Youngki Life

Wordnano to learn a vocabulary

2010-03-30T00:04:00.000-07:00

I actually forgot to update my own blog to talk about a website I recently created with my friend Paul, called Wordnano. This website was a follow-up on my previous project posted before.

As I mentioned before, I am interested in learning languages, and I hope other people are also interested in languages, and even further other cultures as well. And as a small step, we made a flashcard website that helps people learn vocabularies, http://wordnano.com.

We are still working on adding features that will make the website more interesting and different from any other flashcard websites on the web.

Applications/Services

2010-01-14T23:13:00.000-08:00

So far TODO list has been the app that I have been consistently using with my iPhone.. I should try more apps in iPhone, especially those location-based.

It seems there are a lot of efforts on translation between languages with human intelligence. However, so far there is no single app that satisfies my translation needs.

Happy 2010

2010-01-04T22:12:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year.

Old Idea, Different World

2009-06-24T09:33:00.000-07:00

There are many web services that are mostly the same idea, but targeted at different cultures. For example, Google for western world, Baidu for China. Facebook for western world, Cyworld for Korea, Mixi for Japan. It is hard for a single web service to dominate the entire global market because every culture has different taste. Sometimes I think localization is more important than an innovative idea.

New type of Social Networking Site

2009-06-09T00:58:00.000-07:00

These days I have been using a twitter quite a lot. I've used facebook, CyWorld(A Korean social networking site), and Mixi (A Japanese social networking site), but none of them solve the problems I have: Privacy and Simplicity. Once being a friend, somehow I know where friends have been, they know what's going on me by looking at pictures, walls, etc. If I block them or apply restricted permission to them, they'd notice it because they know they cannot access some parts that they used to access before. Also they are not simple to use. If I go to Facebook, my profile looks very disorganized and very complicated in a look.

I don't know about privacy on twitter; but I think I like twitter's simplicity. Moreover, what I really like is the fact that I don't need to spend my time to do something on twitter. Whenever I want to write something on twitter, I can just open the twitter by "toggling" on the computer and write it. Or I can tweet anywhere using my phone. I don't need to spend my time in front of computer to "organize" my wall and my contacts. I think that's the strength of it. I don't need to open a browser to do something complicated.

Nov 23 2007, Yudanaka Onsen (湯田中温泉)

2009-05-31T15:29:00.000-07:00

I am now writing a blog post about my trip that happened more than one and half a year ago.. I know it's already late, but it's still better than never, so I decided to post it before it fades away from my memory.

Me staring at monkeys

Randy, Junko and I went to Yudanaka Onsen (湯田中温泉) on November 23, 2007. Yudanaka Onsen is famous for monkey bath - there you can see monkeys taking bath in hot springs. So hot springs are not human-dominated resorts; monkeys also enjoy them. :) When I was young I always saw Japanese monkeys taking baths as if humans are taking baths, in TV, and this was something I really wanted to see in Japan. So, I went to Yudanaka onsen located near Nagano, with Randy and Junko.

We went to Nagano by Shinkansen first, looked around the city a bit.

Then we went to our first destination, Yudanaka Onsen, the monkey bath resort.

There were tons of monkeys..

Even more monkeys...

...and they are making more monkeys...

Shit..! Don't take pictures..!

After monkey onsen, we went to an actual onsen, called Kusatsu onsen (草津温泉). Throughout the entire year of my stay in Japan, I've never seen any better onsen than this. If you want to experience the authentic outdoor Japanese onsen, this is the place to go.

Then on the way, we stopped by a lava place to enjoy sightseeing.

Then we came back to Tokyo.

Night of Tokyo, from Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building (東京都庁舎).

It was a good trip, and I am very glad I finally wrote a blog post about this trip..!

Twitter's approach

2009-05-23T18:25:00.002-07:00

I have been using Twitter a while, and I really like the concept Twitter makes it easy for users to tweet. You can tweet anywhere with anything: through cellphone, smartphone, stand-alone application, web application. You don't need to sit down in front of the computer to spare you time to post things. You can just "tweet" instantly when somethings comes out of your mind through your iPhone, blackberry, or even QuickSilver in mac.

My new blogging direction

2009-05-23T18:07:00.005-07:00

Admitting that I have been negligent and too lazy to update my blog regularly, I promised myself again that at this time I will be more diligent on keeping up with my blog. And today, I thought about what kind of topics I should post to my blog, and this question then derived to what I want to do, what are my interests, and what I want to write. So here are the products of today's contemplation.

My main interests are cultures and societies in multi-dimension. By "multi-dimension" I mean in terms of time, regions, and individual. Therefore, cultures in dimension of time would be history, societies in different regions are countries and nations, and individuals are people from different backgrounds. I am also interested in connections of cultures and societies: transportation, human languages, internet, social network, etc. I like to study them, and I like to look into how we can improve them. How we can help people communicate each other without language and cultural barriers, how we can enhance transportation overhead between regions, how we can keep in touch from different part of world, are all my interesting problems. In a short sentence, as a software engineer, my goal is to solve those problems by use of technology.

So, my blog is going to be about my interests mentioned above. In my blog I will talk about how I would like to address those issues. I will sometimes find existing solutions, discuss what other problems the solutions still cannot solve, or I will sometimes bring my own solutions to the problems. I will also talk about my trips, memories with my friends, and encounters with awesome people that have happened, or will happen in my life. Meanwhile I will post technology issues as well that might somehow be related into what I addressed above.

Alright, let's begin..!

Skype on iPhone

2009-03-31T13:56:00.005-07:00

Alright, I've been waiting for that to come out. The skype has been the popular service for long-distance / international phone call through the internet, and I think it will be another trend to shift towards to using the VoIP rather than the landline phone.

Carew, Sinead. "Skype to come to iPhone, BlackBerry." Reuters, March 30, 2009, Available from http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090330.wgtskype0330/BNStory/Technology

Progress on Japanese word memorizer

2009-03-03T15:16:00.002-08:00

I decided to collaborate the work with Wendy, and made a start using Google App: http://langbook.appspot.com

New Year

2009-01-23T06:12:00.004-08:00

It's been a long time since I blogged last time.. Yes, I don't deny the fact that I was abundantly lazy and still have a lot of posts waiting as drafts to be posted..

But I finished my one-year internship in Japan on last August, came back to school to finish my undergrad, and also got a job; I am joining Yahoo! on May, 2009. I will be working on Yahoo! Search Technologies (YST). Until that, I am enjoying 4-month break at home, helping parents' business, etc.

While enjoying my free-time, I decided to start a little project. I am going to make a web browser plugin that collects the Japanese words that I do not know the meaning, automatically retrieves meanings from the online dictionary, saves them, and later I can re-practice my memory through online quiz.

For the target browser, I think I will make it for Safari because that's my default web browser, but eventually Firefox, as Firefox is more cross-platform that can run in all major operating systems (Windows, Linux, and Mac).

Also, even though it starts as a Japanese word memorizer, I will generalize it as a memorizer to anything, such as English word memorizer, jargon memorizer, etc.

I will post more about this as I have some progress on the development, and also I will try to post all my pending drafts as I promised myself to be less lazy than last year...

辞書で使ってるNintendo DS

2008-05-31T23:10:00.004-07:00

今日からときどき日本語でもブログを書くことに決めた。そんなことでもしたら、いつかは日本語を自由自在で駆使するそんな日が来ないかたい。
NDSを買ってから僕の生活が便利になった。前は辞書がなかったから知らない言葉があるとパソコンがなければ意味を分からなくて過ぎて行く時が頻繁だった。なおパソコンでも漢字を捜すときに画を数えて捜すから不便で時間もかかった。でもNDSに筆記認識機能があるから、漢字を捜すことが便利になって、何よりもパソコンがなくてもどこでも日本語単語の意味を捜せるから良い。今日は”Financial Japan"という日本経済雑誌を買って読んで見た。まだ読みにくいけど、前より読解速度がすごく早くなった。今まで言語障壁があるからよく英語である雑誌や新聞を読んだけど、そのほうは大部分外国人の観点から見渡した日本の姿だった。でも僕は日本人の観点から見渡した日本がもっと知りたいので、その雑誌はとてもおもしろかった。雇用問題、経済、女性と外国人問題、教育などの時事問題についての記事を読みながら日本人が考える日本に対して習ったから良かった。

Marco's Birthday

2008-02-26T05:47:00.003-08:00

A picture from Italian restaurant to celebrate birth of "Uncle Marco". Happy birthday Uncle Marco..!

Japanese exhibit

2008-02-24T04:59:00.002-08:00

I saw this in Saty today.. This costs 99800 yen, which is almost $1000. But it looks cool.

Valentine's Day

2008-02-14T09:33:00.003-08:00

Everyone Happy Valentine's Day..!

November 18, 2007, Marathon3: Nikko(日光)

2008-01-12T02:28:00.000-08:00

After Shuzenji trip, I came back home, slept 5 hours, and went again to Nikko with Bert, Loic, and Junko.

A lot of temples, etc. But the best photo was this:

can't speak, can't listen, can't see three monkeys.

And there was a circle gate of fortune where people cross and walk around to pray for wishes and lucks.

I danced for wishes.

This was the finale of my three-day marathon for that weekend. After Nikko, I basically faded out on that night, and had to carry on my fatigue throughout the week.

November 17, 2007, Marathon2: Shuzenji(修善寺)

2008-01-11T21:36:00.000-08:00

My marathon had not finished yet. We stayed at the club until 5am, and took a train back to HonAtsugi from Shinjuku. When I arrived at HonAtsugi it was already 7am, and it was 7:20am when I came back home. I changed my clothes, when Randy just knocked my door. It was 7:30am. Then I went on another journey to Izu(伊豆), Shuzenji(修善寺) with Randy and Wendy.

So, by reading this post you can tell that I had not slept a minute. I tried to sleep inside the train, but Wendy bothers me.

And Randy did nothing.

...So I was going to die.

But they did not care. So I decided to not give up on my life.

Seaside in Izu is famous for its beautiful scenes and sightseeing. But we did not go to the seaside. We stayed around Shuzenji. I should go to Izu again later probably in Spring for sightseeing.

The view of the temple with splendid maple colours was magnificent. Besides the temple was also a small hot spring for feet bath.

It was interesting, but I did not dip my feet into it; I was too lazy to take off my socks.

By that time I was really tired.

But it was good to see the maples, especially together with a tranquil view of the temple.

November 16, 2007, Marathon1: night in Shinjuku (新宿) and Roppongi (六本木)

2008-01-11T21:32:00.000-08:00

I remember this as a starting day of my marathon for the weekend. I left work at around 5pm, went to Tokyo to watch a documentary film called "Darwin's Nightmare". The movie seems to show how the introduction of a new species into the local ecosystem can destroy the area biologically as well as economically. But I did not finish the movie till the end. I went out at around 9pm to meet up with other people in Shinjuku(新宿). From this moment start my marathon did; from now on I will explain how I managed a karaoke, clubbing, going to Izu, and going to Nikko during this weekend with only a sleep of 5 hours in total. First of all we went to izakaya(居酒屋) with a karaoke facility.

We really had a blast on that night. After the Karaoke we went to clubbing in Roppongi(六本木).

On our way we stopped by a club with the name "Holy bitch".. I don't know why, but we all had a snap shot in front of the name.

Wendy's birthday and welcome party　for Juan and Marco

2007-12-02T21:32:00.003-08:00

It has been more than a month but I finally managed to upload photos for the night of Wendy's birthday and Juan and Marco's welcome party.

This year was special to me because I have lived in three different countries and made good friends. Even in Japan, the last four months have been great time because of friends I made here. My friends, let's also fill the next year with a lot of unforgettable and joyful memory.

Tomorrow, I will be gone on a 9-nights-10-days trip to Kansai and Chugoku region of Japan. Everyone, happy new year..!

Nov 11, 2007, Yokohama(横浜)

2007-12-02T21:32:00.001-08:00

This was the day when we used to blame the Japanese weather because it used to have been sunny throughout weekdays and suddenly become cloudy and rainy during weekends. That weekend was not an exception; Bert, Loic and I were supposed to head out to Nikko, but because of the rainy weather, we had to change the plan at 5 am. Why 5 am? Because we woke up that time to take the earliest train to go to Nikko. After a debate, we changed our plan to Yokohama. Then we went back to sleep, and I woke up at 12pm. Then afternoon we went to Yokohama.

I like Yokohama's atmosphere. The streets were wider than Tokyo, and the buildings were not positioned so tight to each other. The city looked more like North America's than Japan's, and this reminded me of Toronto.

There I finally understood why Yokohama is so-called "Couple Republic". You can see couples everywhere. Yokohama is a very romantic place for dating, not to mention that we were three of guys walking through them snickering them.

and I kept taking that kind of weird pictures of mine. After looking around the bay area and the red brick house we headed to China town.

As far as I can tell Yokohama China town was not that impressive. I already saw San Francisco's China town and compared to that one Yokohama's did not really impress me much. Maybe I should visit China to regain my satisfaction.

After looking around China town we walked towards Minato-Mirai.

Here comes a quote from Mr. Loic Nigay refering to that bridge:
"If a guy crosses that bridge without a girl, he will become a gay". (No offence to people with homosexuality)

Camera Phone

2007-11-13T20:53:00.000-08:00

This is the picture of the camera phone while having lunch with Randy during one of those days...

Nov 3, 2007, Tokai University Festival (東海大学建学祭)

2007-11-04T00:38:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I went to Tokai University festival with Boy, Kinya-san, Pedro, Ryan, and Hunglun. I haven't been in Japanese University before and I was curious of the college festival as well, so I gave it a shot yesterday to visit Tokai University annual festival.

Just like any other festival, it started with an abundant amount of food and people. One thing that made this college festival different from normal Japanese festivals is, however, that since there are a variety of nationalities among students, I was able to see more food from other nations than Japanese. the nationalities varied from Japan, Korea, China, Thai, Germany, etc. And students were selling the food of their nations.

...not sure what nationalities they were, but there were a group of power rangers crossing the middle of the market.
Anyways, after filling our stomach, we started looking around more.

Inside the buildings were many open-houses from various college clubs. We tried many open-houses, but we spent the most of time on English-speaking society club. The rules were that every conversation must be in English. And people there were very open to foreigners, eager to talk with us. So it was not so hard to spend an hour there with them.
When we left the building, it was already dark. But the festival was not over; in fact, people were prepared to serve dinner food and beer, which I had been wondering why I could not see any beer during the day in college festival. We bought something to eat and a cup of beer, and watched the concert from a band invited from outside the college for this festival.

We did not spend there too long. After a couple of songs, we left the school and returned home. It was good to see how Japanese students enjoy the University festival.

Language Translation

2007-11-01T08:44:00.000-07:00

I now have been for a little more than 2 months in Japan. So far I have been amused, fascinated, shocked, and surprised by various aspects of Japanese culture for the last two months, and one of them is Japanese language. I was especially surprised at how similar Korean and Japanese languages are to each other in terms of grammar and words. The grammar structures in both languages are very similar; if I read kanji in Korean pronunciation, that is exactly the Korean word; even some idioms and the expression forms are also very similar. I think Korean and Japanese languages resembles each other in many ways.
So, I have been wondering, if grammars, words, and even idioms are similar, then this would be the area where the machine learning could sneak into and work really well. As everyone knows by their experiences, the machine translation so far has basically sucked. Even if it works well, the expression might sound awkward that you would rather not use in daily conversation. This is currently the status of the machine translation. But if we tweak and apply machine learning into translation between two similar languages, then it could hopefully solve awkwardness of expressions because the computer might be able to "learn" new idioms and slangs and express the same feeling through another language if they are really close to each other.
Of course the translation between Korean to English or Japanese to English would not work well because the language structures are completely different. But I think we can somehow make a 100% perfect translation technology at least between Korean and Japanese; or any other similar languages such as German and English, French and English, Portuguese and Spanish, etc. Right now I am envisioning Korean and Japanese people having non-awkward online conversation using their own languages, or Korean people reading Japanese websites that would have been perfectly translated into Korean without awkwardness, and vice-versa, if this technology becomes true.

Halloween parties

2007-10-30T08:02:00.000-07:00

This Wednesday is the Halloween day. Well, the concept of Halloween as a party culture has arrived at Japan in recent years, and it was not hard to find the ads targeting the Halloween day since few weeks ago. I am not sure whether or not there will be kids asking around "trick or treat" at Wednesday night, but at least on the last weekend there were quite some parties and I went to the Gugenheim mafia Halloween party with Asahi-Kasei people. Gugenheim mafia is just the name of the bar. Most people there were all dressed up with costumes, except us from Asahi-Kasei. :P Well, at least I brought a mask.

I am the guy with a mask :) The party was really fun. I met some new people, had a chance to talk to other asahi-kasei people as well. We stayed there until 3:30AM, and went back home and blacked out.

Question: Who are non-Japanese people in this picture? Hint: There are 5 non-Japanese. It is not hard to find three white guys there. If you can find me there, then the real question is to find one more non-Japanese person unless you know Bert. :)

Next day I was supposed to go to Yamanote Halloween party with other people. Yamanote Halloween party was in Ikebukuro station in Tokyo. So, I had to take a train to go to the party. But because of the typhoon, we had to cancel the plan and decided to have a common room party instead with some horror movies, which were Evil Dead 1 and 3. For the sake of Halloween, those who had Halloween costumes were encouraged to wear them in our party. So the atmosphere looked somewhat like below:

It would not be hard to find me in this picture. :)

Anyways, so this weekend was quite fun because of Halloween.

Oct 20, 2007, Kawagoe festival (川越祭り)

2007-10-30T07:23:00.000-07:00

I went to Kawagoe festival in Saitama ken with Kinya-san and Hunglun. Saitama ken is Kinya-san's hometown, so he took us around and showed us interesting things that I might not have been able to see had I gone by myself.

In this festival, just like other traditional festivals in Japan, I ate many different kinds of food, including ttuk-bok-gi (떡볶이), spicy rice cakes. It is the second picture above. ttuk-bok-gi is the popular Korean snack you can find anywhere in Korea. In Japan I did not expect it as spicy and hot as in Korea because of Japanese preference of less-spicy taste here. Well, at least the ttuk-bok-gi I had there was almost as spicy as in Korea. Kinya-san found it really spicy. The last picture was called kobe beef. The food is made of beef from Kobe region. I heard that Kobe beef steak is famous for its taste. I should try it when I go there. :)
According to Kinya-san, this festival could be seen as a large festival in terms of the number of visitors. About 500,000 people came to see this festival. No wonder it was so crowded.

How I liked this festival can be summarized with this one photo below. :) 美味しい〜〜

Oct 14, 2007, Miyagase Dam (宮ヶ瀬ダム)

2007-10-30T05:19:00.000-07:00

The next morning after coming back from Tsukiji market, I was again on another trip with Randy, Hunglun, and Junko to Miyagase Dam. Miyagase dam is located nearby Atsugi city, and we decided to go there by bike. So, the point of this trip is about biking, and enjoying the nature and scenery along the way. It sounds fun, so even though I was a bit tired from tsukiji market trip, I decided to go with them to Miyagase dam.

But I should have realized earlier that I completely underestimated this trip; first of all, Randy said the road would get steeper and we would have to bike about 15 ~ 20km. Here I was mistaken that I thought he meant a little bump on the way, which in fact, was totally wrong. Second, I did not take into consideration the condition of my bicycle. My bicycle is only tolerable enough to go back and forth between the company and home, and between the convenience store and home. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if my bike collapses had I gone with this condition. Last, I did not eat at all.
Anyways, I did not know all these at first, so we took off and started heading towards the dam.

Sooner or later our way became steeper and I discovered myself struggling to climb up the hill; I felt something was wrong with my bike and was getting behind and behind the group while I was also getting exhausted as I put more efforts to catch up my friends in front.

When we discovered that my bike went flat, we had gone 5km and we still had to go 10km more. I needed to pump up tires in my bike. We knocked some random Japanese house and fortunately were able to borrow a air pump from a kind Japanese man and pumped up the tires.

The bike was fixed, fortunately there was no hole in tires. We returned the pump to the Japanese man, and started pedaling again. At least I thought I was able to pedal like a superman;; But I was too exhausted by biking all the way up to that point with flat tire. And since I hadn't eaten at all, I was completely wiped out. So, yeah, I was still behind people. But this time Hunglun was also left behind. So it was not so boring at all, and we just gave up cycling and walked like two losers.

Also along the way we passed by a huge lake. I took a picture of a fisherman on the lake shore.

We also passed by a park. Since not only I but also everyone was hungry, we all agreed to have lunch at a restaurant in the park. There I was too hungry that I ordered a 파르페(do not know how to spell in English nor in Japanese) in addition to yakiniku.

After stuffing our stomach, we started pedaling again towards the dam. This time biking was a lot easier because of nutrition-refill. :)

Finally we arrived at the dam. We looked around it, but soon after it was already getting dark, we had to leave there soon. Returning road was mostly a downhill road, so it was not as hard as going uphill. But, returning was much more dangerous because it was already dark, raining, I did not have a headlight in my bike, and we had to bike on the mountain driveway. This trip was quite an adventure, but it was a good thing that everyone safely returned home. :) And the scenary along the way was awesome.
Below is a photo taken at the dam. Randy, Hunglun, Junko, and me.

Mount Fuji from Youth Heim

2007-10-29T09:44:00.000-07:00

This Sunday, a night before that was a terrific typhoon that bombarded the entire area of where I am living. The weather was so bad that we had to cancel our plan to join Yamanote Halloween party in Ikebukuro, and went for an alternate plan of having a common room party with horror movies (which were Evil Dead 1, 3). Ironically, the typhoon also wiped off all the dusts in air out of the city, so this Sunday was one of the most beautiful weather I experienced in Japan. The weather was very clear that I was even able to see Mount Fuji from the roof of our building..! Here are some photos.

Oct 13, 2007, Tsukiji Fish Market (築地市場)

2007-10-29T08:10:00.000-07:00

This is probably the day I woke up the earliest in this year...to go to Tsukiji fish market. The tsukiji fish market is known as one of the world's largest fish market. This means that it is definitely the Japan's largest. I woke up at 4:30am, and headed to the station with Loic. It took us approximately an hour and half to tsukiji shijoo (築地市場) station. We met Junko there, and started our journey through the early morning market with fishy smell and half-closed eyes.

The morning is the busiest time for merchants and fish traders in the market. I was able to see a lot of those scooter-like trucks with fish boxes piled at the back. Despite the fact that the fish market is one of the famous attractions for tourists, at least it seemed to me that those merchants have no interests in tourists nor were they willing to accomodate tourists while doing their business. We basically had to find our own best to avoid those trucks and interfering their business. Below are the couple of more shots.

If we just looked around the tsukiji fish market for an hour and "yeah, so waking this early like 4am to come all the way to tsukiji market and having a look around for an hour was totally worth it and pays off". Hell no. I heard that there is a sushi place where they make sushi right out of the fish freshly caught in the morning same day, and I heard it's damn good..! So why not trying it. My friend (Thanks to Siwan) recommended a place called Sushi-dai (寿司大) and we found it after searching through the side street next to the market. Here the problem arose. The lineup for that restaurant was just so long that we had to wait for several hours to enter the restaurant. I was really surprised to see that a lot of people are willing to wait for hours for good food. Well, the long lineup looks it gotta be a really awesome place, so Junko and I were totally up for joining this line, except Loic looked somewhat reluctant to join us to be a long-time-waiting-for-sushi warrior. He lined up with us eventually, but I had to bear with him whining and complaining that this sushi gotta be really good. :P
Well, sushi were indeed REALLY good. we ended up waiting two hours and half, and finally entered the restaurant. I ordered more than 3000 yen-worth sushi set by myself. Bearing the eyes from starving people waiting outside, the sushi were really fresh and almost melted in my mouth. I took some shots at sushi before they all went into my stomach.

This sushi meal was supposed to be our breakfast. But, because we spent almost 3 hours on waiting, this turned out to be our lunch when we entered the restaurant. Having our stomach filled up with freshly made sushi, I was happy to leave the tsukiji market and move to our next destination. Junko led us to different temples nearby the tsukiji market. We looked them around, walked, finally reached Roppongi(六本木). Not that we did anything crazy there, but had hamburgers with maguro wasabi taste with tofu nuggets and soybean latte. Sounds pretty much Japanalized hamburger set, doesn't it. :)
I am including some pictures I took after Tsukiji market.

Samurai spirit

2007-10-07T18:51:00.000-07:00

These days I started reading a book "Emperor of Japan, Meiji and his world, 1852 - 1912". The book describes Meiji Tenno's life as well as depicts Japan that had been transformed from a traditional feudal state to the world's leading power. I was curious about the modern period of Japan, especially what kind of steps Japan took in order to become the leading power from merely one of the Asian countries.
The most radical change is based on Japan's early modernization, which is also based on Meiji Restoration. And the Meiji Restoration is started by open-minded young-aged samurai who were dedicated to place their country into the same level as other western countries. Those samurai were neither socially high ranked groups, nor elite groups who studied a lot. They were nothing more than samurai who belonged to the local feuds at that time. By that time when USA pressures Japan to give up Japan's national isolation policy, however, they were the people in side of open-door policy. They led the imperial forces against Shogunate forces. They took down the Shogunate and made the first step towards modernization.
I saw the similar historical facts in Korea. About the same time Korea had also been pressured by foreign powers to be open to Western world. Similar to Japan, there were also two groups, one group for national exclusion policy, another group for open-door policy. And people in side of open-door policy were also young-aged elites. Even the fact that these young reformers carried out a coup d'etat for the sake of modernization is almost similar. But the modernization in Korea failed because of foreign power's interference and lack of elaborateness on their plan.
What I have learned about this history is this: successful revolution is based on elaborate and thorough plans. Planning heavily on failures and immediate gains will lose opportunities. Even though you don't know much about your field, I think sometimes it is more important to just believe in yourself and carry it out with courage. There is a difference between modernization attempts in Korea and Japan. People who attempted modernization in Korea were elite groups. They tried to see how to maintain their powers gained from coup d'etat, and they decided to use foreign power to clinch their revolution. But the interference of foreign powers and lack of detailed plans on modernizing the country itself led to tragic failure. Japan, in the other case, attained successful modernization by people with elaborate plans against Shogunate, and plans to reform the country itself.
In respect to nowadays, I think it is more important that when there is an opportunity, I should just carry out what I believe is right, with detailed plans for success.