5/19

This morning we went to a meeting with the business Intralink. This experience was very beneficial because it contrasted with the Jetro meeting yesterday, and in my opinion contained more "real world" information about operating in Japan. The man giving the presentation (Jeremy) was from England, and as such we were able to get the opinion of a fellow foreigner on the Japanese market and talk from an outside viewpoint about how businesses must adapt to succeed. I found it very interesting to learn that in Japan many large companies actually rotate their employees throughout different aspect and areas of the company on roughly a biyearly schedule in what I believe is an attempt to broaden employees skill sets, to fight job repetition, and increase employees relationship with the business.

After Intralink we had a meeting with Avaya. We were welcomed and given a small presentation by an acquaintance that we had met at the dinner the night before and learned about the size and scale of Avaya's operations. The second half of the presentation was by a regional sales manager from England as well, and was quite drawn out and confusing. I did find it interesting to see the clash between the high context presenter and low context presenter on similar content.

Later in the day we experienced the shear technological marvels that many of the Japanese apparently take for granted at a guided (and very professional) tour of DoCoMo and their mobile devices and later that night at our visit to the Akihabara district, the "Electric City". At Docomo we learned about current technology being used in mobile phones that makes me a little envious and leaves me wishing the U.S. would catch up. The tour was very well done, and I was quite surprised that we were able to be on it because I would assume that it is normally for high level potential investors.

That night we took in the sights of the "Electric City", hit up the Sega arcade, and found some great tempura for dinner. Although the sights were really cool and electronic shopping centers were everywhere, I couldn't help but feel that the price points of the products were still very expensive compared to online markets. My feelings are that the Japanese are quite price inelastic when making these purchases so that they end up paying for quality and supporting local businesses over comparing and contrasting prices worldwide.