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Vol.26 : Russell Willis (eigoTown.com Limited)
August 29, 2007
Volatile markets make early rate hike uncertain
Power crunch forces factory shutdowns
Ultrathin TV sets new standard
New technologies keep hearts beating
Expanded coverage: Asians offer fresh perspectives
dot com bubble：インターネット関連企業のバブル
angel financing：主にベンチャービジネス等への個人投資家による経済支援
viable business：存続可能なビジネス
（ R: Russell, P: Peter ）
| P : |
How long has eigoTown been around? |
| R : |
eigoTown was launched in June 2000, so it's been around now for about seven years. It was launched in the dot com bubble days and we set out to be the largest portal site for everything to do with English in Japan for Japanese people.
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| R : |
We had our ups and downs. You know, as a dot com bubble company, we were set up with venture capital or angel financing actually, and we marched ahead and spent lots of money and we were looking for a second round of investment at the time, as most internet companies like us were doing, and that was part of the business plan. And that finally fell through and left us in a very, very difficult situation in about 2001, where things looked really rather bleak.
But at the time the decision was: is eigoTown a viable business, is it something that's worthwhile doing? And I thought, well yes I think there is a place for a destination site or a portal site that has all of the information that someone interested in the English language or English language-speaking culture would want to go to. And I think that we can do something that's both positive in terms of making a beneficial difference to the world and can make money and reward its investors and shareholders.
So, we decided to go carry on and over the last few years since then, I think we've been able to build up a site that everyone can be very, very proud of and we know that many, many people come to eigoTown, hundreds of thousands of people come to eigoTown and rely upon it for entertainment, information, education, and community; so we are very happy about that.
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| P : |
Perhaps you could just go into a little bit of detail for people who are not aware of the site yet, about some of the things that you do at the eigoTown site. |
| R : |
Sure. So, eigoTown is divided into a number of different sections. One section is called eigoCollege. And so for example there you can go and do daily online lessons for TOEIC at the different levels, for Eiken at different levels, for Business English, Business Vocabulary...
Within that section also there are a number of articles and information that are produced by authors, some from America, some from Japan, on subjects ranging from understanding "The West Wing" to new words that have become current in English.
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| P : |
And this is all free, right? |
| R : |
And this is all provided free and it's paid for by advertising. So companies that are selling products related perhaps to TOEIC or to "The West Wing" or to other areas will advertise within it. So eigoCollege, for example is one of our sections and there is a lot more to it than that, but other sections include Ryugaku Plaza, which is all about studying abroad.
So, if you are interested in studying abroad in America or Britain or any other English-speaking country, there is a whole range of information there which will provide you information about specific courses that you can take at universities, at colleges, all of the stuff that you need to know about. For example, with home-stays and safety regulations, and how different the toilets are in America or Britain, or the parking regulations.
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| R : |
I mean it is a huge section. If you were to put eigoTown into a book, it would probably be over 10,000 pages long. There is a massive amount of reference about that.
So within Ryugaku Plaza alone we have country guides, which are not related to any particular courses, but country guides which, if you are planning to be a student in Britain or Ireland or Canada or America, this is what you need to know. And so obviously that's a useful and very comprehensive reference section that people use. So, Ryugaku Plaza was another section.
Another section is our BBS section where people who are interested in English can come together and discuss things. We have a Study Abroad expert within that section who you can just ask questions and he will, as an expert living abroad in Australia and having some experience studying abroad, can tell you all the things that you need to know, and try and help you with any worries or concerns that you might have.
And obviously people get together and discuss other issues about the meaning of words or places to go or difficulties or problems that they have, or share opportunities that they want other people to be aware of. So, the BBS section is another.
We have a great jobs section, so if you are looking to find a job where you can use your English, this is the place, and it will tell you everything from how to behave in an interview, how to write your resume, cultural differences between working in a Japanese company and perhaps a western company, and a whole range of, again, sort of reference information that you might need to know, as well as a list of specific jobs that you can apply for in getting that job of your dreams. And so the Eigo Job section is very popular.
So, we have a number of different sections. Others include: for Japanese English teachers, for translators, for interpreters. We have a great podcast section of which this is one, with the Nikkei Weekly, Time Magazine, 'eigono hint' soap opera drama. We have fairy tales, we have a big blog section with Pakkun Makkun from NHK, with Hiroko Graves and other celebrities and a number of other different people.
So, really, I mean that's the thing about eigoTown. Ask me to describe it, we'll use up all of our time.
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| R : |
It's absolutely massive, it's comprehensive and that's why I think almost anyone who is aware of what's out there knows that eigoTown is the place to go if you are interested in English and you are Japanese.
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| P : |
Excellent. And when you set this up, I mean you'd already been in Japan for a few years. |
| P : |
For you yourself, I mean I know you speak a certain amount of Japanese, but basically you are an English speaker. |
fanzines：ファンの作品を掲載した専門誌（同人誌）
desktop publishing：コンピューターを用いた出版の一連の作業
speech recognition：音声認識
red tape：官僚的形式主義
（ R: Russell, P: Peter ）
| P : |
What were the main hurdles for you in creating a company which gives a lot of information about the English-speaking world, but gives it in Japanese?
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| R : |
Right. Well, I think when I came to Japan, I must have been a bit crazy I think, because I don't know what possessed me to imagine that I could set up companies in a foreign country when I didn't speak the language.
And I think it was because I'd always been involved in publishing and ever since I was 15, I'd been creating tourist guides for my local town and printing out 50,000 copies which were funded by advertising by the local fish and chips shop, and the pub, and the Bleak House museum and what have you.
And basically going around, sort of, signing people up, then they'd give me the money, I'd pretend that I was just working for someone else - instead I was actually just working for myself. At the same time - because I was too young you see, they wouldn't trust me if they thought that I was doing it by myself. And I was doing that then, and I had my first meishi at the age of 15. Bradstow Publications with a picture of Mr. Pickwick on it from Charles Dickens there.
And I was also publishing fanzines about, sort of, modern adult comics, adult in the sense that they were serious rather than superhero or funny animal characters. And a lot of the - when I was around the age of fifteen, sixteen, a lot of those who are now sort of almost world famous comic book writers, graphic novelists, were sort of friends of mine and wrote for the fanzines that I produced, from Alan Moore who did 'Watchman' and 'From Hell' and various other classic graphic novels.
Warren Ellis who is a science fiction comic book writer, David Lloyd who is a famous artist, Steve Dillon. Anyone in the comics world would know these names. And so it was an amazing experience doing that and for various reasons I sort of lessened my activity in that world and when I was at college I was publishing student union magazines and handbooks.
So, when I was in Japan, all I was about was publishing stuff. And so having decided to stay in Japan, I realized that I needed to do this in some form and I became familiar with interactive multimedia on computers through the Mac. I'd used the Mac for desktop publishing, which was, you know, laying out pages of magazines in Pagemaker and QuarkXpress. But it was the interactive capabilities to make multimedia software that fascinated me.
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| P : |
I remember when I'd first met you, you were developing software for speech recognition.
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| R : |
That's right. We were demonstrating at a conference and I think the classic one we had was a gorilla, I believe, sitting in the jungle and when you would say 'pick a grape' and he'd pick a grape, or 'eat a banana' and he would eat a banana. Or I think we had one which was 'vanish' and he'd disappear.
And, yeah that was fantastic stuff that was based on speech recognition technology provided by Apple at the time. And that was very popular, and you were involved in one of the CD-Roms that we did for that.
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| R : |
And we had an interview with you and so you would ask me to choose one of a menu of questions and you'd hear the question and then you would pop up and answer the question. So that was one way; or you would just - the speech recognition part was you would just say "So where are you from Peter?" or something like this and you would pop up and answer.
So yes, speech and we did CD-Roms, we did the British UK '98 Festival. We worked with MacMillan to do a very well regarded children's CCD-Rom. You could buy the CD-Rom in T-Zone, in Laox, Dai-ichi Kaden, all of the retail shops (some of them aren't around anymore) at the time.
But it was at the end of the 90's - 1999 - that we realized that one of the key problems with the distribution of CD-Rom software was the distribution, Softbank controlled it and if you didn't have enough money to get shelf space and proper, sort of, reordering from shops when they sold the product, it was very, very difficult to have a bestseller.
And so the internet seemed like an opportunity to bring an audience to us and then we would be able to sell things to that audience. And so one of the reasons eigoTown was set up was partly that model, so, you know, if you've got hundreds of thousands of people coming to your website every month, then there is stuff that you can sell them.
And we do sell eigoTown products, we've just launched our eigoTown 'Inside Guide' the first topic of which is Harry Potter. And we've had a number of CD-Roms that we've sold, but of course our main business is advertising focused. And so a lot of advertisers who want to reach our audience spend fairly considerable sums of money to reach that audience through our web pages, through our newsletters and other means.
So yeah, so why did I do it, was it a problem? Yes, I was crazy to do it.
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| P : |
But it has worked out. |
| R : |
But it has worked out yes, yes. So, I think it was the arrogance and stupidity of youth that made me do it and pushed me forward. But I think if I were to do it again, I'd certainly say, I would do what you did, study Japanese for four years in college or something.
And then to try and set up a company would be a lot easier because - not so much from the red tape of setting up a company per se, but in terms of being able to understand what's going on around you and really get a sense of what's popular or where the market trends are going.
And also just in terms of networking, when you need to network with people who don't speak English and your Japanese isn't quite good enough to make that kind of bond that you might want to.
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| P : |
Do you have any particular directions where you do want to build eigoTown from here on? I mean I know you said you've just published your first book. I mean, do you want to become a major book publisher, for example? |
| R : |
Well, I think one of our models is that yes, we want people to come to eigoTown, we want to make money out of people advertising to those people through eigoTown. But certainly yes, we want to have a number of publications and products; so books, our own - becoming eigoTown as a publisher is one way that we can see that happening.
The other is publishing software, publishing DVDs, continuing to publish interactive materials, whether they'd CD-Rom based or DVD based or online or most likely a combination of the two where you get a book with something and then there is also an online component.
So, eigoTown as a publisher of products or a provider of services rather than just a place to advertise is the next step for us I think. Now, of course, there is an issue there of competing with our own customers in terms of our - we'll have advertisers who would then become - we'd become competitors of theirs, but we'll be very careful about that to make sure that that doesn't adversely affect us too much.
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| P : |
So, you've just started publishing books. Are you selling the books in bookshops or are you selling them yourself or how does it work? |
| R : |
Well, the books are being sold in bookshops and they are being distributed through various distributors in Japan. But also we have our own bookstore now called eigoStore, which is designed to sell western published books; "Da Vinci Code", "Harry Potter", any kind of book like that that you might find in a bookstore here in Japan which is in English, and we've partnered with Yohan to provide those books. We have about 15,000 books in stock at any one time. |
| P : |
Excuse me, why would you get into a business that's as competitive as that when there are people like Amazon around? |
| R : |
Good question. I think because we looked at the competitive landscape and we realized that Amazon is not really doing as good a job as it could be, especially in that area of western books and Japanese published books about learning English. And we think that we can we can do a better job of providing a better user experience and also certainly with the Japanese published books, there wouldn't be an issue of price because discounting isn't actually allowed in Japan, so you can't discount Japanese published books.
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| R : |
You can with western books. But interestingly enough, many of the books that we sell - western books that we sell on our site are actually cheaper than you can buy on Amazon. So, for us, we know, obviously we are not going to be able to be anywhere near the size of Amazon and it's just - that would be impossible. But we can, you know, there is a nice bit of pie there and we'd like a nice slice of it.
And I think because eigoTown does have a relatively loyal large and regular readership, we can bring those people over once they see that eigoStore is a better experience to buy books and other products, so we'll have western books, we can have Japanese published books about learning English but also be selling other sorts of CD-Roms and electronic dictionaries, these kind of products.
Well, it is nicer space to play in, if you like. You know, you've just got a more - you know, there's more selections of different things on different themes. Someone cares about this area, whereas unfortunately a number of the other bookshops around don't seem to care very much about making their spaces nice for their customers, and that's what we are going to do. And so yeah, we are looking forward to that developing.
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| P : |
Are you a Nikkei Weekly reader? |
| R : |
Absolutely. I mean I would be at sea without the Nikkei Weekly. I started reading it when I first came to Japan and it's just a fascinating newspaper. If you are interested in business and market trends and demographics and society as a whole, then this has a really interesting slice of it. Everything from, sort of, in depth articles on the way in which certain businesses are behaving, just to 'these are the new crazy products that are being put out this week'. I think the Nikkei Weekly is vital for any businessperson, newfound businessperson certainly in Japan. It makes you sound clever if you read it, you know, and there is always a market for that.
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