Sunday 26 January 2014

At your own risk


When I visited Western Springs for the first time, I was surprised to see no fences around the lakes. It is common in Japan that ruthless fences are surrounding the water edge with notice boards saying "Danger: Keep away from the water!" as though killer crocodiles are infesting the water.

I saw some Japanese users of Twitter discussing how to raise the awareness of danger related alcohol consumption while taking acetaminophen, as the caution in the package often go neglected. I wondered whether I had seen such cautions here, so I pulled out a package of Paracetamol tablets I bought at a Pak'n Save supermarket. There was no such caution.

However, the risk that Japanese people would take the least is alienating themselves from fellows. I think that is the reason why the Japanese, despite being so risk-aversive as individuals, sometimes take reckless behaviours as a group or a nation, even potentially damaging their own reputation or security.

I think it should be supported as individual rights to have own judgements on risks and act accordingly, but I wonder if it should be extended to preference for groupthink over individuality. Although the people currently living in Japan have the final say, I am concerned that fearing the risk among their internal relationships might cause much bigger risks internationally.


Tuesday 21 January 2014

A Zen way for a non-vegetarian and non-temperance


Japan is a country with a culture heavily influenced by Buddhism, but it is hard to live there as a vegetarian and/or a temperate. Being both of them is associated with the original teachings of the religion. However, in Japan, vegetarian or vegan options are just recently beginning to be introduced for overseas visitors and almost every social occasion involves drinking - so called nomination, a portmanteau of nomi, "drinking" in Japanese, plus communication.

With varying degrees of dualism with the indigenous spiritual belief, Shintoism, the teachings of Buddhism in Japan, especially of Zen schools, are believed as those of living in accordance with the natural consequences of life which are inherently apathetic to human dispositions. Thus the custom of vegetarianism and temperance has only been practised by monks following strict schools of Buddhism, although several rulers have tried to enforce it throughout history and left some influence in Japanese cultures.

Having said that, enjoying great BBQs and nice wines and beers on a beautiful summer day is a natural consequence of living in New Zealand, Aotearoa. In particular, we regard foods as precious gifts of life for us whatever lifeforms they would come from. It is interesting that the ingenious culture of Aotearoa, Māori, gives special respects to foods and has protocols and taboos that have a lot in common with those of Japanese.

So when you do barbies and boozes in a Zen way, you should not forget appreciating all the lifeforms, respecting the ways they exist as they should do and calibrating yourself into harmony with them. Also, you should eat and drink responsibly because their natural consequences would always catch up with you.


Thursday 16 January 2014

Rotorua - a promised friendship between two brave people



Before I visited Rotorua for the HINZ 2013 conference, in the Te Reo Māori (Māori or indegenious language of New Zealand) course at Te Wānanga o Aotearoa, I studied and presented about Rotorua and Kahumatamomoe, the ancient Māori explorer after whom the lake was named. In the study, I found an old news article of the New Zealand Herald on 12 July 1916, titled "Japanese and Maoris - Brave Races Fraternise" which reported that Māori people welcomed Japanese sailors.

After the Japanese Navy escorted the ANZAC convoys to the European theatre during the World War I, it had been a tradition of the Japanese Navy to visit Rotorua when Japanese training ships visited New Zealand until the menace of war engulfed the whole world again in the late 1930's.

What made this significant for me was that my grandfather served in the Japanese Navy during the period when the Pacific Ocean meant what its name suggested. Thus there is some chance that my grandfather visited the geothermal city long before me, as he once told me that he had crossed the equator in a voyage.

He did not serve in the fleet during the war. I heard that he worked at shipyards building and repairing warships but he did not talk much about the wartime. He was not a warlike man. Whether he had visited or not, he must have heard about Rotorua and hospitality of the people there. He must have been pleased to know that I could return some gratitude to them in my tauparapara or the opening of my presentation at the conference there.

Tuesday 14 January 2014

Mmes “Nuclearotic” Minds or: How Japanese Housewives Learned to Stop Worrying and Leave the Homeland



In the previous post, I mentioned about my presentation at HINZ 2013. The theme of the paper I submitted for the conference was the Twitter's impact on unprecedented scale of the exodus among ordinary people in Japan namely domestic housewives after the Fukushima Nuclear Accident.

Before the accident, Japanese expatriates were rare on Twitter and could easily acquire thousands of followers by tweeting bits and pieces of the daily life in a foreign culture. The shocking videos of the explosions at the nuclear power station changed everything. I have witnessed a number of people seeking information about how to get out the country to a foreign land, maintain daily living in an unfamiliar country and find a way to settle there permanently. I wrote my paper to record their odysseys collectively.

I know through Twitter, considerable people are keep leaving Japan for good. More are planning to do so in near future. However, for a population of more than 120 million, is still only a fraction and even fewer than the recently decreased Kiwi exodus across Tasman. Still this is a big change for a country where vast majority of people are born and die there. I do not think it would have been possible without the prevalence of social network services especially Twitter.

As I listen to those people, they are not acting out of fears. For those who are emigrating, they are just seeking alternatives. Japan has a lot to offer but the options often come as a predetermined set. It may be the result of too much optimisation to an overly cohesive population. I hope that the current diaspora of Japanese bring more diversity to Japanese as an ethnic group.

Monday 13 January 2014

Health IT is no longer the future, it is the reality as a commodity


The most significant event for me in 2013 was attending and giving a presentation at the Health Informatics New Zealand (HINZ) 2013 Conference and Exhibition on 27-29 November in Rotorua. It was second time for me to attend the annual conference and the first time to give a presentation there. Actually it is my first peer-reviewed public presentation on an academic study.

Another first experience for me was that during the whole conference I experienced the power of the information technology in sharing information and connecting people at first hand as well as being explained, actively involved in discussing, and charged for presenting myself.

My presentation was about the role of Twitter in driving Japanese housewives' nuclear exodus from ordinary domestic life after losing faith in the health policies of the nation. Even so, it was a fresh experience of tweeting through the conference with some other active Twitters. I recorded it as retweet in the @HL7NZ Twitter account. Thus we are talking about what we can do hear and now rather than what we will be able to do somewhere or sometime. However, it had some drawbacks as some vendors saw less opportunities of technical developments of their own and were withdrawing from actively backing up pilot projects.

In the HINZ 2014 conference and exhibition, HL7 New Zealand is planning to host a competition of working health IT interoperability solutions according to realistic sample data sets and scenarios. I am thinking of participating myself. Like the MythBusters, I would not only tell the myth but put it into the test. I hope it would be proved as Plausible rather than Busted.

Friday 10 January 2014

Don't forget your roots


Every year, on 9 to 11 January, Osaka, one of the largest cities in Japan and my home town, becomes lively as it celebrates festivals for the god of fishers and merchants, Ebisu. Ebisu is one of the Seven Lucky Gods which are commonly worshiped in Japan. In some schools of Japanese Buddhism, regarded as the guardians of the teaching of Buddha as they provide peace of mind for pursuing the path to enlightenment.

It was my fond memory that my whole family led by my grandfather and father visited the local Ebisu's shrine to pray for the family business's flourish of the year. At the festival we can have festive foods and toys from stalls. When you pray for the god, you have to beat a huge gong as it is said Ebisu is hard of hearing. No wonder, not every business or merchant becomes flourish. My little brothers and I beat the gong as strong as we could hoping for our family business going well.

From unknown reasons, the festive music for the festival at the shrine of Ebisu featured a characteristic refrain played by an electric bass. So when I first heard Six 60's "Don't forget your roots" I felt like I had heard this before. After pondering a while I realised that the electric base sound of the tune reminded me of the Ebisu's festival.

In New Zealand, there are many people doing their own businesses. I am doing a small one along with my full-time job, too. In this sense, I don't forget my roots. For those of you like me, I with your business prosper this year. May the force of Ebisu be with you!

Thursday 9 January 2014

A maverick's tribute to the late Professor Emeritus Hiroshi Hagiwara


The late Professor Emeritus of Kyoto University, Hiroshi Hagiwara (1926 - 2014) was a Japanese computer pioneer. Between 1970's and 80's, he developed QA-1 and QA-2, which were computers with four arithmetic logic units (ALUs) controlled simultaneously and in parallel by a very long instruction word (VLIW) and used them for various research purposes including computer graphics and language processing.

When I studied at the Computer Architecture Laboratory he had already left the lab. Unlike most of my fellow graduates of the Department of Information Science I started off my career in business earlier rather than pursuing academic one. Thus my acquaintance with Hagiwara-sensei was limited except his monumental (literally) QA-2 computer enshrined in the lab and his book on computer hardware used as the textbook for his undergraduate class.

His books was filled with interesting illustrations of mechanisms for data input and output in 1970's including punch card readers and teleprinters. I had a chance to talk him in person at some alumni function about the book and he told me he really enjoyed the research about such devices for writing it. I felt his passion for connecting computing power to real world applications and I was really impressed.

There are plenty of people who received his tutelage and I just barely qualify, however, he had a great influence on my career especially in having courage to be a pioneer, conceiving innovative architecture and making it real.

R.I.P.



Sun Tzu and Hippocrates


Sun Tzu often referred 'skilful leaders of old' in his famous "The Art of War". Translate it into modern healthcare context, as in my another blog, requires an equivalent of the 'skilful leader of old' in medicine. I suppose that few people would strongly oppose to choosing Hippocrates in this place.

Although it was not likely they both lived at the same time, the birth years of Sun Tzu and Hippocrates supposed to be separated less than 100 years. It is another interesting coincidence.

In fact, Hippocratic Oath, both in the original form and the modern version, agrees well with Sun Tzu's principles: Avoidance of unnecessary invasiveness, judgement based on time-tested methodologies and observance of privacy to name a few.

Either within the body or across the borders, they both argued mastery of strategy to safety and health. Also, they are in common with their holistic approaches and encompassing knowledge. In the age of multidisciplinary care today, we would have a lot to learn from them. 

Wednesday 8 January 2014

Going back to film or basics



When I found this camera body at Auckland Camera Centre's website I thought it would be way cheaper than a Nikon FX-format body to fit full-format Nikkor F mount lenses I owned. I had been using a Nikon D80 which has a smaller DX-format image sensor and thus could capture only a part of image my lenses produced. I thought it was good deal and bought it.

Nikon New FM2 is a manual focus, manual exposure 35mm-format film camera. That means quite classic and mechanical. You can take a picture even without a battery if you go without exposure metering. It is the kind of camera I started learning serious photography.

To be honest, I had not been bothered to take photographs actively before I got this camera. It reminded me of excitement of taking pictures. I found a nice photo lab who develops my films and burns into CDs. I pulled out my lenses to attached to it and enjoyed taking pictures with them.

Of course, it would be costly and unrealistic to go back to film totally. Fortunately, it is not a matter of "one or the other" and this camera brought me back my passion for digital photos, too. It is great to go back to basics sometimes to keep your enthusiasm alive.

Tuesday 7 January 2014

De-mythifying Japanese food


If you want to taste typical Japanese food, I recommend you to stay at a neat simple hotel in Japan which offers morning buffet. The picture above is an example of dishes they would serve and it is almost the daily intake for a Japanese adult. (Not many people in Japan have such a 'big' meal especially for breakfast, I am a rare exception.)

You notice that there is no sushi, sashimi, tempura or some other 'Japanese food' you would think. This is because by typical, I mean 'daily and ordinary.' We do have sushi, sashimi or tempura for a dinner but not so often as you think we do. For breakfast in busy morning we have coffee (or black tea) and bread, more likely toast, only. Many of cafes in Japan provide 'morning set' service - if you order coffee they serve you toast (and sometimes with an boiled egg) for free or cheap extra.

Now you would have better ideas of why the Japanese diet is so healthy. I don't mean what you can get at your local Japanese restraints is unhealthy but a real Japanese diet is much healthier than you think.

Another aspect of typical daily Japanese food is its variety. Main dishes for dinner may be Chinese, Indian, French, Italian, German or other ethnic as well as Japanese traditional and even combinations of them and all in relatively small potions. Naturally it becomes a more balanced diet compered to having similar dishes everyday.

Now you know why a Japanese looks embarrassed when you ask him or her if having sushi everyday.

Sunday 5 January 2014

Be Know Do: Leadership the Army Way


I have just finished reading "Be, Know, Do: Leadership the Army Way" from the Leader to Leader Institute. As I am translating "The Art of War by Sun Tzu" into a modern and healthcare context at my another blog "Sun Tzu for Health Strategy" I was interested in how the military of the 21st century is coping the changing reality of today's fast-paced entangled world.

It was amusing to find that an 'archetypal command-and-control organisation' is no longer there, instead the US Army now exists as a learning organisation where 'leaders at all levels work to establish an organizational climate that rewards collective learning' treating every soldier not 'a cog in the machine but a person with mental, emotional, and physical dimensions' being a leader his or herself.

This does not mean the Army became soft or lax. Rather, it is the result of stern recognition and deliberate efforts to meet the challenges from the predominant conditions of VUCA - volatility, uncertainty complexity, and ambiguity of the current world. Without mobilising every single person's recognition and analysing skills, a fighting organisation cannot acquire enough information, formulate action plans, or communicate/coordinate the execution for the next moves required to make instantly and simultaneously at multiple places at multiple levels.

Naturally the lessons learned here can be applied not only to military but also business and social organisations. As Sun Tzu said: The art of war is of vital importance to the State. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence it is a subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected.

Saturday 4 January 2014

Taking wings


I wanted to be a pilot when I was a kid. If I was born in New Zealand instead of Japan, I think I would have chosen a career involving flying as a crew in some way or another. In reality, I became a pilot leading implementation of various health information systems and development of standards for them, meanwhile having earned a quite amount of flying miles in passenger seats.

When I started tinkering about computers more than a quarter century ago, flying in a home computer screen was a joke in today's standard. I was in a cockpit of a B-1 Nuclear Bomber penetrating deep into the Soviet territory for a doomsday sortie by controlling the supersonic bomber in CUI, character user interface which was not communicating through your avatar, but only typing text as commands and getting text as information and feedback.

I was really impressed by the beautiful graphics and dynamic actions when I found my children were playing War Thunder by Gaijin Entertainment. My son helped me out installing the game into my Mac and there I went - completing the training sortie and I enjoyed it throughly reliving the excitement of my childhood dream.

See you somewhere in the sky!

Friday 3 January 2014

There is no Swiss cheese


According to a net friend of mine, there is no Swiss cheese. At least, you wouldn't be able to buy one in Switzerland. It sounds funny for me being in a community intensely talking about the Swiss Cheese Model.

Naming things or concepts can be very tricky. Recently I was involved in a discussion about how we should find a name for an information object that defines what a document should be like but does not constitute the document itself.

All parents may face a similar problem because the name they give to their child becomes a part of the child's identity and presents what they hope for in their child but essentially the child's identity should be established by the child itself. The recent results for such efforts saw many Oliver's and Charlotte's in New Zealand

A name may have powerful influence on and interact with how we see it, how we understand it, how we handle it and what we do with it. When we create something we should name it properly and make sure that it means properly what its name represents.

Thursday 2 January 2014

Turbulent time ahead


One thing I do appreciate in New Zealand is its picturesque skies. Māori people are so right about calling our country Aotearoa - the Land of the Long White Cloud.

The transitions of various shapes and forms of clouds are gorgeous but it indicates the complex and changeable weather of this island country in the midst of the South Pacific.

No rains were forecasted today according to the MetService this morning. But now it's windy and cloudy and it seems that there may be downpours.

It was windy but sunny when I hang the laundries outside in the morning. Sunshines are still coming through clouds. I am buying time being ready to jump out at the first hint of rain approaching.

I suppose that this is exactly the situation we all have been placed as the turbulent time is expected ahead. We have to make assumptions, take positions with some risks and keep vigilant to tell the time to take actions.

If you are too cautious to take any positions, you would get nothing. If you are too careless to tell the time to take actions, you would lose everything.

What a stressful time we are living in!