The first event in the new year was a club evening at a new venue, the Finland Café in Daikanyama, which opened in July 2010.. Club Evenings have been earlier held at Finland Cafés, but these have been temporary tourist promotion venues open for a few weeks.
The 37 members and guests attending enjoyed a relaxed networking evening in a Finnish atmosphere with Finnish style food. Almost 40% of the participants were first-timers at FCCJ events
For a lot of images from the event,
click here 
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On 6 December an unlikely troupe consisting of a real Finnish Santa Claus, an eight-member choir from Lapland and a professional player of the traditional Finnish instrument kantele joined forces with Japanese and Finnish university students and set out on a trip to Tohoku. For four days the group performed music and book-reading for some 2000 children in the stricken areas while Santa and his helpers gave presents to them all.
The idea for the project came from Professor Genjiro Ito of Kanto Gakuin University - an old friend of Finland. At the same time his students at Kanto Gakuin University were pondering of ways to ease the pain of children in Tohoku. So they combined forces and also asked for help from the Embassy of Finland in Tokyo.
Apart from the Embassy, the project was sponsored also by the FCCJ and a number of Japanese organizations. The committee for the Santa Project had distinguished members such as Mr Sadakazu Tanigaki, President of Liberal Democratic Party, Mr Masahiro Ouga, CEO of Shogakkan Publishing and Mr Yoshiharu Fukuhara, Honorary Chairman of Shiseido Company, Ltd.
For a full report from the Embassy of Finland web site,
click here!
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The social highlight of the year of the Nordic Chambers in Japan, the Scandinavian Christmas Party, was held on Friday, 9 December at the Westin Tokyo Hotel in Ebisu.
310 members from SCCJ (Sweden), DCCJ (Denmark), FCCJ (Finland), ICCJ (Iceland) and NCCJ (Norway) and their guests enjoyed a fantastic evening together with delicious Nordic Christmas influenced food and wine, and a lot of other drinks.
The party started with greetings from the organizing committee, followed by Christmas songs by a choir from the American School in Japan, a much appreciated performance by the Mexican magician "Riken" after which the real Santa paid a visit, assisting in the lotteries.
The evening was ended off with a lot of dancing until midnight to the tunes of Brad and the Hitmen.
For more about the party, and a lot of images, go to the party web site
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At our November luncheon JP Takala, Head of R&D at Nokia Siemens Networks Japan Corp. gave us an insight in NSN business globally and in Japan, especially focusing on its new strategy recently brought up. The theme of Mr. Takala's presentation was " Putting Mobile Broadband and Services at the hearth of our strategies". The three pillars of new strategies are Focus, Innovation and Quality.
NSN is the global leader in mobile broadband, it is currently no. 3 in Japan, and interestingly, Japan is one of the most important markets for NSN.
At the end of his presentation JP also explained about their actions immediately after the 3/11 disaster, when a large number of their base-stations were either damaged or completely been swept away.
For a report from the event, click here
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