# The CCTV/NHK TV Show - Author: Joichi Ito - Date: 2002-10-03T00:21:51Z The town hall styled panel discussions were held in the military guarded studios of the national TV station CCTV. Narita is much more fortified, but the guards at CCTV stood at attention much better than the guard at Narita... The first panel was three Chinese whose names I don't have and Okuda-san of Toyota, Miyauchi-san of Orix and Idei-san of Sony from the Japanese side. The panelists for the second panel had to sit on stage but not say anything for 2.5 hours. Several of of our panelists fell asleep. I closed my eyes briefly, but didn't sleep, and at least I didn't snore. Idei-san was great and overall it was good, but a bit bland and the translation was bad. There was kind of a weird anti-Japanese feeling, but it might have just been me... The news caster who was the moderator asked the audience to smile more when they clapped and made us practice. It was kind of... strange. The Chinese side always clapped when anyone praised China. Also, when the Chinese audience were asked to raise their hand if they liked Japanese food, only two of them raised their hand. Then the moderator interviewed one of them about why she didn't like Japanese food. I bet that if we apologized sincerely instead of denying the mass murders, it would get a lot better. As the war vetrans die, it's really our last chance... As I reported earlier, Yanai-san of Pia ended up taking Mari Matsunaga's place on our panel and Iemoto-san, a 20 year old entrepreneur from Japan was also on the panel with us. The Chinese side was James Ding of AsiaInfo, Victor Want of GWcom Inc. and the CEO of Alibaba China. Victor and James both went to Stanford so at lunch I got to talk to them in English. They were great. I got to get my comments in although I'm not sure how they went over in the translation. Idei-san who also joined our session had some great things to say. I thought this was going to be live, but it looks like they will edit it before they broadcast it. It will be broadcast nationwide in China and on Channel 1 in Japan on NHK. I wonder what's going to happen in the edit. As usual, my blurb about how we should unite forces and fight Microsoft together by creating a lot of open source code got a good response. ;-) Mizuka and Makiko-san were sitting in the audience... I got to sit next to Idei-san in the bus and we had a good chat. I had heard a rumor that the design center of Sony had been shut down. I asked him about it. He said, "which one? We haven't shut down a design center..." So I guess that was a bad rumor. We talked a lot about the future of Sony, Japan and Sony's strategy vis a vis ventures. He think that partnerships with venture businesses can help Sony be more innovative. That's great news for me/us! --- #### Categories Joi's Diary, Photo