Look out for the artistic photo of Sven against the ever-rising Tokyo Sky Tree in the east of the city, as well as shots of everyone’s favorite stormtrooper, Danny Choo.

This photographic survey of the globe’s vending machines takes in America, Mexico, Britain and more, with Michael providing some of his expert insight on the Japanese section. In the interview he discussed the problems with the TASPO tobacco passport scheme, marketing possibilities with RFID tags, and why capsule and claw and crane vending machines are so popular.

Topics included doing business in Japan as well as CScout’s soon-to-be-released Eco Japan report focusing on Japanese innovations in green tech and marketing. The full interview is available online at Pokya and through iTunes.

We first began our relationship with defacto over a week-long Tokyo Trend Tour, hopping around town nonstop from boardrooms to backstreet shops. We also had some time with Branding, the agency behind the famed Tokyo Girls Collection, which is what recently brought us here at CScout Japan over to Germany a year and a half later along with the innovators behind the TGC.

Along with producer Maki Okuda and F1 Media CEO Ayako Nagaya (both pictured below), we brought the energy and branding innovations of the TGC to a room full of executives from Germany and Europe’s top brands and retail shops. CScout’s job was to lay the technological and cultural background for a European audience, getting everyone up to speed on the mobile phone, fashion magazine, and pop culture trends in Japan so that they could appreciate the TGC’s ability to bring all three together in one big event.

Our presentations at the Textil Dialogue also got some great press from Textil Wirtschaft (German language only), focusing especially on the mobile commerce side of the event as well as the CRM potential.

Many thanks to everyone at defacto and Branding/F1 Media for a great event, and especially to everyone who came to spend the day with us.

They had asked originally about the McDonalds Kazasu Coupon CRM program with integrated RFID, which we’ve noticed at ground level as being relatively successful. There’s great potential for growth in this market, but retailers can be rather timid about being early adopters due to the high cost and complication of entry. Eventually, however, one brand is going to use NFC in a way that grabs the masses, and it will grow massively from there.