Dang, no blog posts for almost six months? What’s kept me so busy? Japan!
Back in January I changed roles at Cisco. I started helping on a project in Japan for Rakuten Mobile. They are building a cloud-native, virtualized, 5G-ready mobile network that is aiming to operate more like a web-scale company than a telco.
That’s a mouthful.
This isn’t the place to write about that, but it sure has kept me busy. I’m in Tokyo nearly every month, usually for a week, but the last trip was for two weeks. I’ll write some about my experiences there later, but I do want to comment:
- Tokyo is CLEAN. Really clean. No trash, clean sidewalks and streets. No homeless.
- You can go ANYWHERE on Tokyo public transit. Seriously. Puts everything else to shame.
- Tokyo is diverse. Compared to my last visits 10 years ago. Food, people, age.
San Francisco Supervisors: go to Tokyo. Seriously. Go and then come back and drive on our filthy, pothole infested, construction littered streets. Try to use public transit. Dodge the homeless crazy man screaming on the corner. Avoid stepping in the human feces. Then maybe start to do something to fix what was once a great City.
I don’t want to move to Tokyo (though my client would like me to). But I can tell you once you really see that a giant, complex city can be well run you REALLY get angry at seeing your own city run as a shambles.
