I gave a presentation at Zope Essentials 7 in Japanese regarding Deliverance, the new flexible theming technology for Plone. Funnily enough, 2 years earlier, I also attended and presented at Zope Essentials 6, so this was as much a resurrection of the event as an opportunity for me to present again to the local Plonistas.
17 attended including myself and following my presentation I fielded a number of questions from the attendees, which was a good indicator of the level of interest in the technology. Following my presentation, Takanori Suzuki gave a lightning talk regarding eggifying an existing Zope 2 product using ZopeSkel and setuptools. In his presentation he used his PloneSlimbox product as an example. After this, Takeshi Yamamoto presented regarding his efforts to translate the eduCommons project into Japanese, and finally Manabu Terada gave a brief talk on accessibility in Japanese Plone-based websites.
A special thanks to Jay Hotta for helping organise the event, to Manabu Terada for MCing, to the JZUG for supporting it, and to ASCII MediaWorks for hosting.

On Wednesday, April the 18th, the Japan Zope Users Group had their quarterly meetup, and I gave a presentation regarding the use of Open Source software in New Zealand and particularly the use of Plone in New Zealand Government. My presentation also included a demonstration of creating a UML model for a simple Plone content type and associated workflow and then using the code generator, ArchGenXML, to create the product. I also demonstrated some of the benefits of using Instance Manager while doing Plone development. Following my presentation, Jonathan Lewis gave a report regarding what was achieved at the recent Sorrento sprint.

About 30+ people attended and it was really encouraging to see the enthusiasm for Plone in Japan, where Plone appears to be experiencing a similar surge in popularity as New Zealand and other countries around the world. Many thanks to Shigeo Honda who organised the event, WiseKnot who provided the venue (and beverages), those who helped me prepare the presentation, and all those that turned up to listen to the presentation.

Prior to our leaving for Japan, on February the 16th, we had a Plone Meetup 'New Zealand-style' where 6 of us met at a Malaysian restaurant and discussed the progress of Plone in New Zealand, some Python and Zope technologies, some Flash front-end goodness, and some friendly Microsoft Vs Google banter. I've received some nice feedback regarding the meetup so thanks for that and thanks to those who were able to attend and also those who were there in 'spirit' :-)

Finally, yesterday I met with Atsushi Shibata in Akihabara. Some of you may know that Shibata-san is responsible for the Plone Blogging product, CoreBlog2. Shibata-san has been pioneering the use of Plone/Zope in Japan for some time now and it was nice to discuss with him the progress of Plone in Japan and some of the challenges Japan faces going forward. I'm sure we both came away from the meeting enlightened and it is always nice to meet another Plonista!

I've previously made some comment on how Japan has influenced costume design in Star Wars but I was dumbstruck when a friend let me know that the Star Wars saga was largely influenced by Akira Kurosawa and more specifically his movie's 'The Hidden Fortress' and 'Yojimbo'.
This comment from an online article I just read through:

Star Wars owed much to The Hidden Fortress in its inception. Lucas' original script was basically just a remake for Fortress, although even in the final edit many concepts from the film still remain.

The article explained specifically how this movie and Yojimbo influenced Star Wars and also what other influences Lucas had.