Japan

We had one website where it looked perfect in Firefox, Opera and Safari. Also if we checked it on a system with an English Windows OS is also looked fine. But it would only render a white screen in Internet Explorer on a system with a Japanese OS. When we checked the page source, the markup was there but only a white screen showed in the browser.

We originally has the markup like this:

< !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
head
title Our site title /title
meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
meta name="keywords" content="widget 1, widget 2, local widgets” /?
meta name="description" content="Widgets by a local widget maker you can trust"/>

The page title was at the top. Again this rendered fine in firefox and opera but we had the white screen of death in IE.

We then changed the order of the head items:

PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
head
meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
title>Our site title
meta name="keywords" content="widget 1, widget 2, local widgets” /?
meta name="description" content="Widgets by a local widget maker you can trust"/>

Vola! Japanese IE rendered fine after putting meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″ /> before any other head content.

There is a great little plugin for Firefox that makes the browser display sites as if it were a mobile browser. I have used user agent switchers to check Safari and IE in Firefox but this is the first time I have been able to do it for Japanese mobile phones.

The user agent switcher can be found here:

http://chrispederick.com/work/user-agent-switcher/

Here is a list of Japanese user agents can be found here (need to be added in the plugin’s preferences):

http://www.zytrax.com/tech/web/mobile_ids.html#domoco

Marco thank you for the information!

Hokkaido surf and snowboard photographer (and friend) Yoshi Okada finally launched his photography website. Yoshi has traveled all over the world taking photos, surfing and making friends. He is especially gifted at surf and snowboarding photography has recently documented a snowboarding trip to Rishiri Island, off Hokkaido. He also shot photos for North Face and has documented most of the surf spots in Hokkaido, the rest of Japan, Hawaii, and California.

His site is mostly a blog setup and uses the Gallery software to keep all the photos organized.

If you have a chance to review his site, please give him some feedback to make his site better.

Okada Photography

PEK Interactive Japan is pleased to announce our new office in Sapporo. The new office is located directly across from Sapporo’s Odori Park and one minute from the 11-Chome subway station. The new Sapporo office will provide easier access and more convenience to website development and search engine optimization clients located in the metropolitan Sapporo area. The Otaru office will continue to serve clients in the Otaru, Yoichi, Niseko and other Western Hokkaido areas.

The new office is located at:

4-11 Chome Nishi Odori, Chuo-ku, Hanada Building 7F
Sapporo City, Hokkaido 060-0042

Tel: 050-5536-3351
Fax: 011-261-6763

Sergio Kajirian and Patrick Kajirian offer advice on opening a business in Japan. They relate their experiences opening a branch office of PEK Interactive in Japan and talk about web development and search engine optimization in Japan.

See the case study on the JETRO website – http://www.jetro.org/content/408

Business Week published an excellent article regarding the future of internet usage. It focused on how people in Korea and Japan use their cell phones rather than home or computer’s to interact online. It also discussed WIMAX the broadband cell phone technology that allows beaming of tv content and movies to cell phones.

The Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) is a Japanese government-related organization that promotes trade and investment. JETRO was helpful in the process of establishing PEK Japan in Otaru, Hokkaido in the fall of 2005. JETRO’s Bill Nakamura who was based out of Santa Ana, California made the drive down to San Diego to visit PEK Interactive’s head office.

In the photo, PEK Interactive Co-Founder Sergio Kajirian is shown presenting Mr. Nakamura a copy of PEK Interactive’s Toolstorm program. Mr. Nakamura returned to Japan in Febraury 2006. Here is part of the letter we received from him as he was leaving:

After three years living and working here in California, I will be departing LAX airport on February 6th bound for Tokyo, Japan.

I wish to extend my deepest appreciation to the State of California, the City of Santa Ana and JETRO for providing me an opportunity to work in this great country and with such nice people.

I hope my work has contributed in a positive manner in promoting better business relationships between U.S. and Japanese companies.

We want to thank Bill Nakamura for the visit to the PEK Interactive office and wish him the best as he returns to the Sumitomo Corportation in Tokyo.

PEK Interactive is proud to announce the formation of PEK Interactive Japan. PEK Japan was granted recognition by the Japanese Legal Affairs Bureau on September 22, 2005. This will allow PEK to operate as a Japanese company when interacting with its Japanese clients.

“Japan is one of the high-tech centers of the world. We are excited to be on the ground as a local company,” commented Jeffrey Preston, Director of Asian Pacific Sales.