LIFE IN JAPAN
Tokoto Mitomi
 Occupation:
TV Presenter, Model and
Creative Mastermind behind CyberJapan, one of the top five Internet sites in Japan.
"On weekdays I go to
Japanese school. Even though I am half Japanese I have to learn polite words and how to
write. I am lucky because I can see Japanese society with foreign and Japanese eyes. My
mother was a model for Pierre Cardin in Paris, she married a French TV producer so I was
brought up in the middle of the french movie industry.
I came to Japan because I wanted to see
real Japanese culture: Computer and video games. I though it would be like a giant
amusement park. To start I got modeling work in most of the major Japanese magazines, but
now I only work for Boom. One of the highlights was when I went to Hokkaido for a
chocolate ad with TRF. Dancing with Yuki was great - she' very nice.
I set up CyberJapan in January this year.
At that time there were very few sites that had pictures of Japanese girls so I made some
webpages and told my friends to promote the site by email. It was so succesful my provider
asked me to go away! So many people were coming in to the site that their other users
couldn't go out. I was just learning how to do it then and when I look back the design
seems very unsophisticated, but people liked it.
I tried to make a Playboy-level site
combined with AIDS awareness. I wanted to break the Japanese idea that AIDS is a foreign
disease. I hope that I can spread the word that everyone should use condoms. But now the
site is only 10% famous sexy girls with lots of new information on fashion, clubs, music,
anime, TV games, hacker links for the new Japanese cybergeneration. We have had 1,300,000
gaijin and about 850,000 Japanese people visit CyberJapan making it one of the Top Five
sites in Japan. The Japanese think it's a funny hen-na-site because it shows Japan from a
foreign viewpoint.
It's funny that people looking at the site
think that there must be 50 of us making lots of money. But there are only three of us,
and I do most of the work! I am not an internet maniac but being in the Top Five means we
have to keep ahead, so we have to change the design and content every two weeks. It's
tough.
Recently a French TV producer saw
Cyberjapan and asked me to make a cyber design for a one-minute kids programme shown every
day for TF1, the main French TV channel. When he found out I could speak French he asked
me to be the show's announcer. So we go around Japan trying out the latest rollercoasters,
playing video games and finding cool sites on the net. So I suppose Japan has become a
giant amusement park after all!"
Tokoto spoke to Sparky
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