A business day in Tokyo

I spent today meeting with Japanese business executives and experienced my first "simultaneous translation". The company I met provided a professional translator to help me understand their presentation. It took a lot of concentration, but it was very effective. In the city, the day starts around 9am and finishes around 7pm.

Everyone I have met in Japan has been so polite, welcoming and very charming, despite my total ignorance of the language and customs. However, it looks like the 20+ page "etiquette in Japan" guide that my Japanese colleague forwarded to me has prevented me from making any mortal mistakes!

In just a short time, I have found that we share so many things and have so much in common. Except........ February 14th, Valentines Day, is a really big deal here in Japan, but it's a day for the girls to just treat the boys with chocolate. Now that's the kind of country I could live in!!!

At lunch, I enjoyed the best sushi I have ever had in a tiny "hole in the wall" restaurant near the office with the local team. The chef is pictured here. He instructed me on the art of using chop sticks properly with sushi. After demonstrating that I had taken on board his instruction, he told me that he would serve me the same type of food as the locals. According to my colleagues, if the chef sees that a foreign visitor is not good with chop sticks, he makes the rice base more compact so that it is easier to pick up and it doesn't risk making a mess of the customer's shirt (which would cause embarrassment, a really bad thing here). The downside of compact rice is that it doesn't taste as good. But I got the real-deal, and I can tell you that the sushi was out of this world.

This evening, the president of the company kindly took us out to dinner and we had a fabulous traditional Japanese meal at "Kurosawa". This restaurant is owned by the son of the famous Japanese movie director, Akira Kurosawa; among a long list of brilliant movies, he directed Seven Samurai, widely accredited as one of the most influential films ever made.