A record for the ages

Sumo is the national sport in Japan, however, like in India where field hockey is the national sport and cricket is the most popular sport, baseball would arguably be the most popular sport. 20 years ago I wouldn't have used the word arguably but the professional baseball game has lost some of it's popularity with many of the best players in Japan going stateside to try their luck in Major League Baseball with carrying degrees of success,

Since Hideo Nomo blazed a trail to Major League Baseball immortality, many Japanese players have followed. Names like Ichiro Suzuki and Hideki Matsui have become household names in the United States. Ichiro has in fact beaten a few records and just recently posted his 4000th professional baseball hit. For cricket fans, I think that is probably the equivalent of 35 test centuries.

The role of the foreign player in Japanese professional baseball hasn't been so glorious with the odd exception. Until today the record in NPB for home runs in a season was 55. This is one of the most revered records in the Japanese game. It was set in 1964 by the Japanese batting legend Sadaharu Oh. It was always thought that a Japanese player would break the record. In fact when Hideki Matsu signed with the Yomiuri Giants, he was given the number 55 jersey. American Randy Bass threatened in 1985 but was walked every time he came to plate when he got to 54. Two other foreign players, Tuffy Rhodes and Alex Cabrera hit 55 home runs in the 2001 and 2002 seasons respectively but were also walked or not challenged when they came up against the Fukuoka Hawks who were ironically managed by Sadaharu Oh.

The above situation was dramatized in the movie starring Tom Selleck called Mr.Baseball in which Tom's character gets to 54 and then is thrown garbage. Once again for cricket fans, think the leg spinner bowling into the rough from around the wicket all day or the fast bowler bowling it down leg all day out of reach of the batsman but not to be called a wide.

However, today the record was finally broken and it was broken by a guy from the the tiny Caribbean island of Curacao. Wladimir Balentien hit two home runs to get to 57 home runs and break the 49 year old record. The fact that he did it with 18 games left in the season means that he could quite possibly smash the record and become a legend of the game.

The whole idea of a foreign smashing the record may be unpalatable to some diehard fans but it would be as bad if it happened 10 years ago. What is the reason for this? I think it is the fact that many Japanese players have done well in the United States and they are treated with respect that a quality professional baseball player deserves. Quite possibly the Japanese fans have seen this and realized that this is global sport, it is global market place and unlike beforehand it is easier to apply your trade in another country and to contribute. Quite possibly they are realizing that because of the success of the aforementioned Suzuki and Matsui, that they are watching some world class athletes on their back door step and that they can go and represent themselves and their country in another land and break their records and not be considered a foreign but another quality player.

I think what has happened today is a great thing for Japanese baseball and for society in general and I hope that this kind of tolerance continues. With the Olympics coming up tolerance of foreign culture will be high on the agenda but I think that is the topic for another post along the line.

Congratulations Wladimir, well done. And to Mr. Oh, just because you have lost your record to a Netherlands Antillean doesn't make your record or achievements any less special.

Tokyo Olympics 2020

At about 5am this morning, Japan time, the city of Tokyo was awarded the hosting rights for the Olympic Games of 2020. As you would expect the only thing that the television stations could talk about this morning was the announcement and why not. The Olympic Games is a huge event, the biggest sporting event in the world and I am wondering if I will still be here in 2020 and to accept guests from around the world who may want to stay at my place during that time. Also with the Rugby World Cup on in Japan in 2019 it looks like it is going to be a bumper six months of sport in the Japanese capital.

That's the good news but I'm staying to wonder if the Olympics in Japan is a good thing for the country and the economy as a whole. I'm not sure. I was thinking this morning that the billions of dollars that are going to be spent on this sporting event could be used more productively in the areas where the 2011 earthquake and tsunami wrecked havoc. I mean if I was living in that area and I was still homeless and my government is celebrating the fact that they are going to host a sporting event  I would start to wonder about what their priorities were. It is all very well saying that they are trying to bring happiness to the people which is noble but surely there are other ways.

Anyway, the hosting rights have been awarded to Tokyo and the Olympics will be held in the Japanese capital in July and August of 2020 and it will be one hell of a party.

From a foreigner's perspective, what will Japan and Tokyoites need to prepare for, for that time and what advice can I give them? The reason I write this is before the 2002 Football World Cup some people were almost scared that the harmony of the country would be disrupted when in fact the opposite happened. I think that that kind of feeling may happen again. So that it doesn't, what can we do? Here are five things:

1. Hotels are going to have to change their policy of charging per person. It is a real nuisance for people looking for good quality accommodation and I still don't understand how one space can suddenly become double the cost because there is another set of arms and legs in the room.

2. All the train stations in the greater Tokyo area need to have safety barriers in front of the tracks. They will be used by a great number of people who may not be familiar with this kind of public transport and the last thing the organisers want is some drunk sports fan spoiling the event by slipping on to the track in front of an approaching train.

3. Some signage needs to be better. I'm not talking about it being in English or other foreign languages because generally it is quite good in that regard. I'm talking about signs that say to go this way or that way and then when you get to a dead end or a t-juntion, there is no sign to show which way to go after that. This is generally in stations and even for long term residents like myself, it can be incredibly frustrating.

4. Businesses should not freak out about hoards of foreigners descending on them. I'm sure most businesses will welcome the new people showing up but there will be the odd one who won't like it. To these people I say smile, embrace it, most of the people coming to Tokyo want to give you their money so take it and if you don't want to take it just think that it is only for three weeks or so.

5. Have fun. Take a chance to meet people when the Olympics come to Tokyo. One of the great things about living in Tokyo for me is the chance to meet people from all over the world and for two weeks in 2020 Tokyoites will get that opportunity. Don't waste it.

Citiu, Altius, Fortius.

Making sense of Financial Sense

Financial Sense is a website that is very educational for people interested in investing and learning more on how the financial world works.

I like to listen to the News Hour which is essentially a podcast with a review of the the previous week's market action and then they have various interviews with different authorities on different topics.

Even though they call it the News Hour, the program itself can go on for over two hours and sometime even over three hours, so you get a lot of information and obviously learn a lot. It is usually available every Saturday afternoon (Japan time) and I use iTunes to download it and listen to it.

The August 31st edition of the Financial Sense News Hour was an encore presentation where they replayed three interviews from earlier in the year. Below are some observations and learnings that I got from the program.

The first hour was an interview with a gentleman named Neil Irwin who wrote a book called The Alchemist, http://tinyurl.com/lhzaju5. It talks about the economic crisis between 2007 and 2009. Something that the world hadn't seen since The Great Depression of the 30's. It focuses on the three major central banks in the world, the US, the UK and Europe.

Apparently we were extremely close to the collapse of the world economic system which is quite scary if you think about it because some of these people wield an unbelievable amount of power and can change you life and in instant.

An interesting reminder I got out of this interview was that money is just an idea. For many people that is a very uncomfortable concept. Another interesting reminder was when they spoke of history of the central banks and they linked it to Germans taking wheelbarrows of cash to the local supermarket to do their shopping. I must admit I can't even comprehend that and I can imagine that is what happened and maybe is still happening in Zimbabwe where hyperinflation was rampant.

In the end the consensus was that if they had a choice they would have taken what happened recently to what happened in the 30's and 40's.

As a result I bought the book and look out for a review of that book in upcoming blog posts.

The second hour was an interview with Martin Armstrong and once again there were a few interesting things that I took out of that interview.

The fact that there are $20 trillion in pension funds with the government thinking of taking over all pensions. The reason being that the US is in $17 trillion of debt so they see that as a way out. (On a side note, you can imagine some corrupt countries doing that without batting an eyelid.)

This interview was quite scathing towards our politicians in particular saying that if you or I had some insider information that we would probably get chucked in jail but a Congressman does not have that same problem. So in other words what is good for the goose is definitely not good for the gander. He also said that it is the advisers running the show, not the politicians. The politicians are just the mouth pieces.

Finally he talked about rogue traders and how they are just the fall guys. It is something that I have suspected for a long time as well how the hell do these banks not know that one of their employees is betting billions of dollars. The powers that be, surely must know. It sounds as though they just let the Nick Lessons of this world take the fall.

That reminds me of a Michael J. Fox line in the movie American President in which he basically says he is not going to do something because it is  not the president who takes the fall but someone like the adviser who spends six months in jail.

In the end, the host of the show, Jim Puplava says and I agree with him that it is good to listen to guys like Martin because the press is basically run by the government and they only produce what they are allowed.

I recommend that you go to FinancialSense.com and have a listen or read the articles. It is a fantastic website and program. Long may it continue.

Training

It is now five minutes to three on a Saturday afternoon in late August here in Tokyo, Japan. I am on a train travelling out to Kisarazu, which is a city in Chiba Prefecture about ninety minutes from Tokyo Station. I am typing this on my MacBook Pro and generally trying to make good use of my time.

As I got on the train I thought what would I do if I didn’t have my computer with me and how would I pass the time from Shinbashi Station to Kisarazu Station.

Below are ten things you can do to pass the time while commuting. Naturally, the ideas I give are applicable for Japan and my not be appropriate in some other big cities in the world. One idea I can think of right off the bat is the idea of sleeping on the train. In Japan you see some real pros at this and you wonder how they wake up in time for their stop.  Obviously in some other big cities the idea of sleeping on the train is not the best idea in the world as that opens you up to the less desirable elements of society and their wicked ways.

So lets gets started, what can you do on the train to make the time pass more quickly and to make the best use of your time productively or otherwise?

1. Read a book. In today’s society maybe the pastime of reading has gone out the door with people having full access online to newspapers, magazines and different websites. Whether you are reading the actual book or a book on tablet or phone, at least you are expanding your mind and maybe even learning something as well. A university on rails, so to speak.

2. If you know that you can sit down and it is not going be crowded, like the train I am on at the moment then why don’t you take your computer along and do some work? I had to write a blog post today. I basically knew I had ninety minutes stuck on a train so I decided that I would write this. It is amazing. Thirty minutes have passed since I got on the train and it feels like about five.

 3. If reading or writing is not your thing then use a MP3 player and listen to books or listen to different recordings of motivational speakers or the like. When I was back in New Zealand for a short time I would on occasions walk to work. It took me approximately one hour. In that time I would listen to Anthony Robbins on my iPod. It was very interesting and he came up with some very interesting ideas. Another good thing for me was that I couldn’t hear the dogs barking at me. For those of you who don’t know, I’m not the biggest dog fan in the world.

4. This wouldn't be a popular idea in Tokyo or any part of the world for that matter but you never know what you are going to discover. Why don’t you strike up a conversation with the person standing/sitting next to you? I know that in Tokyo you might get the very shy, don’t know where to look because it wasn’t part of the text book when he or she was growing up brush off or you might strike it lucky and get talking to someone who is very fascinating and has lived all over the world. Who knows if you don’t try? The amount of times I haven’t spoken to the attractive looking female sitting next or across from me is uncountable.

5. Make your time on the train productive by using it to think, I mean really think. Not about what you are going to have for dinner tonight or what the women you saw last night looks like naked, I mean think about ideas you can use to improve yourself, or ideas you can use in your work to increase your income or ideas to improve what you do and who you are about. You can write down any ideas on your phone and take action on them when you are no longer on rails.

6. If all of this is too intellectual or sounds like too much hard work then I suppose if you really must, you could play games on your phone, tablet or console. Not the best use of time in my book but at least you are doing something fun and the time passes quickly.

7. If you are on the commute home you could splash out and treat yourself by buying what are called in Japan, Green Car tickets and sitting in “ first class’’ luxury and having a drink or three. As long as you are not a nuisance to the others around you may get the ‘salaryman’ sitting next to you joining in and the time will pass very smartly.

8. Most of the time when you are commuting you will need to be standing up, so having a beer or writing the next Pulitzer Prize winning novel may not be applicable. If you have a little bit of room and if you are like me, and your bag is quite heavy then you could use it to do some weight training. Most of the people around you will be thinking you are crazy but don’t worry about what they think as you are there improving yourself and your body. Imagine if you did that every day. Look out Arnold!!!

9. As I am writing this a young man across the row in front of me is doing his English homework. I wonder if I should help him out. A half of me is saying why not and the other half of me is thinking he doesn’t want my help. I shouldn’t disturb him. My point here is look out for opportunities like that to help people. Whether it is standing up and giving your seat over to an elderly or physically challenged person or helping a junior high school student with their homework, you are doing a good deed and what are they going to say, “Go away?”

10. If all of the above is too much then you can just sit down or stand up and watch the world go by. Of course there is nothing wrong with that. Although in saying that you are wasting maybe a couple of hours a day where you could be very productive and getting things done and maybe even change the world.

Commuting on a train does not need to be wasted time. You can use it as productively or as wastefully as you want, it is your life after all. Remember one thing, those two hours on the train a day, you can never get back so why not use it?

As I finish I would just like to say that I am fifteen minutes away from my destination, so by the time I finish proofreading this and maybe making any alterations I will be at Kisarazu and I would feel like my train ride was not a big waste of time. I am quite proud of myself but I wouldn’t want to do this everyday. There is only so much train time a man can take. 

Sport!!!

It is interesting what sport does to some people. To some people the need to be out on a Saturday and Sunday living their dreams and running off the week's stresses. To others it means sitting in front of the television watching other people play their dream and basically drinking off the week's stresses

So what is it about sport that makes us want to travel to play or follow your favourite team or sit up half the night waiting for our favourite team to run out onto the field?

It's interesting when you live overseas you will go to unbelievable lengths to watch your favorite team play at the local sports bar but if you were at home you might not even bother.

For many people sport is about being social. It is about joining a team to play something that you love with a bunch of people who share your passion and want to share that passion with you. It is why the aforementioned people will seek out a sports bar to watch their national team play to feel part of a community or part of a country.

For other people it is a challenge. They want to challenge themselves, to get better at something, to see how far they can go. To see how far they can push themselves to succeed. To see if those people that they see on television are any better or any worse than themselves.

At the end of the day (to borrow a phrase often used in sport interviews) it is all about being social, it is all about doing exercise that helps us live a long and healthy life and when it comes to supporting our team, we like to do that because generally we have played the sport ourselves, we know what is going on in the game as we have experienced the emotions that the players are going through on our television screens or the stadium. We may even know some of them personally and we like to see them do well on the big stage.

Sport is great, sport is fun and the benefits are huge.

The "learnings" of a book

I was reading a book this afternoon and it gave the story of a couple in America who were working for a company. The company was not doing very well and the owner decided to close it. The couple could see potential in it and went to the owner to see if they could purchase it from him. He knew that they couldn't afford it and told them so. They borrowed and begged for the money and finally got the money together. Anyway, to cut a long story short, at the time of writing the company had 300 employees and was grossing $50 million a year. Not a bad effort I must say.

When asked they gave 10 things to the secret of their success. (By the way, have you seen that movie, a 1980's movie with Michael J. Fox in it? I quite enjoyed it) I will list those ten things and give my opinions on the 10 things:

1. Keep a single focus. I think that my mind tends to wander and it takes forever to get back on track, whereas if I knew where I was going and what I was doing and that was clear in my mind most days would be easier because I had a focus I knew what I should be doing.

2. Keep a long term view and think ahead. It is very easy to focus on the present and agonise about the past. I tend to do that all the time, that is agonise about something that happen 16 and a half years ago that probably no one remembers and if they did they would laugh about it anyway. Think forward, have vision, that's what great leaders have, vision.

3. Do not panic. Panic is just a waste of energy. Step back and have a look and make informed instead of rushed decisions.

4. Develop a network and inventory your assets. What this means is that your friends, family, ideas and talents are also your assets. It doesn't have to be just hard assets. So if you have some kind of talent then you can leverage that.

5. Think possibilities and believe in the possibilities. You got to have options and you brainstorm until you find the right one or ones for you and then once you have decided you have faith in your decision and go for it.

6. Conserve you money. Yep! Don't follow my lead and spend it like it is going out of fashion or as my mother would say, "fritter."

7. Always be careful with your special team. That is your family and friends. You whole world might crumble and you could be in the middle of a pile of s**t but your family and friends will always be around. Look after them and they will look after you.

8. Surround yourself with positive people. It can very tiring being around negative people. it can be so demoralising for the soul, so why do that to yourself? Surround yourself with people who see the glass half full and tend to have that great smile on their dials. You will feel a lot more positive about things and you will get things done.

9. Don't take rejection to heart. Everyone gets rejected and it is how you react to it that shows what kind of person you are.

10. Look at every problem as an opportunity. This is another way of looking at the glass as being half full. You have a problem, you could do as I do and run away and hide under the nearest park bench or you could go great, I have this problem in my life what is the opportunity I am missing here? What can I learn from this?

There you go, sounds easy, doesn't it? It could be, so lets get to work and build something spectacular.

Social Media - Is it Social?

Recently a friend of mine here in Japan invited me to join Empire Avenue. For those of you who don't know what Empire Avenue is let me see if I can explain it although I must admit I'm not 100% sure myself.

Empire Avenue is basically game in that other players buy and sell shares in you. At the beginning I thought that your online activity on sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ allowed you to get a higher price on your share price. I thought that this was directly related meaning if you tweeted then you price would go up. This is not true. The more social media activity you do the the more desirable your profile then people will more likely buy your shares and then your share price goes up. Confused? It took me about a month to work this out. I'm not confident I've got the whole idea but I suppose the whole idea of anything new is to dive in and work it all out later. If you study and study it you will never do anything and you might as well have done something else with your time.

Thanks to Empire Avenue I have started a Twitter account, I'm a lot more active on Facebook than I used to be in that I "like" a lot more, I try to post and share things and just generally use the site a lot more. A friend of mine introduced me to Hoot Suite which has helped me with Tweets. I'm sure if I tweeted manually I wouldn't tweet at all.

Social media is certainly here and here to stay. People are using it as a marketing tool or as a way to keep in touch with family and friends and you would think that with many people using Facebook and the other sites that everyone is happy with it but like other things there are always detractors and I met one of them yesterday. I have just spent a week with a couple of women and then I asked if I could connect with them on Facebook. They were both negative about Facebook in that one said she likes to keep he life separate meaning family, friends, work are all separate. Fair enough. the other woman thought that Facebook was not social at all and that was to the detriment of society as a whole because we hide behind our computers and don't get out and actually meet people. I can see her point there and I agree but social media does have it's place so the following are five reasons why I like social media and more specifically, Facebook.

1. It is easy to catch up with old friends and also keep in touch with family, especially cousins who may not be in your generation.

2. Information can be shared very easily. After the Tohoku earthquake in 2011, Facebook was an essential part of people's lives as information was sent back and forth.

3. It can be used for both social reasons and business reasons and in fact some larger business businesses actually have departments in which someone's job is to look after the social media of the business.

4. Even though you may never get to meet with the person face to face, it gives you an opportunity to connect with people from all around the world and get their perspective on life.

5. In terms of Twitter it allows you to have in one place a base to hear from people that you might admire or idolize and you can even interact with them by asking questions. We know with some famous people their security doesn't even let you near them.

Social Media is social if you use it to supplement your "off-line" life. When you start to find yourself sitting at a computer for 15 hours a day then you might have a problem when you go out into the wide world.

There you go. As I said before, social media is here to stay. All I want to know is, what is it going to be like in 10 years time. That will be interesting.