Rachel's Writing

  Zenjiro is a Japanese comedian who belongs to Yoshimoto Kogyo, a representative entertainment company in Japan. He was born in Hyogo in 1968, and became a disciple of Kamioka Ryutaro, who was a popular comedian from the 1960s to 90s. Firstly, Zenjiro had debuted on TV shows and stages in Osaka, and got many awards in comedy contests. In 1995, he started to perform in Tokyo, but his comedy wasn’t accepted well there. He was depressed and moved to USA and began to perform there as a stand-up comedian. He won the International Comedy Festival in Thailand, and got 2nd place in the L.A. Comedy Store Stand Up Competition. I had an interview with him in September 2019, and asked him about his experiences and ideas. This is the summary of the article I wrote for Singalife, the Japanese magazine in Singapore. — What’s the different between Japanese entertainment Owarai from the comedy in the US? Firstly I was impressed that the audience pays attention and respects the comedy. They like ...

  Tokopedia is a successful E-commerce business in Indonesia that was founded by two computer engineers, William Tanuwijaya and Leontinus Alpha Edison in 2009. They would like to enrich small shops in Jakarta, and planned to make an EC site for selling their products. However they didn’t have enough funds. And it wasn’t so ordinary for people to buy products through the Internet at that time. That’s why RAKUTEN, the famous EC company in Japan, had failed in Indonesia. The founders of Tokopedia started their small business doing things such as making the BBS for classified advertisements. They had improved their site both technically and made it more user friendly for years while the Indonesian economy was growing in the beginning of the 2010s. At that time, the volume of the middle class increased in Indonesia especially around Jakarta. They began to enjoy their life as consumers. New shopping malls were built everywhere, and they began to use personal computers and mobile ...

  According to the annual weather change, the separation of seasons is decided. People generally consider a year is separated into four seasons, each three months, like spring, summer, autumn and winter.  But the region near the equator has two seasons: dry or rainy. There are two types of separation of seasons in Japan, they depend on the Western and Chinese calendars. As we use the Western calendar in general society, spring starts in March. However in the Chinese calendar, we start spring in Lichun, and it is described as the start of spring in Chinese characters, even though it is coldest in terms of days. It was Lichun on February 3rd or 4th, and it is celebrated on the day before Lichun, as the Chinese New Year’s Eve “Setsubun” in Japan. Peple scatter roasted beans while yelling “Fuku wa uchi. Oni wa soto”. It means to invite happiness to our house and get demons out. That’s because the origin of this ritual is a kind of purification or exorcism. But we don’t sca...