The most typical strength of Japanese nation I think the strength of Japanese society is motivation. We can easily work hard and motivate me with a kind of stupid reason. The challenge in recent years is we don't have incredible motivation for working because of aging society. The current system in Japan is a typical squeeze by seniors. No seniors try to motivate younger people and they just mention "We were strongly motivated and worked harder than the current youngs". I think that's a stupid opinion. People who have authorities should design the incentive in typical games. If you couldn't do that, players(younger people) would get frustrated. Who can actually design new game. We just follow silicon valley methodology. I really hope we establish our own methodology for global society.

Future in content, entertainment and media I enjoy reading manga every day thanks to Amazon Unlimited. It is a subscription service you can read as many as you like in tons of available books. I think the distribution cost of manga dropped significantly in a recent couple of years. Then many manga authors can skip some editing company or major book shop distributors. So is it easy to sell manga? Not at all. Manga authors need to differentiate their works from a lot of competitors and if you aren't famous enough, it becomes harder for you and your works to get people's attention. I can see the same thing in the celebrity industry as well. They don't need to communicate with the large TV stations or the agency. Just broadcasting you via YouTube, then you can become the hottest talent in the world, YouTuber. However, they seem to be struggling to establish a strong image among many YouTubers. One of the most famous YouTubers in Japan buys a lot of luxurious goods and shows them. Like $100 tissue box, $30000 Louis Vuitton trunk etc... They look a little bit anxious because they have already entered into the endless competition on YouTube. Upload an exciting video and increase their subscriber, then creating a video, editing a video... They do this cycle every day because their competitors do every day. And one of them just said that it's ridiculous because they can't do anything they had wanted to do. Maybe in the future, the cost of creating contents will also go down. For example, just share your plot of a story in the text format, AI will create your original manga or animation based on the text information. I don't think it's impossible at all. Then what manga drawer( sometimes manga is created by pair. Author and drawer. or artist and writer? ) will do in the future? Only a writer can run a business? The same thing will happen in the movie industry as well. And the important thing is who will add an incremental value to the work in addition to AI standardized work. A director, scriptor, producer or writer?

Stupid politeness in Japanese retail store After some incidents about labor issues, Japanese society has tried to transform themselves into more efficient and productive culture.However, it's easy to say. The government and companies try to reduce working hours by putting additional holidays and prohibiting overwork. The reason is easy to measure but it's really questionable for me this kind of reduction truly improve our productivity. When you visit Japanese supermarkets or convenience store, you can find a cashier never sit down in front of customers.This is the typical our bad culture. Try to behave politely to customers and do what you don't need to do. The worse thing is customers take it for granted and may feel uncomfortable if a cashier sits down. There are many ridiculous behaviour like this in Japanese unique business rules. And I think that's the real issue in Japanese culture. Not overworking. The culture of always dedicating to customer or bosses generates our high-quality service and products however now it damages the life of employees.

How different Japanese and British people feel their responsibility? Through the arguments about Brexit, I feel some differences about the definition of responsibility between UK and Japan. Japanese people basically think PM as a responsible and strong leader because she never give up to persuade the PMs and EU. Additionally, she is still facing so many different headwind and difficulties however she doesn't seem to resign her role. Her attitude seems to be very responsible for Japanese people because Japanese typical leaders easily resign their roles if some troubles happen. On the other hand, British people think she clings to PM role. It's definitely apparent there has been no progress in Brexit conversation for these three years. With 36 months, the only thing we have decided is just to extend the deadline. My British friend said "She should have resigned much earlier. She could neither bring good Brexit deal and persuade the MPs. The responsibility of PM should be executing this deal within a certain limited project period. I don't think she has a clear plan and have any idea where to compromise. The one thing I feel confident about British politics is it's very transparent now. It seems to be chaotic situation for people and actually very chaotic disaster." So I think there is a critical difference between UK and JP about what the responsibility is. Japanese tend to think responsibility is to finish or complete something without giving up. And it's not necessarily based on the results. However British people think the responsibility should be evaluated by the result. And staying in the position without any results means a kind of lack of responsibility.

Why did spin-off startups easily fail? As you may know, startup is one of the most attractive workplaces for all talents in this era. Google, Facebook and other silicon valley venture companies are the top market value campanies in the world. They can easily disrupt existing rules or regulations with their technology and their growth is unbelievably fast. On the other hand, many established companies has tried to change themselves and innovate their industry. One of the typical methods is launching a startup with massive assets, budgets and network which parent company has. In theory, they have an advantage compared to an usual startup which founded 'from scratch' . However, it's not easy to remember the name of a famous spin-off startup which successfully drives their business and overcame their parent company. Why? In my opinion, the main reasons are as follows. 1.Motivation 2.The past success as the current debt 3.Speed Firstly, I know the employees in spin-off startups have high motivation and sense of responsibilities however it's totally far from the ones which true entrepreneurs have. The risk of running a startup is massive. It's like gambling with all your money and time. So I guess the difference of motivation between pure startups and spin-off startups makes a critical gap to business. Secondly, the famous book, 'The Innovator's Dilemma', says a successful company has strong discipline. It often puts the skids under their new business because new business needs some break-through idea which ignores the existing regulations.However, most established companies have achieved their bright successes on the existing rules. Or they created these rules in order to enhance their position. Thirdly, it's the most different one, speed to make a decision. Can you imagine how the established company works? There are so many people only for tiny and small decision. Also they potentially have some conflicts if all decisions are not necessarily beneficial for all departments and divisions. So you need to overcome some politics in spin-off start-ups.

Photo wedding It has been six months since I got married. I and my wife started to consider wedding party however there are some options. 1. Wedding ceremony in Japan 2. Wedding ceremony in the UK 3. Photo wedding I think the most reasonable option would be 3. 1 and 2 have some pros and cons. In terms of the wedding ceremony in Japan, it's not easy to organise everything in Japan from the UK. And Japanese wedding party basically needs a lot of preparation so we need to plan next year ceremony from now. The ceremony in the UK is easier to prepare however it's not convenient for our guests. So we need to narrow down the guest lists. The kind of easy and light option is a photo wedding. I'm not sure it's popular outside Japan however it's one of the realistic options for Japanese couples who live in foreign countries.

Massive pollens in Japan I was back in Japan last week in order to meet my grandparents and my wife's grandparents. It was only 7 days trip including a flight between the United Kingdom and Japan. We have a lot of things to do in Japan so the schedule was quite condensed. Our trip was amazing except for hay fever. Both I and my wife have the allergy to pollen and unfortunately, the season of cedar pollen started from 25th Feb in Japan. We couldn't endure massive pollens without some pills and it makes us a little bit sleepy in addition to jet lag. The season may come to London in a couple of weeks and we definitely hope it would not be as terrible as JP one's....

A difficult concept for me -- Articles The most typical hurdle for Japanese English-learners is "articles". I think we don’t have any interchangeable concepts in Japanese and the patterns of "a" or "the" seems to be very tricky for me. Additionally countable and uncountable nouns make this issue more difficult for me. I already understand the basis of this concept. Article is one of the most important components in English and it may change the meaning of a whole sentence. For example, if you put “the” instead of “a”, you mean a specific thing. -I want to go to a restaurant( any restaurants work for you) -I want to go to the restaurant(you mean the specific restaurant which you mentioned before or your favourite one) And if you say "I like the dog", it means you like the specific dog. (maybe the Yorkshire terrier in your gland mother’s house?). If you want to mean, you like any dogs generally , -I love dogs. And you can't say "I love a dog.". It seems to be very simple so far but in some cases, it’s definitely confusing. For example, "sea", "beach", "sky", "space", "galaxy" I always get confused whether I should put 'a' or 'the'. Furthermore, uncountable nouns like "information", "software" and "effort" make me mad!

I think or I thought I've received many emails about the recommendation of services and products. One sentence attracts my notice. It is "I thought you'd like to check it out." I just wondered the difference between "I think that ...." and "I thought that ..." I understand time tense is different however are there any differences in the meaning? Or is either grammatically incorrect?