Tokyo’s Muslim

Well, if my visa is any indicator, I’ve been here for about an year.

I started off in Yokohama, moved to Tokyo (Shin-Okubo’s Hyakumancho), went on to Nishi-Tokyo, then back to Machiya, spent 6 months in Shibuya-ku (Sasazuka). Now, I’m in unfashionable Saitama. I’ve never lived further away from Tokyo, but likewise, I’ve never had a higher quality of life.

This week, a retrospective about the things I’ve seen here.

Pokens are these little USB dongles that you tap together rather than exchange business cards. It’s a good way to build up your friends list on facebook/myspace/mixi.. No wait – not Mixi. That’s where the problem starts.

Poken is the perfect info-exchange tool for foreigners in Japan. We aren’t too bent out of shape about appearances, and we all generally hang out on Social networks (if only to keep in touch with home). To that end, Poken is great. I also had a conversation with a friend at Oracle who told me how much he was sick of business cards and how he’d love to trade information some other way. Theoretically, Poken should be awesome for that too. Unfortunately, I’m not Japanese, and this isn’t going to work in Japan until they figure out a few things.

• Giving business cards is a major part of Japanese culture. You can’t replace it with a tap-tap, or they would have done it with cell phones already.
• Exchanging social networking info is great, but Japanese people use Mixi a lot more than Facebook and Myspace. Until it is available, this is a device for foreigners and the beautiful women who love them.
• How hard would it have been to have 10 or 20 formats for your Poken background available from the start? People pay to customize their cell phones; having 5 or 6 different poken layouts at the start would be nice. It would prevent the awful Myspace-esque “purple text on blue background” that I am already seeing.

I think the Pokens are worth 2000 yen to me, especially since I can convert everything to vfile format and store it locally. Unfortunately, I don’t know if Japan is going to feel the same (I heard some j-girls complaining it was “mendokusai”, as they didn’t know how to exchange contacts properly).

At any rate, I wouldn’t throw out my informal business cards yet.