Been sorting through many years of photos recently and have been having nostalgic trips down memory lane which I thought I'd share with you.
This photo of our first apartment was taken in the Summer of 1999 - the year when we finally purchased a one way ticket to Japan. The top left corner was our place.
Settled for a small place far out in West Tokyo for the both of us. The further out you go from central Tokyo, the cheaper rent becomes. Commute was 2 hours per day to and from Ichigaya.
Photo taken on the same day near the station. My first job in Tokyo was with the scientific journal called
Nature and you can read how I got the job in the
Japan Work Benefits article.
The first camera we got when we arrived was this Fujifilm - had a load of noise which put me off from buying any of their later models.
Currently choose the Canon IXY and have been through 3 different models so far. Quality is good but need a steady hand as the stabilizer is rubbish. Which brand do you swear by when it comes to compact digital cameras?
Our first phone. Came with a removable scanner which we never used. We got most of our household electronics (refrigerator, TV, rice cooker etc) from Akihabara. I think it was from Sato Musen. If you buy a load of stuff in one go, you get a discount - and when the shop attendant says "OK, I can do this price for you", they never say the price verbally and show you the calculator instead.
This is when you are prompted to say "Mou Chotto!" and put your hands together like you are saying a prayer. You should get a further discount. If you have no shame then you can keep doing this until the attendant gets pee'd off at you.
We arrived during a time when cassette tapes were still in use ^^;
This was a wireless Walkman with remote.
My first office space in Japan. Small n cramped in an open space office with no partitions.
Was great as I could hear all the office Japanese that I was not taught in university.
The Japanese hardly ever great each other with "Konichiha" or "Sayonara."
The typical greeting is "Otsukare sama desu" [お疲れさまです] literally meaning "you've done a good job/you've been hard at work."
When cutting the phone one normally just says "ha-i" or "hai ha-i."
I first started out in the typical Salaryman cosplay. My work was to sell as many subscriptions of Nature through the Internet and conventional means.
When I first started out at Nature, all I had were Microsoft Frontpage skills ^^;
I started to learn how to use Dreamweaver which I ended up using for many years until I switched from using tables for layout to CSS.
I then started to teach myself PHP and MYSQL - mainly outside of work time. These skills were used to make forms, landing pages and manually coded content pages.
The "conventional means" which I mentioned above referred to direct mail and magazine subscription postcards which I used to design. Learned how to use Illustrator and worked closely with the printing company so gained much experience in print buying.
I also looked after subscriptions in Korea so processed those orders and answered customer queries too.
My wife keeps my Korean in shape by watching K Drama ^^;
The girls at Nature were really cute and carried guns.
That mac was a horrible experience and made me wonder how mac users got anything done. Was a 100% Windows fanboi at the time.
Back then, trips to Akibahara saw me coming home with a load of PC parts instead of eroge mags and figures.
For a while I didn't have a case as it took up too much space in our small apartment ^^;
Gotta love those thick IDE cables.
Remember carrying that case from Akiba - was darn heavy ^^;
It was the incompatibility between devices, clashes of resources, driver hell etc etc and the amount of time needed just to maintain a desktop that made me decide never to get one ever again in 2005.
How often do you open up your PC to exchange parts? Are you a desktop or laptop fanboi?
Shinjuku 1999. Having just arrived in Japan after living all my life in London, I would constantly have dreams of me walking about in London - the occurring dream was of me walking across a zebra crossing - can anybody tell me what it meant? ^^;
Have always wanted to live and work in Japan and didn't miss London so don't think the dreams meant that I wanted to be back there.
Its the year 2000 March the 4th and the PS2 goes on sale - completely sold out everywhere. I remember going around to Shinjuku, Ikebukuro and Akihabara looking for one.
What was you doing in the year 2000?
Xmas 2000 in Shinjuku - not much change in this area.
This is the only screenshot that I have of my first domain at studiodanny.com ( which I don't own anymore ). Cringe when I think about the domain name that I chose ^^;
Was built manually from HTML in Dreamweaver and was a place where I could start to experiment with web technologies.
Am wondering how many of you out there can code.
Unlike central Tokyo, we got quite a bit of snow ever year where we lived - one of the good things about being in the sticks.
And when it snows we always have snow ball battles ^^;
Due to the lack of space, we used a cupboard as an office ^^;
I constantly see Danny Choo bashing on the Internets but after the
CNN broadcast I saw more than the usual load which included "He's just a spoilt rich kid living off his dads name" and "he would have got nowhere without his dad" yada yada.
If I did have a load of cash from dad then I probably wouldn't have chosen to live an hours away from work in a small apartment with a cupboard as an office. Er yes, my dad makes shoes but he has a load of connections in the scientific field, Amazon and Microsoft and helped me get where I am now. Right.
Was a hardcore Sony fanboi at the time but didn't mind the zillions of compatibility issues that came with the hardware.
How are Sony laptops these days? I'm guessing the same.
By this time I started to do stuff on the side - mainly design work. The money was not bad at
60,000 yen per A4 design using Illustrator - the skill that I learned for work ended up helping out a lot outside of work and it started to pay for the computer hardware that I invested in to study and learn more.
Furniture in Japan costed a bomb before Ikea came along. We got much of our stuff from discount stores or made furniture ourselves. Here I've just done shopping at Tokyu Hands for material to make a DIY stand for our TV.
Until 2001, we didn't have a mobile phone but decided to get one because of an interview I had at JobDragon - an internet recruitment agency.
I got the phone to make a mobile version of their site to demonstrate my skills. Ended up working for them for a few months.
More evidence of my Sony fanboi past - the Sony PDA Clie which ran on the Palm software. Looked cool at the time but had too many software restrictions.
The Nature offices moved around the corner and I was doing the milk rounds looking for another job. After speaking to many recruiters, I realized what my market value was given my experience and skill set.
Its always important to understand what your skill set is and how much they are valued at. Keep your options open all the time and speak to folks in the industry who can advise you on job opportunities and your market value.
2001 was the year that I saw Pearl Harbor and AI on the same day - had a headache after for being in the dark staring at a large screen for so long ^^;
Many thought that AI was terrible but I thought it was good.
I also loved the action in Pearl Harbor. Given the nature of the film, you may think that Pearl harbor would not have done so well in Japan - which is why they marketed it as a love story and didn't focus on Japan bombing the Americans (and being bombed back). Pearl Harbor Trailer below.
After Nature, I joined Job Dragon as a contents producer - design and some ASP which I just didn't get ^^;
After working at Job Dragon for only a few months, the boss called a few of us to a meeting and told us that he had to let us go as the company wasn't doing so well at the time.
T'was a huge shock to be layed off. But all things happen for a good reason. Job Dragon is a recruitment/head hunting company. They helped us look for new positions. They introduced me to Ebay Japan, Amazon and a few other IT companies. Got job offers from a few and chose Amazon.
When my college at Job Dragon said "I'm going to introduce you to Amazon. You will be given a large production team and run their website as Website Manager" I thought to myself "Errr, OK (^^;)"
Going from managing websites made in Dreamweaver that were updated using FTP to managing an e-commerce site used by millions of users per day seemed like a huge change for me - and it was.
After many phone interviews, my boss flew in from Seattle to interview me - I got the job and before I knew it was on a plane to Seattle and the UK for training.
It was my first time in the US. I remember not being able to beleive my eyes when I was in the hotel watching TV - September 11th 2001.
Akihabara in 2001. No moe, no maids, hardly any eroge or figures.
This corner at Akiba is completely different today.
Some of my first team members at Amazon. Going to managing a couple of members to a team which grew to about 30 was a huge challenge for me. Learning how to deal with different types of personalities and needs was invaluable experience.
The way content is pushed to the live (known as Production) site was completely different to what I've known up until then.
Each developer checks in their code to a central repository using CVS (Concurrent Version System - later switched to Perforce). Data is pushed to a development server where the QA team then check the site and run test scripts.
When QA has finished, data is pushed to the next development server which is connected to the live database. After that is done, a member of my team called the Builder builds the data and pushes the new code to the hundreds of servers. He also is in charge of the catalog build too.
I've overly simplified the description but I felt like I was on a different planet when I joined.
Apart from my dev team, I worked with personalization (p13n), search and browse, internaitonalization (i18n) and other dev teams globally.
I was also on the management team at Amazon where we ran the company together with the country Manager Jasper Cheung - a Chinese Canadian fellow.
I was also working with what Amazon called "business owners" - the folks who wanted stuff from my team - Marketing, Supply Chain, Customer Service, Human Resources, Product Managers, PR, Marketing etc. Learning how to prioritize the requests from all these groups was also a great experience gained at Amazon.
Think I've spoken to much about Amazon for now - was saving it for the "Working in a Corporate IT company: Amazon and Microsoft" article coming soon.
The views from my office at Amazon we great - would spend much time gazing outside. I remember watching Roppongi Hills being built from scratch from here.
And the glow of lights you see is central Shibuya.
Will write up Tokyo 2002 - 2005 soon ^^