Last night, October 31, 2015, was Halloween here in Tokyo. By around 20:00 the streets on the west side of Shibuya were completely jammed with people, and the police had 800 officers in the area for crowd control.

Earlier this week I traveled to Kochi city to participate in a seminar designed to help Kochi Prefectural tourism-related officials understand what might bring more foreign travelers there.

In this age of the Internet, there is still nothing more powerful in our grab bag of popular culture and entertainment media than movies with inspired plots that can actually move the hearts of audiences.

Having been there, I can safely say that as of September 2015, there is NO access allowed by the Great Firewall to Google services like search, Gmail, maps, etc.