first drums, then vocals, now piano) at a Yamaha music school. In Shibuya, but especially in Ikebukuro the number of Chinese people has dramatically increased.Ten years ago I never ever heard a word of Mandarin in Ikebukuro, now at more or less every corner.

I recently saw a Japanese news report that department stores are steadily loosing customers, mostly to online shopping. Only convenience stores still enjoy growth here. And at least in Tokyo I believe that those department stores mostly survive thanks to Chinese shopping tourists.

In the 90ties, when I was in Japan for the first time, prices were ridiculously high, not anymore, it’s cheaper here nowadays than in Singapore or London and around the same level as Germany, whilst going out eating in Germany has become more expensive than in Japan.

In the BBC they had an article this week that the Drumpf becoming US president is among the top ten global risks. If you look at the list though, the number one threat is that the Chinese economy tumbles. Yep, if those Chinese shopping tourists aren’t coming anymore… although that would be the least of Japan’s worries concerning economic woes in case of the Chinese market collapsing… The politicians might bicker about never heard of before islands in the Pacific, but the Japanese tourist bureau announces happily record numbers of foreign visitors who find their way to our lovely islands here, most of them Chinese

A Martian on Offer

It’s been a while since I wrote some movie reviews. The reasons for that are a) busy at work and not seeing that many movies, b) not so much remarkable stuff out there that inspires me to write a review.

But now there are two movies that I’d like to say something about.

At first something not so well known, but that I highly recommend (spoiler alert).

The Best Offer

I don’t think too many people saw that movie, which is a shame, since it’s awfully good.

It’s a European production with Geoffrey Rush in the lead role and Donald Sutherland in a supporting part. The story centers around an arts evaluator/auctioneer played by Rush, who has a side scheme going on. He pays Sutherland for acquiring some of the auction pieces for him, which he previously evaluated, declared below value to get them cheaper and which he adds to his private collection. That private collection consists of female portraits only. Rush, around 60, has never been with a woman, he is a recluse of sorts, wears gloves all the time for “hygiene” reasons and only admires the portraits of women instead of real ones.

Until he is asked to catalogue the fine furniture and art of a young woman who inherited the stuff from her parents. Now that young woman has a problem. She has fear of wide and crowded places and lives as a true recluse, hiding out of sight in a secret room of her villa. Rush talks to her through the wall and slowly becomes obsessed with her, wanting to see her face, identifying himself with her, since he has similar problems. Finally, she reveals herself to him and he falls in love with her.

Although I anticipated the ending from the moment she reveals herself to him, it was devastating to see that ending play itself out. It turns out that she, Sutherland’s character and another side character whom Rush thought to be his friend, were working together with the aim to relieve Rush of his priceless portrait collection. The defeat is thorough and deep… friends whom he trusted played with his anxieties and his innermost feelings to get to the paintings. There is something incredibly mean and vicious in this story because the “friends” hurt Rush’s soul and truly get to him. They destroy the man thoroughly. This is more horror than having zombies gnaw at your feet. The story has no special effects and hardly any blood but it gets under your skin because of the unbelievable betrayal and meanness displayed. That’s the kind of story that sticks with you, but beware – it’ll make you lose your faith in humanity.

The Martian

As a side note – interestingly this movie is called “Odyssey” in Japan. I don’t know why they changed the title. I haven’t read the book, so I can only comment on the movie. I heard the book is much better and more intense, since you get the inner monologue, feelings of the guy stuck on Mars, which is not so easy to express on screen.

I suppose the screenwriter and director had discussions on how to express those feelings. They refrained from voice-over and resorted to the Martian talking to himself or to a camera for the purpose of recording his predicament. Maybe a voice-over would have been better?

The movie is nicely made, a nice piece of hard SF that for the most part looked believable to me. I wasn’t cringing like with dropping into the black hole in Interstellar where the attempt at “realism” excused itself. The Martian looks pretty “real” even if the “Iron Man” stunt at the end is a bit over the top. It’s a nice movie to watch, but it left me emotionally untouched in contrast to “The Best Offer”, because of an odd clinical distance to the characters. I didn’t really feel the commander’s anguish at leaving the Martian behind. I didn’t really feel the despair and the fear of the Martian at having been left behind. I’m sure that this worked better in the book, but the movie failed to convey emotional depth.

Cast Away comes to mind, another Robinson Crusoe variation where Tom Hanks is stranded on a lonely island. I felt much more with Tom Hanks and rooted much more for him than for the Martian. Maybe it’s also the quality of the acting

Luxury-Whining

My sister coined the expression this week – Luxus-Jammern. Jammern is a beautiful German word whose normal translation is to whine, but I’m wondering whether whinging or yammering expresses the tone better.

The trigger for the coinage of the new term was our father, who, behold, is 83 years old, super healthy and currently on 4 (in words “four”) weeks of ski (again “ski”) holidays in the Austrian Alps. And it’s not as if dad was creeping over flat land in snail speed with cross-country skis, no, 83-year-old dad is plunging down steep powder snow slopes in breakneck speeds… Despite that, dad is constantly bitching about the weather on the phone, he would like to have blue sky and sunshine for his four weeks of ski holidays.

Both, my sister and I, and I bet many other people, would LOVE to have dad’s problems at the age of 83! That is why my sister coined the term luxury-whining, because she is tired of hearing him complain about the weather.

Yeah, it made me think that we all better do some appreciating of our easy and nice lives. I don’t even want to compare us – who are lucky to live in western or eastern highly industrialized democratic nations – with people a few hundred years ago or in the depths of poverty and famine today in not so lucky countries. Most of us have never been hungry, cold, homeless or anything similar ever. But wait, my dad has been… he was a kid during WW2 and he has gone to bed hungry and cold… Now in Europe or at its borders many many refugees are sleeping at the side of the road hungry and cold, fleeing from the insanity of war in Syria for example.

I recently watched “Torn Curtain” by Alfred Hitchcock with Paul Newman that was shot during and deals with cold war East Germany in the 60ties. At the end of the movie they flee with a boat to Sweden and have to swim the last few meters. A Swedish guy at the harbor gives them blankets, saying “oh we always have a few blankets here for defectors/refugees”. The nationalities of the refugees has changed, but the rest?

I’m donating to UNICEF for some ten years or more already, guess I should increase the monthly donations and do some more appreciating of the salary I get and the freedom I have and all the little luxuries I can afford and even the heating on/off game I’m playing with a colleague in the office. Hey, at least we have heating! And I hope my dad will be able to enjoy the rest of his four week ski holidays

Temperature Wars

It’s amazing what small things can trigger dislike among people. I’m having a bit of feud with one lady in our office over the heating system

Of Irresponsibility and Aggression

I almost had an accident this week – bicycle versus car.

After work, I rode from the train station towards home in the dark at around 8 p.m. and from a shop’s parking lot a big, fat, white Toyota Alphard comes zooming into the street with roaring engine, giving a shit about my presence and that he should stop before entering a street from a parking lot.

I had to swerve out of his way and showed him the finger while doing so.

That the dude took as an invitation for quarrel and with howling engine drove up next to me, letting down his window, shouting something at me, which I did not catch acoustically (I guess I should be glad I didn’t). I wasn’t in the mood to start a fight with this guy and ignored him and drove on. He picked up speed, letting the engine rev for the third time and deliberately drove past me so close that I almost touched the car with my bicycle’s handlebar, squeezed in between the car and a fence at the side of the road. Then, the dude drove off, much too fast in the 30 km per hour zone.

What a super-jerk!

Luckily he didn’t hit me and luckily I kept my balance and nothing happened.

But – guys like that should have their driving licenses revoked.

One of the reasons for why I am scared of driving is idiots like this dude who endanger their own lives and worse, the lives of others with irresponsible and aggressive behavior.

Maybe the dude had a bad day, but that doesn’t give him the right to ignore my right of way and it even more so doesn’t allow him to deliberately almost hit me. Had I lost my balance on the bicycle, I would have fallen into the fence or the dude’s car…

I am fascinated by the lowness of such kind of aggression. We ain’t that far away from animals yet, are we? It does take so little to make someone snap and do things that he or she will soon regret. It’s quite a leap, but a situation like that confirms my strong believe that the possession of weapons is poison for human nature. I am very glad to have been born and raised in a country where it’s very difficult to own a gun and that I am also now living in a country where it’s even more difficult to be a gun owner. There are enough weapons around already, like cars and knives. We as a people shouldn’t add to that with guns. Coming back to automated driving, please make it possible as soon as you can, you lovely engineers out there, because the sensors of an automated car would stop it before entering a road when leaving a parking lot!