The Coca-Cola Company changed the secret formula by making the soft drink a little lighter and sweeter, similar to Pepsi. Coke’s market researchers noticed an improvement and tested hundreds of thousands of consumers in North America. The head-to-head test revealed that the New Coke beat Pepsi by 6 to 8 percent. Coke’s executives were happy with the results and gave the green light.

However, there were a lot of protests. Coke drinkers rose up in outrage against the New Coke, and its predicted success never happened. A few months later, Coke was forced to go back to using Classic Coke with the original formula. But surprisingly, Coke has remained the number one soft drink in the world for the last twenty years. The story of New Coke is a good example of how complicated it is to figure out what people truly want.

Hokusai was a gifted artist with extraordinary character. His great works include the Hokusai Manga and Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. It is said that he moved ninety-three times and changed his artist name more than thirty times.

While working on Hokusai Manga, he heard some people saying he could draw nothing more than small pictures. He then decided to create a large portrait of Daruma in front of many people. It was so big that they could not figure out what he had painted until it was hung from scaffolding the next day.

Hokusai wrote at the end of One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji: “Around the age of six, I enjoyed drawing things. From fifty on, I drew some pictures that people liked.” He also added that he understood the structure of animals and the life of plants at the age of seventy or so
and would understand them better at ninety. “If I have another ten years or just five more years, then I will become a real painter,” he said before passing. The great artist who changed world art was never happy with himself as a painter.

In the early 1980s, the Coca-Cola Company, otherwise known as Coke, was nervous about its future. Once, it had been the dominant soft drink in the world, but Pepsi had been slowly catching up to coke. In 1972, 18 percent of soft drink users drank only Coke while Pepsi had 4 percent. However, Coke dropped to 12 percent whereas Pepsi had risen to 11 percent by the early 1980s.

Pepsi then began running television advertisements and went head-to-head with Coke called the Pepsi Challenge. Dedicated Coke drinkers were made to take a sip from two glasses, each marked with Q and M. Most of them preferred M, which was revealed to be Pepsi.

Coke privately did a similar blind taste test on its own. The result was the same: 57 percent chose M over Q. This was devastating news for the Coca-Cola Company.

A famous magazine in the U.S. featured the top 100 most important people of the past 1,000 years in 1998. One of them is Katsushika Hokusai, a famous ukiyo-e artist during the Edo period. The famous French painter Edgar Degas once said, “Hokusai is not just one artist among others in the ‘Floating World.’ He is an island, a continent, and a whole world in himself.”

The works of Hokusai and others were first introduced to Europe in the latter half of the nineteenth century. They had a great influence on Western art, which became known as Japonism. Another French artist, Félix Bracquemond, came across prints of Hokusai Manga around 1856. Paintings in Europe were usually about war, religion, and important people. Hokusai Manga, on the other hand, included all kinds of things, like common people, small creatures, imaginary animals, and ghosts.

Many artists were influenced by the works of ukiyo-e and Japanese art in general. Vincent van Gogh was a great fan of Japanese art; he collected hundreds of ukiyo-e paintings and used them as backgrounds for some of his paintings.