If you’re flying in and out of Haneda Airport from January 9, 2018, you may be surprised to see a new team on hand to assist you. The team will be made up of seven robots designed to assist staff and visitors at the busy domestic and international airport, located very near the central part of Tokyo.
Robots will be there to provide information, offer interpretation into four different languages or carry your bags, for example. When you’re at Haneda in January, you’ll see a C-3PO ancestor, the”EMIEW3″ robot, which is less than a meter tall and can provide you with information in English and Japanese.
With the number of foreign visitors to Japan climbing rapidly – the total number of visitors to Japan exceeding 24 million this year – combined with a tight labor market, Haneda officials realize that they will need robots to increase productivity and meet the needs of travelers. Additionally, there is a pride associated with showing the world during the Tokyo2020 Olympics that Japan is cutting edge.
As Yutaka Kuratomi, a representative from the Japan Airport Terminal, said in this article, “We want foreign tourists to think that the Japanese people are cool when they come here.”
Sonja Henie on the cover of TIME Magazine, July 17, 1939
A skate, according to Mr. Webster, is a contrivance for the foot, consisting of a keel-like runner attached to a plate or frame, enabling the wearer to glide rapidly over the ice. This definition, good enough so far as it goes, is, in the light of recent developments, plainly deficient. It is evidence that the times move faster than the dictionary, and that the dictionary is not yet aware of Sonja Henie.
For this blood daughter of the Norse has during recent months demonstrated unmistakably that a skate is something more than what Mr. Webster’ says it is. To her it has proved the means to fame, fortune, movie stardom and the plaudits of kings. With it she has glided swiftly not merely over the ice, but also into one of the most extraordinary of all motion picture careers.
J.D. Shapiro of Arkansas Gazette, January 23, 1938 had an opportunity to interview Sonja Henie, a retired figure skater whose three straight Olympic gold medals and ten straight world championships in individual figure skating propelled her to the heights of Hollywood. Henie would leverage her sporting accomplishments and become one of the most famous people on the planet in the 1930s and 1940s, a movie and professional skating star, who earned millions of dollars in the process.
At the time of the interview, Henie’s third feature film – “Happy Landing” – was about to debut, and she was about to leave with 80 other skaters on a lucrative national tour of her own ice skating show, called the “Hollywood Ice Revues.” Thanks to her first two films, Henie had already earned hundreds of thousands of dollars. Her first film “One in a Million,” had already made 20th Century Fox more money than any of its other films released in 1936, while her second film, “Thin Ice,” was the fifth biggest box office hit of 1937.
Sonja Henie in One in a Million
According to the Shapiro interview, skating stardom and Hollywood famedom was the goal all along.
“I said to myself,” she explains, “I’ll win 10 skating championships, then I will go into the movies,” She won the championships. Now she is in the movies. So what is strange about it? Sonja it seems has always been like that. She usually knew what she wanted. She usually go it. At seven years old, she told us recently, she wanted a pair of skates for Christmas. Her parents didn’t want to give them to her because they thought she was too young, but in the end she got them. Soon she wanted to win a Norwegian championship. She did, at 11. Next she fastened her eye on a world championships, and she got it, at 14. After that she decided to triumph in the Olympics, and nothing could stop her.
And when it came to the world of film, she targeted 20th Century Fox, led by Darryl F. Zanuck, who according to this Vanity Fair article, had a nose for talent outside the acting world and was willing to take a chance on non-conventional ideas and people. Henie’s business partner, Arthur Wirtz, who created the ice revue business for Henie in New York, would help Henie bring an ice show to Hollywood with the hopes of getting the studio heads’ attention.
Sonja’s father, Wilhelm, then went to see media mogul, William Randolph Hearst with an offer – the Henie’s would donate $5,000 to a charity of Hearst’s choice if his mistress and actress, Marion Davies, would sponsor Sonja’s ice shows. They agreed, and two shows were produced, and the stars came out to the spectacle: Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable and Myrna Loy – Hollywood royalty of the time.
Sonja Henie and Tyrone Power in The Second Fiddle
And at the second show, Zanuck showed up. According to Shapiro, Zanuck signed Henie to a five-year contract, instantly making her one of the highest paid actresses of her time.
At the release of her first picture, “One in a Million”, Sonja Henie, walked arm in arm with Hollywood leading man, Tyrone Power at the film’s premier at the Roxy Theater in New York City. The one-and-a-half meter tall woman from Oslo, Norway was a giant of giants.
Here is Sonya Henie in Fly on Ice, her last theatrical film in 1958.
Oh to be a child again – to not care what others think, to ask questions randomly and endlessly, to see only friendship in others, and possibility in anything….
And so it is inspirational to me that the Tokyo 2020 Organizing Committee decided to have elementary school children in Japan select the mascots of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games. On December 7, 2017, the organizers finally unveiled the top three mascot designs, which will be put to a vote of schoolchildren held from December 11 of this year to February 22 of 2018.
Initially, to my adult eyes, they kind of look and feel similar, perhaps because they are generally all humanoid, and of the same dimensions. To me, the Olympic mascots of candidates A and B are quite similar in their big-eye and big-ear look. But on closer inspection, candidate C is different, with the pronounced application of Japanese fairy tale characters – the fox (kitsune) and the raccoon (tanuki).
Candidate B’s Paralympic mascot is also from Japanese lore, an animated representation of the koma-inu, the lion-dog creature that you often see at the entrance of shrines. Candidate A tries to employ the checkered design of the official Tokyo2020 logo, which to me, feels kind of forced, something a committee member would recommend.
But again, my adult eyes are not the filter – the mascots are for the kids.
Having said that, the finalists in this competition were decidedly selected by adults. As this list of jury panelists show, only adults selected the final three designs. And these were very commercial adults, people who have succeeded in marketing product to children and young adults: experts from toy companies Bandai and Takara Tomy, from comic publishers Shueisha and Shogakukan, children’s book publisher Poplar, game producers Bandai Namco and Square Enix, anime producer Toei Animation and stuffed doll manufacturer Sega Interactive.
So the Tokyo 2020 mascots, when they are voted on by schoolchildren in the coming weeks, aren’t entirely springing from the fertile minds of children. But at least they have a say. The question is – will moms and dads the world over, when the time comes, have a say in whether to buy or not.
The inaugural ANOC World Beach Games are coming to San Diego in 2019. Wake boarding, beach volleyball, beach wrestling, beach handball, bouldering among many other events will be on display at Mission Beach. Mix sand and sun, with youth and sports and you get something less formal and more participative than the Olympics.
In fact, Chief Executive Officer of the ANOC World Beach Games Sand Diego 2019, Willie Banks, calls it the “anti-Olympics Games – fresh and fast paced, more community based, more of a festival feel.”
I had the opportunity to sit down with Banks in Tokyo as he was in town on business His career path is a model for athletes who wonder what to do after spending so much of their youth training and competing. Banks was one of the premier triple jumpers, breaking the world record in 1985 with a hop, skip and a jump of 17.97 at the USA Outdoor Track and Field Championships, a record that lasted over a decade.
Banks competed at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and the 1988 Seoul Olympics. In 1994, he was deputy venue director of the Rose Bowl for 8 games of the FIFA World Cup in the United States, where the finals between Brazil and Italy were held. In 1996, Banks was the director of athletes service at the Atlanta Olympics. And over the years, he has been a consultant to cities bidding to be Olympic hosts. Today, in addition to serving on the executive committee of the World Olympians Association, he runs his own company, HSJ Incorporated, which markets an artificial turf called Fieldturf in Japan and Taiwan.
Banks, who grew up in San Diego, is looking forward to bringing the world to his neighborhood. “The most important part of these Games is that we will have fun and the athletes and spectators will enjoy, which will build a wonderful brand,” he said.
I recently bought a copy of Life Magazine’s October 30, 1964 edition, featuring a young Don Schollander staring off into the distance, his four gleaming gold medals draped around his neck. (Read about that here.) But equally interesting to me were the ads in the magazine, a time capsule containing artifacts of a consumer goods era long gone.
Polaroid: Polaroid saw the future was in instant images. Why wait days to get your print photos when Polaroid could do it in 60 seconds? Polaroid is still around, albeit more as a novelty. Although you can’t tell in this ad, this Polaroid Color Pack Camera expanded like an accordion, and appears very popular amidst the biggest names in rock and roll according to this site. Polaroid’s brand and IP is now owned by “The Impossible Project,” an organization dedicated to keeping Polaroid’s instant film legacy and business alive, a decade after Polaroid gave up on instant film cameras.
Encyclopaedia Britannica: Did you own a set of that massive collection of Western-centric knowledge? My family did. I remember chucking it into a dumpster as we cleared out the detritus of 20th century knowledge management, replaced ruthlessly by the Internet. The last paper version of this massive set of tomes – all 32,640 pages – was published in 2010.
Yellow Pages: This was a directory of telephone numbers and addresses amassed by AT&T, a tome published every year to help find the contact information of a business in your area. This tome too is now a relic of the past – see Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Admiral: In the early 1960s, Admiral was one of the leading names in electronics, famous for their televisions, radios and record players among a vast lineup of products. In their heyday, Admiral helped lead the transition from vacuum tube technology to transistors. Today, Admiral is still around as a television brand marketed by a company based in Taiwan. More interestingly, vacuum tube amplifiers today are all the rage.
Winston: I had thought that you couldn’t advertise cigarettes or tobacco products in American magazines, so I thought I’d highlight this antiquated ad for Winston Filter Cigarettes, with its iconic slogan, “Winston tastes good…like a cigarette should!” That ad made Winston the best-selling cigarette in the world in 1966, two years after this ad. While advertising tobacco products on the television and radio was banned in America in 1971, apparently, companies can still advertise tobacco products in magazines and newspapers. However, tobacco companies can get significant blow back if they try.
A friend of mine at Coca Cola gave me a gift that I treasure – a “3 Years to go!” pin, distributed to all Coca Cola Japan employees in anticipation of the Tokyo 2020 Games.
Coca Cola is a TOP Sponsor, which means they are one of 13 global sponsors of the Olympic Games. In fact, Coca Cola is the longest running sponsor of the Olympics, having first established its presence at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics. They also produce Coca Cola branded Olympic pins, and sponsor pin trading centers at the Games.
The “3 years to go!” pin highlights the official Tokyo2020 logo and Olympic rings on the right, with a red Coca Cola bottle swathed in a green and gold kimono obi.
Images of ordinary people jumping over fences, getting ready for a row on the river, kids in judo gear, elderly people on a swim…oh yes they’re watching something on their mobile phones or tablets…and the song is “I Go to Rio.”
To the average viewer in Australia, it’s just another ad during the Olympic season.
At least that’s what the Australian Olympic Committee (AOC) claimed in court over the past year. The AOC has rights to select local sponsorships which goes to funding the development of athletes in Australia. In 2016, they had signed Optus to a ten-year sponsorship, which replaced Telstra as an official sponsor, known as an “Australian Olympic Team Partner.”
With a sponsor spending millions for a long-term relationship with the AOC and the Olympic brand, the AOC has an obligation to protect against so-called ambush marketing, ads or campaigns that associate with the Olympics even though they did not pay for the rights to do so. The AOC viewed this advertisement as a prime example of ambush marketing, and filed a lawsuit against Telstra when they started broadcasting the commercial just prior to the start of the 2016 Rio Olympics.
Part of the issue was the statement made by the voiceover on the commercial: “This August, for the first time ever, you can watch every event in Rio live with the Olympics on Seven app and Telstra on Australia’s fastest mobile network.” In essence, the AOC saw this as piggybacking off of another official sponsor, Seven West Media, which is the network with rights to broadcast the Olympics.
Additionally, the advertisement ended with the text, “Official Technology Partner of Seven’s Olympic Games Coverage.” According to this article in the Sydney Morning Herald, the lawyer representing the AOC explained that Telstra modified that statement and even added a disclaimer that it was not an official sponsor of the Olympic Games, which I presume means that the AOC is arguing Telstra was aware that the audience might be confused regarding their relationship to the Olympics.
In the end, the Full Court of the Federal Court put an end to the AOC’s fight against Telstra on October 25, 2017 by ending AOC’s appeal against a judgment of a lower court that found in favor of Telstra. Here is the explanation as provided by the Sydney Morning Herald:
The full court agreed with Federal Court judge Michael Wigney who, in regards to the Telstra-Samsung promotion, found “the only hint that the advertisements related in any way to the Rio Olympic Games is the “I go to Rio” soundtrack.”
“The primary judge found that this reference does not make the advertisement misleading or deceptive as contended by the AOC. We find no error in that conclusion.
The Full Court also upheld Justice Wigney’s finding that a “reasonable person viewing the advertisements would not necessarily know about or recollect Telstra’s previous sponsorship of the Australian Olympic team, let alone turn his or her mind to that fact when viewing the commercial”.
“As to Seven’s advertisements, he (Justice Wigney) found that they simply confirm that Telstra’s sponsorship arrangement is with Seven. Those findings of fact were open to the primary judge,” Full Court judges Andrew Greenwood, John Nicholas and Stephen Burley found.
Why does this all cause concern to the AOC, and perhaps other NOC’s establishing long-term sponsorships? It’s in the first paragraph of the Sydney Herald article:
What is a multimillion-dollar sponsorship worth if your key competitor can muscle in on your exclusive rights?
Not much according to a recent decision by the Full Court of the Federal Court.
Whenever I write a story on an American high jumper, long jumper or a discus thrower, I have to go through the painful back-and-forth conversion between feet and meters, inches and centimeters.
It used to be the holy grail in the United States and Britain to run a mile in fewer than four minutes, until Roger Bannister broke it, which broke the mental barrier and allowed others to blast through the four-minute wall. Today, however, no one really cares about the mile, as the standard racing distance is the 1,500 meters, which is a little less than a mile.
Now, track and field in the US has generally gone metric. For example, the USA Outdoor Track and Field Championships hold the same distance running events that other countries do: 100 meters, 800 meters, 5,000 meters, 110 meter hurdles etc. In fact, the organization, USA Track and Field, adopted distances using the metric system in 1974.
They were ahead of their time apparently, because in 1975, the US Congress passed an act that states preference for the metric system of weights and measures, which was followed by an executive order from President Gerald Ford. Essentially, the entire world had already adopted the metric system. Politicians and businessmen alike wanted the US to get with the international game plan. However, for some reason, probably related to a tremendous resistance to change, the act and the order were watered down by stating that adoption was voluntary.
What was this resistance? Listen to this fantastic podcast on design, 99 Percent Invisible, and their story on America’s implementation of the metric system, titled “Half Measures.” History professor, Stephen Mihm is quoted as saying in the podcast that interestingly, uncommon bedfellows united to resist – astronomers, theologians and industrial engineers:
But abandoning the U.S. customary system did not sit well with a lot of people, including an influential group of “astronomers, theologians, and cranks,” Mihm explains. “And keep in mind that those categories which we consider separate and distinct today were not at this time.” This group spun together scientific arguments with other wild and nonsensical ideas, and developed a theory that to abandon the inch was to go against God’s will. Converting to metric, they argued, would be tantamount to sacrilege.
But the real core resistance to metrication came from a different group entirely: some of the most innovative industrialists of their day. Engineers who worked in the vast machine tool industry had built up enormous factories that included everything from lathes to devices for cutting screw threads — and all of these machines were designed around the inch. The manufacturers argued that retooling their machines for a new measurement system would be prohibitively expensive. They also argued there was an “intuitiveness” to the customary system that made it ideal for shop work.
Imperial – Metric Conversion for Cooking
This reluctance to fully shifting to the metric system can result in engineering miscalculations, sometimes with tragic or costly consequences:
In 1983, an Air Canada Flight ran out of fuel mid-flight because the ground crew and the flight crew all calculated fuel requirements in pounds instead of liters, granted this mistake happened just after the Canadian government required conversion to the metric system. Fortunately, the pilots managed an incredible “dead-stick” landing, gliding safely to a nearby airstrip.
In 1999, NASA lost a $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft because engineers in Lockheed Martin calculated thruster data in pounds to NASA while NASA engineers were making their calculations in metric units called “newtons.”
In 2003, a car on the Space Mountain roller coaster ride at Tokyo Disneyland derailed due to a broken axle, resulting in the injury of 12. Apparently, new axle parts ordered in 2002 were measured in inches as opposed to millimeters, making the new axles off spec.
In the end, there are bigger issues than the momentary confusion of trying to know how far 5,000 meters is in feet or miles. And to be fair, American institutions have gradually adopted the metric system due to its partnerships and obligations internationally.
And yet, the fact that America still clings officially to inches, quarts and Fahrenheit can be a pain. Don’t we know that we are shooting ourselves in the 20.48 centimeter (aka foot)?
I had the opportunity to sit down with Banks in Tokyo as he was in town on business His career path is a model for athletes who wonder what to do after spending so much of their youth training and competing. Banks was one of the premier triple jumpers, breaking the world record in 1985 with a hop, skip and a jump of 17.97 at the USA Outdoor Track and Field Championships, a record that lasted over a decade.
You must be logged in to post a comment.