A reader of this blog posted the following question to me:
A question for a cosmopolitan Japanese, connoisseur and graduated in the art of living: where is that, in this city called London, I can order for delivery Japanese and oriental flowers?I'm sorry I don't know the answer. You may want to visit the Japan Centre on Piccadilly and ask its shop assistants. They may know something.
Let me put on a hat as a development economist today.
The November issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics (or QJE for short), one of the top 5 academic journals in economics, is released today. It features two papers in the field of development economics.
One paper, written by Marianne Bertrand, Simeon Djankov, Rema Hanna, and Sendhil Mullainathan, analyzes corruption involved in the acquisition of driver's licenses in India. They find the following facts in a convincing way (there are other findings in the paper, but these are less convincing):
1. If a man in Delhi is more willing to obtain a license quickly, he will be more likely to obtain one without taking the licensing exam.
2. Such a man pays about 50 percent more fees over and above the official fee for licensing.
3. But he is no more likely to bribe bureaucrats at the transport office.
4. Instead he is more likely to hire an "agent", a professional who helps individuals obtain a license in return for a fee. Presumably, these "agents" pay bribes to bureaucrats on behalf of license applicants.
5. These agents can procure licenses irrespective of the applicant's driving ability. They don't even charge a higher fee for applicants who can't drive.
6. These agents are, however, less likely to procure licenses for applicants who don't have documents required for application (proof of age and area of residence).
Maybe these findings are obvious to Indians or people from developing countries with rampant corruption. For development economists, however, this is a "finding", especially the presence of "agents". We always believed that when corruption occurs, citizens directly pay bribes to bureaucrats. That's not the case, at least for driver's license applications in India.
Another lesson from this paper is that corruption is socially harmful. Some economists in the past argued that corruption is good because it speeds up the lengthy bureaucratic process. But the study shows that corruption increases the number of people with a driver's license who actually cannot drive.
Finally, finding 6 suggests that corruption to bend official rules is more difficult for rules that are easy for higher-up government officials to check.
For the other development economics paper published in the QJE this month, please wait.
Last week the publication of Tokyo Michelin Guide hit the news headline. A Swedish colleague of mine was surprised by the total number of stars awarded to Tokyo restaurants which exceeds any other city in the world (including Paris).
What I was surprised is, however, the lack of the Michelin Guide for Tokyo until now. It well reflects the Westerners' ignorance of the quality of services in Tokyo, and in Japan more generally.
The year of 2007 already saw a change in this: the launch of Monocle magazine, the magazine I keep talking about since day one. Every monthly issue introduces the reader in the West to Japanese top quality players in the service and consumption goods industry, from hotels and airlines to cosmetics, foods, and bags. And the magazine recognizes Tokyo and Kyoto as among the 20 most livable cities in the world.
But it's not enough. The world isn't fully aware of how demanding Japanese consumers are and how great, as a response, is the services provided by companies, both domestic and foreign, in Japan.
What I recently discovered is a stark difference in HP's website between Japan and UK. I was trying to find the best HP printer for me. But electronics shops in Stockholm are stressfully unhelpful because each shop stocks a different set of printers. The comparison of all the available products in the market takes a lot of walk. Also, each shop is pretty much under-staffed. It's difficult to seek assistance, or it takes a lot of time by waiting to be served. So I did search on the web.
As the Swedish website is, as always, hieroglyphic to me, I turn to the UK one. But the website doesn't help me choose which one suits my need. I then access to the US website. It looks like a search result on Amazon.com, which means that it's not easy for me to spot the best printer.
So I visit the Japanese one. And it is amazing. When I see the list of HP printers, it's almost immediate to learn which functions are available for which printer. Each function takes up one square in a 3 by 5 matrix shown next to the printer image. If a printer lacks in a particular function, the square for that function is left blank. As the position of each function in the matrix is fixed for all printers, just a glance at the list tells you the difference among printers. So I immediately learn which printer is what I'm looking for. Compare this to the British version in which each printer's functions are listed in the bullet-point style.
Usually, this method of searching the best product in the market doesn't work because what's available in Japan is often unavailable in Europe. This is because the range of products in Europe is smaller or because the European electronics market lags behind the Japanese one by 6 to 12 months. Thankfully, this time the best printer in Japan was available in Stockholm.
Since I'm used to this Japanese-style product catalogue during the 24 years of my life in Tokyo, shopping electronics products in London was, and in Stockholm is, (and, I believe, in other European countries will be) such a pain in the neck.
I'm not sure whether this difference in consumption culture between Japan and the West (or at least UK and Sweden) comes from the difference in awareness (ie. people in Europe have never imagined that such a level of service quality is feasible) or the cultural difference at a deeper level (ie. Japanese people are materialistic while Europeans derive satisfaction from invisible things---travelling abroad, staying with family members, etc.).
But I'm sure that daily life in Japan, such as things described in this post, should be intriguing to Westerners. This blog keeps trying to spread the word on what's standard in Japan but not in the rest of the world (the post below is an example).
The Japanese mobile market is so isolated from the rest of the world (e.g. Apple's iPhone is not available in Japan, and Apple has no plan to sell it in the Far Eastern country) that its evolution is beyond your imagination (just like animals in Australia is different from the rest of the world).
By clicking here (this is a news video clip in Japanese, but just keep watching the images), you will see the latest mobile handset in Japan (called Infobar 2). The round-shaped edge of the handset is amazing. And this handset allows you to watch digital television channels (called "1-seg").
Once you are aware of Japan's latest mobile handsets, mobile shops in Europe start looking so boring.
The number of blogs written by development economists appears to be on the rise. One of such blogs, the one by Chris Blattman, offers a tip for fieldwork:
[When] running surveys ... [i]n western Kenya, parents were reluctant to name their exact number of children lest it be seen as boastful, provoking God to take one of them away. ... [W]e learned with time to ask about an eldest child, counting down child-by-child without ever mentioning the total number.
Allkort is a Swedish term for a credit card. Or so I believed. When I opened my bank account, I applied for a credit card. A week later, my credit card was delivered by post. So far so good.
Then I tried to pay by this credit card. It didn't work.
The card was rejected. I called the bank up. They said I needed to activate the card. So I asked them to do it.
Then I tried to pay by this credit card. It didn't work.
In Britain, debit cards are clearly different from credit cards. That's why I applied for a credit card. My Swedish debit card, however, can be used as a Mastercard. So I actually don't really need a credit card.
So I just left aside the useless credit card.
Today, I need to visit my bank to obtain my ID card. The ID card is an essential item in Sweden because you are often asked to show it when you pay by credit/debit card. (You also need to show it when you rent a DVD, or so they say. I don't watch DVDs, so I don't know for myself.) It takes 4 to 6 weeks to issue after placing an order either at a post office (which is almost non-existent in this country, by the way) or at a bank.
When receiving my ID card, I ask the bank staff why my credit card does not work. They say,
"Because you don't put any money on the credit card account."
"What?"
I'm totally confused. By definition, you can use a credit card when you don't have money, can't you?
The bank staff at the desk cannot answer my question in English. She asks for help from her colleague. And I learn this. You can use your credit card by transfering your money in the standard bank account to the credit card account. (And the money in the credit card account earns a higher interest rate than the standard bank account.) You can also use your credit card by applying for a credit limit with your income statement as proof of your payment ability.
In Japan and in UK, when I applied for a credit card, I could immediately use it without applying for a credit limit. The credit limit is automatically provided. And there was no such system as depositing money in the credit card account to use the card.
I don't know if this applies to other Swedish banks as well. So I cannot generalize this to Sweden as a whole, especially because my bank appears to be the worst one in Sweden. (I couldn't choose because it's almost part of my employment contract.) But I didn't know that the system of using credit cards could be different from country to country.
By visiting a tiny bookstore selling Japanese books and magazines in Stockholm today, I learn that Luna Sea, my favorite rock group since my secondary school days, will hold a gig on the Christmas Eve this year, 7 years after they broke up. The gig is aptly titled "One Night Dejavu". This news was actually released last September. I just didn't know it until I found the September issue of a magazine at the bookstore. (This bookstore sells Japanese magazines with a few month delay.)
X Japan, another favorite Japanese rock group of mine since my secondary school days, will soon release a new single "I.V." for the first time in 10 years after it broke up. The new single is featured in the ending credit of US film "Saw 4".
These news bring back my memory during those days, which I'm not sure if I'm comfortable with. These rock groups mean a lot more to me than you would imagine.
Added on March 28, 2008
Luna Sea's gig on December 24, 2007, can be seen in this post.
X Japan's gig on March 28, 2008, can be seen in this post.
This is a sequel to the previous post.
Ray Fisman, an economist at Columbia University's business school, empirically proved the following. (These are quotations from Fisman's column at Slate.) In choosing whom to date with,
Finding #1: "Men avoided women whom they perceived to be smarter than themselves. The same held true for measures of career ambition—a woman could be ambitious, just not more ambitious than the man considering her for a date. When women were the ones choosing, the more intelligence and ambition the men had, the better."
Finding #2: "Women of all the races we studied revealed a strong preference for men of their own race: White women were more likely to choose white men; black women preferred black men; East Asian women preferred East Asian men; Hispanic women preferred Hispanic men."
Finding #2 is a serious threat to my marriage perspective. In Stockholm, there are very few East Asian women. What's worse, an additional finding says,
"East Asian women did not discriminate against white men (only against black and Hispanic men). As a result, the white man-Asian woman pairing was the most common form of interracial dating—but because of the women's neutrality, not the men's pronounced preference."So the precious East Asian women in Stockholm are likely to date with white men. (Of course, this assumes external validity of the finding. What happens in U.S. is the same as in Stockholm.)
I didn't know that asking help from customer services is the most difficult thing for a person who lives in a country whose native language he/she doesn't understand.
My broadband connection at home has failed since two days ago. Since making a phone call to the broadband provider's customer service just ends up in an automated message in Swedish (which of course I don't understand), I emailed them writing my request in English yesterday.
Within an hour, an auto-reply message came to my email inbox, which is of course written in Swedish. I initially thought this was just an indication that they received my email. So I didn't try to ask somebody Swedish to translate it for me.
One day later today, no further response. I asked a Swedish colleague at the workplace for translating the auto-reply message. She said, "You need to click this line in the message to confirm your email message."
So I clicked it today, which took me to a webpage which is of course in Swedish. I asked the colleague again to translate it. It says that this is your inquiry number and they will respond shortly.
Fixing the broadband connection is, therefore, delayed by one day.
After coming back from Boston, the summer time has ended in Sweden.
Which means that the sunset time is now 1 hour earlier.
After 3pm, the sky starts darkening; by 4:30pm, darkness prevails. It's early November, but I'm here in Stockholm.
Temperature does not exceed 5 degrees celcius these days. A couple of days ago, the landscape was covered with snow when I woke up, this winter's first snowfall in Stockholm.
I've decided to wake up early and go to bed early so that I can maximize the exposure to the sunlight, from dawn to dusk.
Welcome to dark winter in Stockholm.
I fly with Swiss Air to Boston because it allows me to stay in Zurich for 8 hours on the way back. Just wanted to see what one of the 10 most livable cities in the world is like.
Going to the city center from the airport is extremely easy: it takes 11 minutes by train. When I bought a ticket to Zurich city center at the counter, I was told (before asking) which platform and what time the next train to the city center departs. The way back to the airport is also easy. Just need to find an airport mark on the list of train departures, which tells you which platform you should go. The signage at the city center station (Zurich HB) is also clear enough.
Lunch at Adler's Swiss Chuchi, a cheese fondue restaurant every travel guidebook appears to mention, is a mixed blessing. Fondue with cube tomatoes tastes certainly great. But the amount of cube tomatoes is tiny, and I end up just eating melted cheese topped on cubic bread. A bit boring. And very expensive: with a 500ml bottle of mineral water, it costs 30 Swiss franc or 20 euro. And I feel unhealthy as I didn't eat vegetables properly.
A stroll on Bahnhofstrasse, Zurich's counterpart of London's Bond Street, Tokyo's Omotesando, or Milan's Golden Rectangular, is for sure elegant. Unusual for such an expensive shopping street, the atmosphere is rather laid-back with trams going back and forth in the middle of the street. But at the end of the day the list of shops is the same: Gucci, Prada, Dior, Tod's, and so forth. Way too many bag and shoe shops, of course mostly for women. Boring.
Bahnhofstrasse
Having latte macchiato (there's no "cafe latte") with creme brulee at a cafe by Confiserie Sprungli, Switzerland's most famous chocolatier, is truly refreshing though entering the coffee shop is slightly intimidating.
There are several nice views in the city, but overall central Zurich appears to be a place for the rich. Next time I should explore the area north-west of the Zurich HB station, the former industrial area transforming itself into a bohemian district.
Lake Zurich
A view from Munsterhof square
Dine Boston Cafe, a restaurant just in front of the security check gate in the Logan International Airport (Terminal E) seasonally features some meals by a chef of a Boston's local restaurant, a very admirable initiative given that nobody wants to end their trip to Boston with uninspiring meals at the airport. This season's featured restaurant is Chez Henri, serving French meals with Cuban twists. Fresh oysters slightly topped with chili and vinegar sauce for a starter, and beef steak with tomato and basil sauce accompanied with crunchy and spicy French fries for the main, beautifully puts an end to my four-day stay in Boston.
I find Boston similar to London in many ways: dimly-lit interior spaces, uncomfortable metro trains, smelly booze pubs, the difficulty to eat salad in restaurants, etc. The cityscape of Boston is better than that of London: Boston has at least got this pleasant, red-brick covered street-scapes. 
Marlborough Street, Back Bay
But I see stupid demonstrators blocking city traffic here as well. The presumably picturesque Copley Square was spoiled by politically-charged Americans shouting their ideology. (Boston Public Library was an escape from all this.)
Cambridge, a neighbouring town where Harvard and MIT are located, is a weird place. From central Boston, take the red subway line and the first station is Kendall/MIT. The area is Tokyo-ish: super-modern high-rise residential buildings without any hint of tradition. But it seems to be the place where you can find some hidden gems (like The Blue Room, Toscanini's, List Visual Arts Center---see below). Stata Center looks rather ugly, though. 
Stata Center at 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge
The second station Central is in the area with many immigrants: the atmosphere is a bit like London's Brixton. I smell of ganja. Then the third station is Harvard, where I feel rather uncomfortable and sometimes even depressing. Perhaps because I'm never comfortable with the mainstream or what the majority believe is true.
In the end, I didn't try hard to explore the city because I didn't feel like doing so (I didn't visit downtown Boston). Given that Boston is called the Athens of America, maybe I'm fundamentally disinterested in what constitutes America.
Having a dinner until late last night and checking out by 9:30am, I'm hungry but don't fancy the hotel's mediocre breakfast. I walk around outside the hotel, finding this nice neighbourhood cafe at 899 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge.
Freshly squeezed organge juice and warm bread puddings with maple syrup and soft cream cheer me up. The window-side comfy sofa seat receives the morning sunlight, with fat b-lined chillout music as background. Waitresses and a hippy-looking cafe owner are nice and pleasant. Around 10:15am, there is a long queue of people presumably living nearby. They also serve a variety of coffee, brunch menu, and "the best ice cream in America" according to the New York Times (so reads the sign on the cafe window). If I were a PhD student in Boston, I would definitely come here for a weekend brunch.
A free-to-enter gallery of contemporary video installations in the middle of MIT campus is a pleasant surprise if you think MIT is all about technology geekiness. Each of white-cube style exhibition spaces features one video installation with a comfy leather bench in front of the screen.
I find one interesting installation (entitled "Hor-champs" by Stan Douglas, 1992). In a rather spacious cubic space, a double-sided video screen is hung diagonally at the center. One side shows a free jazz band's performance in a standard TV style: the camera mostly focuses the main saxophone player with backing trombone, bassist, and drummer just occasionally shown. The other side of the screen shows the video shots usually discarded: the bassist and drummer while the saxophone player plays the main melody or the saxophone and the trombone just standing while the drummer or the bassist is playing solo. It captures my interest because this is how I often listen to music: the vocal or the main guitar is just background for me; my ears focus on the bass line or the drumming rhythms. So I like this installation.
For the uninitiated, here is an example of how a large-scale academic conference (with participants more than 100) proceeds.
It begins at 8am when breakfast (just sweet bread and cakes with Starbucks coffee and Tropicana orange juice) is served for an hour. Participants chat with their freinds based in other universities or meet with new researchers who may become their collaborators in the future.
From 9am to 10:40 am, five different sessions start in parallel, each consisting of four papers tackling more or less similar research questions. (How similar the four papers are depends on how much the conference organizers put an effort to group a number of papers presented at the conference.) Each paper is assigned 25 minutes. The first 15 minutes is a presentation by the author, followed by 10 minutes questions and comments by a "discussant" who is supposed to read the paper carefully beforehand and by other participants. A horrendously large number of the paper authors cannot clearly talk about the paper within 15 minutes: they take too much time for stating a research question, talk too much about related research in the past, and explain things that are not really important, ending up running out of time and explaining the most important things too quickly with the audience lost in confusion. The discussants then follow the same trap: they re-state what the paper is about (that's the author's job though it can be helpful for the audience when the author fails to explain clearly) and praise the paper superficially, ending up having no time to explain their comments clearly enough. As a result, the audience is not allowed to speak up with comments potentially useful for the author or simply don't know what to say because they don't understand what the paper is about.
After a 20 minute coffee break, the second session begins at 11am until 12:40pm with the same thing repeated. Lunch follows with a box of a sandwitch, crisps, and a fruit served to each participant. Participants chat to each other, talking about which paper was interesting etc. From 2 to 3:40pm, the third session, followed by a 20 minute coffee break, and the final session until 5:40pm.
From 6pm, a buffet dinner begins with poster presenters (I was one of them; that's why I posted this last week) standing next to their poster describing their research. Participants may go to a poster for which they're interested. Or they simply just chat with their friends, possibly on future joint research.
By 8pm, the conference dinner is over. Participants are separated into several groups, each going to a bar etc.
Attending an academic conference is simply tiring unless you are naturally smart. It's difficult to make new friends unless you manage to give smart comments to paper presenters. Young, up-and-coming researchers try to talk to senior researchers by overcoming their intimidation by presence.
But I have learned. It's a matter of getting used to it. This is the second conference for development economists that I attended since I started a job as a researcher. I see several people for the second time. I manage to talk to some of them this time even though I couldn't last time. What's important is to keep attending this kind of conference. It takes time to build a network.
After an 8 hour trans-Atlantic flight, with a 2-day academic conference awaiting me next morning, I definitely need to have a great dinner with an excellent atmosphere. The Blue Room (1 Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA 02139), a restaurant in a rather Tokyo-ish area of Kendall (where MIT campus is located), almost perfectly satisfies my picky expectation. Wood-grilled whole branzino fish, served with pomegranate syrup, crushed olives, herby leaves, and bits of pink grapefruit, is super. A whole baked fish often exhibits a steep decline in the degree of extra pleasure from eating more: the second half of fish meat quickly starts tasting boring even if the first half was gorgeous. The Blue Room's chef knows how to avoid this: serving grilled fish with what tastes continuously stimulating with texture in stark contrast: pink grapefruit.
A dessert (cream cheese flan) is rather mediocre, but the service is extremely beautiful here. A waiter taking my order tells me that baking fish can take at most 35 minutes. When the fish is almost ready, he comes to my table again, saying, "In two minutes." A waitress serving the fish asks me if I have an experience of eating a whole fish (when I reply by saing, "I'm Japanese," she says, "I don't want to make any presumption."). The decor and atmosphere is stylish without being pretentious.
A truely excellent restaurant (and its website is cool).
On the way to Boston, a Greek girl sitting next to my flight seat said to me, "You look 18 years old." When I told her that I'm 30, she looked shocked. I was shocked by her remark, too.
I'm now in Boston to attend an annual academic conference for development economists. Some photos and restaurant reviews etc. will shortly appear on this blog.
