Shohei Otomo and his artwork

Amazing artworks by Shohei Otomo.

His interview video to understand his thoughts behind his art.

Backwoods Artist Profile : SHOHEI OTOMO from Alexander Mitchell on Vimeo.

Website: http://hakuchi.jp/top.html
Tumblr: http://hakuchi.tumblr.com/

His father is Katsuhiro Otomo, famous for creating Akira. I'm a big fan of Katsuhiro Otomo too.



If you encounter a natural disaster in Japan, you can connect to wifi using SSID “00000JAPAN”

Great news: When large-scale natural disaster happens in Japan, within 72 hours, unified SSID "00000JAPAN" will be launched, and regardless of which carrier you are using, and regardless of where you are in Japan, you can use this Wireless Internet for free.

Japan learned from the natural disaster back in March 2011. During natural disaster, many of the telephone and mobile phone carriers becomes unusable. It is impossible to predict which carrier will be down, and where. Also, in many of the cases the Internet was a useful network to communicate, with examples such as people getting their lives saved by communicating via Twitter. In September 2013, experiments were conducted in Kamaishi and Sendai, in order to publish a guideline on opening public wireless LAN during natural disasters.

In March 2011, there were only 13,000 public wifi access points in Japan, in 3 years it increased 70x and as of March 2014, there are 900,000 access points, combining those of NTT East & West, NTT Docomo, KDDI and Softbank. Also, they are planning to prepare more public wireless LAN infrastructure leading up to Tokyo Olympics in 2020.

This unified SSID is planned to launch next Spring. Also, a disaster portal will be launched with useful information for evacuation and rescue, and it will include search engines (Yahoo and Google) and links to major social networks (Facebook, Twitter, mixi).

ASCII: 大規模災害時には無料のSSID“00000JAPAN”に接続！
Internet Watch: 災害時に無料で使える公衆無線LAN「00000JAPAN」を統一SSIDとして提供
Wireless Wire News: 大規模災害時にはWi-Fiで「00000JAPAN」に接続 －無線LANビジネス推進連絡会がガイドラインを公表
無線 LAN ビジネス推進連絡会: 大規模災害発生時における 公衆無線 LAN の無料開放 に関する ガイドライン(pdf)

Related: NTT-BP launched Android/iPhone apps called "Japan Connected-free wifi" which enables users to connect easily to public wifi networks at airports, rail stations, and municipalities all over Japan. Finding public wifi was the biggest complaint travelers had in Japan, and this app was created to tackle this problem.

-Android (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nttbp.jfw)
-iOS (https://itunes.apple.com/jp/app/japan-connected-free-wi-fi/id810838196?mt=8)



Project311- Visualization of the Evacuation Process During the Tsunami

"Visualization of the Evacuation Process During the Tsunami" project by "Team Masters & Forever 22" started from a simple question- Why were evacuation during the tsunami so slow? In order to get hints to save lives in future disasters, they analyzed how people moved fleeing from tsunami in the coastal areas.

Video (Japanese audio, English subtitled)


They used ZENRIN Datacom's data to see the changes in population density per 250m2 and visualized them on Google Maps, in conjunction with shelter data and water level data.

They picked the town of Otsuchi in Iwate Prefecture as a model case for 4 reasons:
1) center of the town is all gone due to tsunami
2) lost 10% of the population due to tsunami
3) was surrounded by mountain, and should have been able to evacuate
4) the researcher had 3 relative families there, and one is still missing due to tsunami, so she has talked with the citizens and knows the actual situation there before and after the tsunami.

(I think knowing the reality is very important when analyzing the data. Not just looking at the data only, but going back and forth between data and the real world is very important in analyzing data.)

This is the map of Otsuchi, red line shows where the tsunami came. The area circled with yellow line is the area that are the busy area during the daytime, with municipal buildings, hospitals etc, and note these are all built alongside the river. The team mapped hourly population density change and created video out of those data.

The earthquake happened at 2:46 p.m. The Meteorological Agency issued an urgent report that the tsunami is estimated at 3m in Iwate. The levees in Otsuchi are 6.4m tall, so many people figured that they wouldn't have to evacuate, and there even were people who took cameras to the top of the levees to watch the ocean.

30 minutes after the quake, the Meteorological Agency issued its first correction of the initial estimate of tsunami size, but at this point the first wave of tsunami had already reached the town. At Otsuchi, in merely 30 minutes, the waves surmounted the levees and entered the town, influencing citizens' destiny.

This picture is from around 4 p.m. Most people have already evacuated from the coast.

Since Otsuchi is a small town, it may seem that everyone should be able to reach higher and safer places within 10 minutes. However, as you can see from this data- which is the route an actual tsunami victim took to evacuate, movement of people are much more complicated.

She says it would be useful for preventing similar disaster in the future, if we could get a more detailed data of the movements of people in these decisive 30 minutes.

After the tsunami's arrival people do not move much, but can see a slow decrease of people. Since Zenrin's data is based on the GPS information of cell phones, and there were power outages in the town, it is likely that cell phones ran out of battery and lost their GPS connection.

Also, there are issues about the data.

The image on left shows population distribution from 2 to 3 a.m. on the day after the quake, and on the right, from 3 to 4 a.m.

Zenrin's data had 190 people in several places in the image on the left, and those people disappeared in the image on the right. Also, we see numbers like 92. This number probably comes from the calculation of 29 minute long access, by multiplying 29/60 by 190.... representing the proportion of people with reception over time. In larger cities, those calculations might be effective, but in smaller towns like Otsuchi, we should use raw data to get accurate movement of people.

However, we are able to learn two important things from this data.

1) Up until 12 hours after the tsunami, we had multiple cell phone signals even from flooded area
2) We can track individual cell phones, on how many hours and minutes they lasted

So we can propose several useful ways of using cell phones during disaster from this data.

Proposal 1) Create power-saving mode for cell phones
If users set their cell phones to power-saving mode, it can make the battery last up to 3 days. This mode should stop unnecessary functions and applications, and allows only GPS, mail, and phone calls to operate. Also, slow down the GPS transmissions to about once in 5 minutes. Cell phones lose battery power much quicker when reception is bad. But even when there is no reception at all, like during the disaster, we can still trace the owner's whereabouts for 3 days with the GPS. If we could relay personal 
information like that to firefighters or the Self-Defense Force or relatives, it would help the search effort.

Proposal 2) Create cell phone relay stations that can be transported by helicopter
This would enable us to send evacuation and rescue information via e-mail to people in need.

Proposal 3) Make an exception to Privacy protection law during disaster
In order to make those work, we would have to have exception to privacy protection law to rescue disaster victims.

Comment from Professor Murai:

The thing about 30 minutes is interesting. The standard life for cell phone relay station batteries is 30 minutes, too, so there might be connection. They will be changing the battery life of relay stations to 24 hours, so that might affect it.
Comment from Suzuki-san:

Un reality, the cell phone batteries held up. But even in cases where there were generators and cell phone batteries available, sometimes the relay station had been swept away or the power of relay stations went down. Supposedly the cell phone relay station batteries lasted for about 24 hours. After that, probably also due to congestion, communication became impossible. Cell phone's power saving more is important, but ways to prolong relay stations are even more important.

This team also presented at the poster session with their analysis of tendency of roads that tends to get traffic congestion and roads that tends to isolate victims by natural disaster.



Videos to experience Japan

I'd like to introduce several awesome videos about Japan.

Keio Global | Shaping History, Shaping Tomorrow

"Follow one international student's breathtaking journey through the heart of Tokyo and experience the sights and sounds of Keio University. Our student navigates both ancient and advanced, sipping tea in centuries-old ceremony one moment and break-dancing alongside Keio students to Japanese hip hop the next. After perfecting controlled brushstrokes at the Japanese calligraphy club, he tackles a jostling bout of sumo with students and joins experiments in state-of-the-art robotics research at a Keio laboratory. With its rich history and modern outlook, Keio University offers a rewarding and exciting lifestyle to international students while providing a first-class education over an extensive range of disciplines, including a number of programs taught entirely in English."
You can read the production interviews here.

Hayaku: A Time Lapse Journey Through Japan


Series of videos by augment5.


Kusatsu Oct 26 , 2011 from augment5 Inc. on Vimeo.


KYOTO Nov 4-5 , 2011 from augment5 Inc. on Vimeo.


Mino Aug 1,2012 from augment5 Inc. on Vimeo.


ENOSHIMA Oct 16 , 2011 from augment5 Inc. on Vimeo.



"Wake up Japan!" says Dave McLure

Global Innovation Conference was held in Osaka which I didn't go, but I thought I'd share its keynote video.

The speaker was Dave McLure, and he told the Japanese people to wake up, it's no longer the time for the Japanese to be sitting in the comfort zone, because this country is on fire. He tells people to become the nail that sticks out, move fast and break things, and don't be afraid to fail, because key factor to innovation is creativity, failure and iteration.

There is a famous saying in Japanese "七転び八起き" which means even if you fall 7 times, get up 8 times and move forward. But at the same time, the Japanese wants to do things well and organized, the citizens does not like failure, it's a country that fears shame.

"Failure is necessary, it is a process, not a problem." says Dave, and urges Osaka's mayor Hashimoto to dance without practicing, show everyone his failure in public, and urge the citizens to make failures- make them feel they are allowed to fail, practice, and become successful taking that failure as a process.



Project311- Project Hayano

Project Hayano is a project to understand the risk of the children in Fukushima and surrounding areas to get thyroid cancer due to internal contamination of Iodine 131. The team mashed up simulation of Iodine plume emission from the nuclear power plant with traffic congestion map which shows where people actually were.

The purpose of this project, at the end of the day, is to work on a legislation so that when someone gets thyroid cancer in the future, the government will need to compensate the medical fee without the citizens to prove the causal relationship between the cancer and the nuclear power plant accident. Calculations done during Project311 will be used for the financial estimations related to that bill.

Slides used at the presentation is as following:

You can see Professor Hayano's presentation video here, audio is in Japanese, you can turn on English subtitle, and machine translation on other languages:

He started this project because many people feared the internal contamination of radiation due to the
Fukushima nuclear reactor accident. He proposed to do tests of school lunches and other meals, and
combined those with measurements from whole body counters (WBC). From those data, he learned that the internal contamination due to radioactive cesium in contaminated foods was extremely low. For example, the following diagram shows the results of whole body counter scans since April 1st within Fukushima Prefecture. 99.1% of scans were below the detection threshold. And for children, 100% of the scans were below the detection threshold.

According to data from 1964, Japanese person's body had about 10 becquerel of cesium per kilogram of body weight.

If we compare this to the data from Fukushima, we can see that most people in the prefecture are far below the level of data back in 1964.

However, that doesn't mean that everything is OK. Iodine 131 has a half-life of only 8 days, and there could have been many who inhaled it shortly after the accident. Data from that period of time barely exists, so many people are anxious about this. It is known that after Chernobyl accident, many children
developed thyroid cancer from the iodine intake. So we need to know what the risk of developing
thyroid cancer is for the children in Fukushima and the surrounding prefectures.

Professor Hayano started "Project Hayano" aiming to evaluate openly the risk of internal contamination by radioactive iodine. In order to do so, he had to know how many people inhaled how much iodine at what time at each location. We have to rely on simulations such as SPEEDI etc to guess the amount of iodine (since real data does not exist). The problem until now was to estimate when and how many people were present at each location. Thanks to the congestion data provided by ZENRIN DataCom at this workshop, they were able to solve that problem.

Risk evaluations are made by multiplying radiation dose times the number of people. For example, if 1 person had a thyroid radiation dose of 100 millisieverts, the risk would equal that for 10 people with 10 millisieverts each. This is the hypothesis they used.

Of course, the federal and local governments have also done population behavior studies, asking where the people were on paper surveys, and their survey results were used for evaluation of radiation doses. However, because this is private information, the data will not be open to public and third-party evaluation is impossible. Therefore, they used the data provided by ZENRIN DataCom and SPEEDI to conduct a risk evaluation that is verifiable by third-parties.

There are many kinds of simulations, he used 4 of them.

1) Data from SPEEDI, which is open to public, movie with timeline
2) Data compiled by JAMSTEC and mashup movie with ZENRIN data
3) Data calculated by the National Institute for Environmental Studies and mashup movie with ZENRIN data, and another mashup movie with ZENRIN data (iodine * people)
4) The JAEA calculations.

Professor Watanabe made a mashup map on Google Earth and overlaid the data with the congestion data from ZENRIN DataCom. For example, in the screenshot below, the green bars and circles underneath is data from ZENRIN, showing where people were at about 3 p.m. on March 15 -and you can move the sliders to change the time frame. The red bars represent the concentrations of iodine in the atmosphere close to the surface.

You can see the simulation here on the web: http://speedi.mapping.jp/
-Time slider at top left will enable you to move the timeline
-Navigation tool on the top right will enable you to zoom in/out on specific place
-You can toggle on/off the following using the checkbox on the menu bar
  1) Iodine simulation by National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES, default on)- red bars
  2) Iodine simulation by Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC, default on)- color coded on the surface
  3) Iodine simulation by Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA, default off) - color coded on the surface
  4) Iodine simulation from System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information (SPEEDI, default off)- orange bars
  5) Traffic congestion data by ZENRIN DataCom (default on) - green dots, for places with more than 500 people 3D bar chart is displayed
  6) Automobile drive map by HONDA (default off)
  7) Phone service map (default off)- red represents areas where mobile phones were down, grey represents areas where fixed phone lines were down

Before we move on, we need to understand how reliable the basic data we are using is.

1) Understanding ZENRIN's data

Prof. Hayano plotted how many people were within radius of 5 kilometer intervals from the reactor along with the time. From the chart, on 3/10-12, we can see people actively entering and leaving the 5-kilometer zone, going to and from work, before and during the accident .

On 3/12-14 we can see fewer and fewer people within 5, 10, and 20 kilometers, due to the evacuation order with people fleeing from the reactor, and the population is decreasing. On 3/13-14 it looks like the population is decreasing, but this was due to the cell phone base stations going down, so we don't have accurate data during this time.

However between March 14th and 15the the base stations started working again and it looks like the number of people is increasing. The most problematic time of the reactors were from the early morning of March 15th to March 16th, when the concentration of iodine was at its highest. Fortunately the ZENRIN data for this time is from after the base stations restarted, so it appears to be useable.

Further investigation on ZENRIN's data: this population frequency distribution chart shows how many people were within this 250-meter grid, and we see peaks at 200, 400, 600, and 800.

What we can guess about this data is that here were certain number of people with automatic GPS features on their phones within the grid (like 1, 2, 3 people) , and we can see that ZENRIN is multiplying them by the proportion of contracted cell phone users, and guessing that there are 200, 400, or 600 people there. Then, the intervals are filled in.

Taking a closer look at the data for March 10, 3 p.m., as an example- people aren't moving much, and the peaks are sharp. But at 8 p.m., when people start changing locations the peaks become flatter. So we can imagine that the data has been derived using the fractions of people leaving and entering the grid. Due to this reason, prof. Hayano didn't use the 250-meter grid, instead made the space-time grid coarser.

2) Understanding SPEEDI's data

Here, Professor Hayano evaluated 2 kinds of SPEEDI calculations (in red and blue), and overlaid them with the calculations from the National Institute for Environmental Studies (in yellow) to check the difference. Unfortunately, the data is extremely different. The source terms must have been pretty different. Therefore, they made the grid coarser here as well.

He published the population figures for a 10-kilometer grid openly, and asked many people to help check the calculations. As a result he was able to approximate the magnitude.

The purpose of this project, at the end of the day, is to work on a legislation so that when someone gets thyroid cancer in the future, the government will need to compensate the medical fee without the citizens to prove the causal relationship between the cancer and the nuclear power plant accident. Calculations done during Project3111 will be used for the financial estimations related to that bill.

Q (Professor Murai): What do you think the relationship between these data presented today should be - data published and analyzed by the authorities, and data that is publicly available and can be analyzed by anyone?

A: That is a difficult issue. Ever since March 11th, there were many questions surrounding the way authorities that are supposedly owning data- how they communicate or publish data, how those data are utilized or not utilized. It is important that our project published the data openly in a way anyone can see what was happening and verify.

Project Hayano's documentation can be seen here [ja]:

You can see how cautious Professor Hayano is about the data itself. Getting reliable data is extremely important in analyzing data, because if the data is rubbish all of the analysis will be rubbish as well. Therefore, he takes a lot of efforts verifying the data, making the data available and asking many people to check and verify his calculations.

The other important aspect about this project is that it is goal oriented- Prof. Hayano has the aim to make a legislature to save the victims get compensated if they get cancer in the future, and he is very focused on making that happen. Data, research and analysis is tools for making bigger decisions, not the goal.

He was also very successful in involving other people help his project- many experts provided data outside Project311 itself, due to his credibility. He was also able to get many people to help verify his calculations.

We learned so much from professor Hayano through watching his projects.

He continues working on his projects, and the latest presentation slides can be seen as below, it is a comparison of thyroid radiation intake between Chernobyl and Fukushima.

It looks like Fukushima (red) is extremely lower than Chernobyl (blue) and the distribution differs greatly as well.

BTW, Project Hayano was actually the very first project that launched at Project311. Upon launching Project311, we weren't sure how many people would participate. We didn't know how many valuable projects will start from our data. On 9/19, we did an event called "office hour". We gathered participants and all of the data providers in our office, and made this opportunity for the participants to ask questions to the data providers. At the after party of this office hour, Professor Hayano started talking about what he wants to accomplish from this project- which was so concrete and so compelling. The moment I thought there definitely will be great findings coming out of the workshop was when I talked with Professor Hayano. Thanks again!



Project311- Comments from Professor Murai

One of the commentators for Project311 workshop was professor Jun Murai from Keio University, Dean of the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies.

He is called the "father of Japan's Internet", the founder of JUNET and president of WIDE Project. He also served in the past as the president (currently board of trustees member) of Japan Network Information Center (JPNIC), Advisory Member of Information Security Policy Council, Cabinet Secretariat Information Security Center, Cabinet Secretariat of Japan and Advisory Member of IT Strategy Headquarters at Cabinet Secretariat of Japan.

Professor Murai is currently tackling Open Government in Japan, he is the advisor of the Japanese government's "Open Data Promotion Consortium [ja]".


You can see Professor Murai's comment video here, audio is in Japanese, you can turn on English subtitle, and machine translation on other languages:

"This was an awesome project. The point is, how can we leverage this learning to the future." says Prof. Murai. "As you heard during Mr. Suzuki's comments, and as was mentioned in many of the presentations, I'd like to stress what we're doing here can save lives on the grounds in the future. It is important to think about how we link the people on the grounds and the information that was analyzed here."

"The presentations were great- lots of diversity, and this whole day was a great experience for me. I would like to thank and express my respect to the organizers for making this happen, all the data providers that released such data, and participants who did the analysis of those data. What we need to do now, is to connect this with the people on the grounds."

"What we learned today is that the role of public sectors, private sectors and individuals surrounding data is important. Individuals have shown great strength after the disaster, both good and bad. In today's workshop it was all about how to prepare for future disasters, but in a broader terms, how can we build a new global society where the public sectors, private sectors and individuals interacts surrounding data. We experienced a lot of experience on that during the disaster, and we were able to have a precious experience of analyzing and sharing that today. We recognized the importance of properly understanding the data and analyzing data, and then we need to move from theory to action."

"The data used today had time-limited conditions and it's been made available to you because you're academics. Personal info has been made available because of its potential to save lives. Otherwise you won't be able to keep using it. I think the most important thing is to work on making a society in which data is more available. There were many parties who were hesitant about releasing data and didn't provide them. There's a lot of data that we really could have utilized. We need to make an environment where we can use data properly. A society where those who have data can provide it without hesitation. We need to create a system, environment and society that allows to do this.  If we can realize such society, people like you can continue and further develop your present research and connect it to concrete actions that will save human lives. All that depends on how data would be available to the public and private sectors and the individual. If we can realize that, we can make this country a new, data-driven advanced nation. Japan learned a lot from last year's disaster, and with such experience we can make contributions to the whole world. We should take action toward creating such an environment. To make productive use of all this work and research you did today, I want to help create a society where data can be used effectively and safely. What you all have done here today is extremely useful evidence of how people can utilize such open data. I would like to ask all of you here to help. It was a wonderful event today. Thank you everyone."
