Hi-Tech Services Culture

AV Magazine

Japan’s hi-tech image will be boosted with the 2020 Olympics but the impact is intended to rejuvenate its ailing domestic market.

http://www.avinteractive.com/features/hi-tech-services-culture-02-12-2016/

When Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe accepted the Olympic baton in Rio dressed as Nintendo’s Super Mario, it was clear that Tokyo 2020 means far more to the country than a sports extravaganza.

“The Olympic Games is a sports festival, but also it’s a chance to show the innovation of scientific technologies,” said Toshiro Muto, chief executive of Tokyo’s organising committee.

The Japanese are known as tech-savvy but the country’s lustre as a world capital of innovation has faded in recent years.

The economy is saddled with the highest debt burden in the industrialised world (not aided by spiralling Olympic costs of $30 billion), and the population has aged more than most nations (a third are over 60 according to one estimate), causing the workforce to shrink.

Japan intends to use a hi-tech Olympics to propel itself back to the top of the global tech league and reinvigorate its ailing domestic market.

Here come the robots

Robotics are one part of this strategy, intended over time to revolutionise Japan’s anaemic service sector.

The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi introduced 58cm robot customer liaison officer NAO at its Tokyo branch. NAO responds to customer requests with pre-recorded multilingual responses anticipating it will help foreigners navigate the Olympics. The robot is produced by French firm Aldebaran Robotics, a subsidiary of Japanese telco SoftBank and speaks Chinese and English. The plan is to program it with 19 languages.

Pepper, another Aldebaran machine, is helping Nestle Japan sell its coffee makers at large stores. The unit of the Swiss food company plans to have around 1,000 robotic sales assistants fitted with facial recognition software by the end of 2016.

Robot-themed amusement park Huis Ten Bosch, near Nagasaki, opened in July featuring over 200 automatons built by Denso, Yaskawa Electric and Sharp. Already attracting attention for a hotel staffed by robots which opened last year on the premises, Huis Ten Bosch is also themed to resemble a 17th century Dutch village, replete with tulips, canals and windmills. Hideo Sawada, president of the park’s operator, thinks robots are the key to lowering costs throughout Japan.

Self-driving cars

2020 will see a fleet of self-driving taxis run by mobile internet pioneer DeNA and Japanese robotics company ZMP. The real target audience though is not visiting sports fans, but local pensioners, particularly those living in rural areas.

It’s far from being the only autonomous car project. Nissan, Hitachi, Toyota and Honda have all signalled their intention of having autonomous cars on the road in time for the Games. A key initiative at the National Innovation Complex at Nagoya University is to develop self-driving car technology.

Display of 8K

Another 2020 target which has been brewing for a decade is public broadcasting in 8K – 16 times the resolution of HD and a leap ahead of anywhere else where 4K Ultra HD is only just commencing service.

To get there the Japanese government has urged domestic electronics giants including Ikegami, Panasonic and Sony to pioneer suitable camera and signal processing equipment. The results will filter throughout Japanese society, in particular into videowalls and outdoor signage.

“In anticipation of 2020 the entire industry is accelerating technological innovation with the aim of creating an ‘image revolution’,” says Toshiyuki Iguchi, senior general manager of Casio’s digital signage division. “One example is public viewing based on hologram technology. We also expect that the digital signage applications necessary for tourists visiting Japan will lead the increase in the demand for pro-AV devices, such as projectors.”

He predicts that educational institutions will increase demand for high-resolution still images and businesses will want to embed them within presentations. “It will take time for the 8K system to become widespread in comparison with the 4K,” he adds.

Earlier this year, NHK showed off an OLED panel (produced by LG) just 1mm thin made out of plastic. The rollable screen is being devised for Japanese homes which tend to be smaller than western counterparts. Putting up giant 100in TVs to view 8K transmissions may hog too much living space, but not if the screen can simply be scrolled up tidily into the ceiling.

NHK has also linked four of them together to form a 130in  8K display. It’s this attention to detail plus an unswerving belief in its vision that has seen NHK successfully roll out 8K test transmissions daily with a view to going live as earlier as 2018, and going ballistic around the 2020 Games.

Keishi Matsuzaki, of custom residential installer and CEDIA member Glance, finds home theatre solutions increasingly popular “because most houses in Japan are small in size, making it difficult to have a fully-functioning, designated home cinema room,” he says. “However, homeowners still want the benefit of home theatre systems.”

Doing AV business in Japan

Anyone approaching the Japanese market is going to face numerous significant challenges. Language is one. English may be commonly spoken in business, but interpretation will still be required in many cases to ensure that true meaning is being conveyed rather than just a literal English/Japanese translation. Even then, arguably language differences are secondary to culture.

“Face to face meetings are common, and the decision making process typically involves many, many meetings,” according to Adrian Jones, an industry consultant with experience of working in Japan for multinationals, such as Mitsubishi. “This can be difficult for foreign companies to sustain during the protracted negotiations.”

“One of the main challenges in developing business and the sales channel in Japan would be the stereotypes that are hard to die in clients’ minds,” observes Shin Yamada, sales and marketing representative for Audiobrains, the local Powersoft distributor. “This can be done by educating and actually demonstrating things to the client in simple ways. The Japanese people are very conservative, so new solutions must prove themselves before making it into this market.”

Service level expectations tend to be high in Japan. The decision-making process is often slow and extremely methodical due to the need to achieve consensus, and expect to deal with numerous queries and clarifications along the way.

“Japanese business relationships tend to be based more on expediency and relationships rather than hard and fast contractual agreements,” Jones adds. “Business relationships are supremely important, take time to develop and can be easily damaged. Slow and steady is probably the best advice.”

The best and easiest way to approach the market is via a local sales partner to act as an interface, deliver the required level of frontline customer service and maintain those all-important relationships, says Jones. “With the right partnership, Japan can be an extremely dynamic market in which to work. Get it wrong, and it can prove a costly and frustrating nightmare.”

Conservative culture

While private industry maintains its innovative edge, the public sector tends to be more conservative. Somewhat surprisingly, education has yet to see the explosion in AV witnessed in the west and computers in schools are still a relatively rare phenomena.

“Whether this will change is debatable thanks to the Japanese education system still being largely based on learning by rote rather than independent study,” says Jones. The conservatism of Japanese culture tends to mean that a well-known product with a good reputation in terms of quality “will typically receive a good reference in the market,” says Yamada. “Reputation is key, as one successful project usually leads to the next one.”

While Glance recently installed a home theatre solution in a living room which incorporated two-zone audio, a home network solution, and a full KNX home automation system. “In the mainstream, we still tend to see traditional software such as CD/SACD/DVD/BDs being used for audio and home theatre use,” adds Matsuzaki although many private clients are moving to AV streaming services including TIDAL, Netflix and Spotify.

However, Tom Hoshi, Daktronics’ regional director for Greater Asia, reckons the emphasis for large video screens is based more on price than screen and video quality. The other obstacle is that customers tend to believe Japanese brands are better than overseas ones. Two of the sectors that Daktronics focuses on in Japan are Large Sports Venues (LSV) and DooH. “LSV is looking at the quality of the screens it installs at its stadium. However DooH clients are looking for lower cost solutions with a focus on fast return on investment,” says Hoshi.  The DooH market is growing faster than LSV, but as they favour low cost products, they tend to choose low quality screens that are not as attractive and degrade.”