Dave Jenkins

Well, I told ya so.  The iPhone isn’t doing so well in Japan, and has an uphill climb ahead of it.  As reported in a poll conducted by the Nikkei Business, 59% of respondents had “no intention to buy”, and another 26% had “no interest.”  That left 2.5% who intend to buy, and another 13% who may think about it.

Apple just doesn’t have the juice in Tokyo– almost everything there is either clearly wabi-sabi and traditional, or slick-plastic-wonderland-emotive.  This goes for cars, buildings, magazines, shows, and even the girls in Harajuku.  The iPhone’s sex appeal that is so compelling to clunky plaid-shirted Americans is just another plastometallic toy to the Japanese.  Even at that, the iPhone comes up short in functionality– no terrestrial TV, poor kanji anticipation, and an underdeveloped app market.  Japan, like Europe, has fierce competition amongst calling plans and contracts; they don’t have the Faustian vendor plans like in the United States, so iPhone’s lock in with Softbank is a big turn off.

I don’t have an iPhone.  I think I want one, but at the same time, I find myself using a cellphone less and less.

Meh.

(thanks to Gen Kanai and Joi Ito for the photo)

An old college roommate once took a job somewhere in the South, where Dixie was certain to rise again.  He sent us a postcard showing a statue of some confederate general on his steed, sword raised defiantly about to charge into glory.  The only thing my friend wrote on the back was “The War was over long before it began“.

It was one of the most cryptic, and yet compelling messages I’ve had.  It left the whole war– and by extension– his contemporary experiences up for interpretation.

To this day, whenever I meet my friend (once every few months or years now), my first statement is “The war was over long before it began”.  I am not sure he even remembers the postcard at this point, but invariably I am then treated fantastic insight in to the current war (local, state, national, ethical, economic– you name it) or core philosophical challenge that lays before Western Civilization.   Mind you, this isn’t the Wolf Blitzer tripe about what Obama vaguely promises or who McCain’s brother slept with or all that shit (the masses can read People or Time or Teen Beat for that).  No, my friend is much more concerned for the complete and utter lack of advanced discourse,  attainable rhetoric, or salient policy toward anything real.  This time, the war was for the remaining scraps of liberal democracy– and no one seems to really care if it slips out of our fingers.  I am left with the impression that we are working on a millennial scale– my friend mentioned that 600 years of The Enlightenment was at risk.  The war was over long before it began (sure– but which side?).

I promised myself I wouldn’t delve into mindless political opinion on this site– I just liked the phrase, and the internal struggle that it triggers in the heads of all of us– our jobs (or lack of them), the landlord, that fuck-up of a middle manager in your office, the middle east (Gulf War II, Gulf War I, 6-Day War, Suez Crisis, Lawrence and the boys, or the crusades led by St Louis– take your pick), or just the jealousy of those who make a fortune off of writing blogs.

The war was over long before it began.  Discuss amongst yourselves.