About the Japan Earth Observer
Welcome to Japan Earth Observer (JEO), a free monthly newsletter with a news roundup and an in-depth article about the space, Earth observation and geospatial technology industries in Japan.
Why?
I have been working in the geospatial technology world for almost 30 years. I began my technology career doing geospatial data analysis and software development for municipal government in Philadelphia. After a four-year tour of duty in local government, I struck out on my own and started Azavea, a geospatial software engineering company that I would lead and grow over the next 22 years.
But before my geospatial career, I lived and worked in Japan. I had studied Japanese language, history, and culture at the University of Michigan and after I finished my degree, I worked in local government in a small town in Shiga Prefecture. It was an incredible first professional experience, enabling me to improve my Japanese language skills as well as an opportunity to learn about the world of work and to travel broadly in Japan and the rest of Asia. I left Japan in 1994 to attend graduate school in Philadelphia, where I studied Landscape Architecture and received an introduction to geospatial technology.
After more than two decades as the founder and CEO, I sold Azavea in 2023 to Element 84, and following a brief stint as Chief Strategy Officer with them, I found myself on an unplanned sabbatical.
I decided to use some of my newly available time to travel, and at the top of my list was spending some time in Japan again. Apart from a brief vacation in Japan more than a decade ago, I had been away for almost 30 years. Being there again was revelatory for me. I found it unexpectedly nourishing and restorative for reasons I cannot entirely explain, and I returned to the U.S. with a conviction that I wanted to find opportunities to more substantively reconnect my life to Japan.
A key challenge, however, is that while I had almost three decades of experience working with geospatial data, software, and Earth observation technology, my geo career has been in North America and in the English language, and I have neither the language nor the context to operate professionally in Japan. My Japanese language skills slowly seeped back into my head while I was visiting in 2024, but I had never acquired the vocabulary and context to be able to have meaningful conversations in Japanese about my geospatial technology work. So alongside my newfound conviction - reconnect with my life in Japan - I returned to Philadelphia with a pile of books and a desire to dive back into learning Japanese.
I wrote and spoke on a range of technology and entrepreneurship topics for Azavea and Element 84. This newsletter will be a bit different. Rather than building and growing a business, I hope it will represent part of my effort to combine two components of my professional life: geospatial technology development and Japan. Over my career, I’ve learned that if I really want to understand a topic, it helps me to write about it. The act of trying to explain something to others in written form helps me learn. Further, I have often found that writing helps me think. So that’s what this is, my effort to learn and think through writing. Along the way, I also hope to meet new people, reconnect with long-time colleagues, deepen my understanding on an array of Earth observation topics, and improve my Japanese language skills.
For those of you familiar with my past work, I remain both fascinated and motivated by many of the same themes that drove my work at Azavea: cultivating an open knowledge ecosystem (open data, open source, open science, open standards), building institutions, and applying geospatial technology in service of public good, and this newsletter will likely reflect those interests as well.
Thank you for joining me on this journey.
Robert Cheetham