Last Sunday I left for Japan to keynote the inaugural Japanese Virtual World Summit and attend the Tokyo International Film Festival.¬† The event was created by the Kadokawa Publishing Group with help from Japanese virtual world developer Meltingdots.¬† I traveled with our esteemed CCO Douglas Gayeton, whose enthusiasm for all things Japanese led me to some of the cooler epicurean experiences of my life, including sumo stew called Chanko, Yakitori, (skewered barbequed chicken including gizzards, skin, hearts and liver).¬† An episode of Douglas’ film “Molotov Alva” is showing in the festival.¬† We also hung out with a whole bunch of great virtual world creators, Net pioneers and media folks (see the picture below taken by Joi Ito right before we walked the red carpet on Saturday.

The unexpected highlight of our trip turned out to be an near total immersion and obsession in the toy stores of the Akehabara district, which feature robots, transformers and millions of tiny toys fromthe longstanding Japanese anime and character culture.¬† We bought close to 400 of these, focusing primarily on “Gashapon”, the small vinyl characters dispensed from coin operated vending machines in Japan. ¬† These will be carted today in a large suitcase to the MoU Sausalito offices where they will be greeted with joy by fellow MoU’ers (Gregory and Emma in particular).¬† Once Douglas returns (he is now in Rome),¬† I promise to upload the photos of our trip to Flickr and begin sharing how these toys will become integrated into the MoU creative process.¬† How’s that for a cliffhanger?

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