The weekend arrived before I knew it.
Today I received two replies to my business inquiries.
One company in Kyoto turned me down for the same reason as before: it was unable to offer service in English. Yet there was good news as well. A company in Osaka sent a positive reply.
I took another careful look at the two company profiles. Judging solely by the number of completed cases and the experience listed on their websites, the Kyoto company seemed to have the advantage. Its fees also followed the industry’s usual principles, but where individually negotiated commissions were concerned, it was at least one million yen cheaper than the Osaka company.
The reply from Osaka was far shorter than the one from Kyoto, and its message was concise. In essence, it said: “The type of assignment you are seeking falls within our area of business. Please provide us with information about your company for our consideration.”
The person who wrote back was the company’s representative director. His profile said that he had begun as a local journalist, then studied, founded a business, and worked in the United States. No wonder the need to communicate in English did not appear to pose any particular obstacle for him.
It also made me wonder whether Japan might in fact have many excellent products whose makers choose to remain within the domestic market because of the language barrier.
Despite Japan’s lost three decades, the economy’s underlying strength remains formidable, allowing most businesses to survive on the domestic market alone. Yet with the yen so sharply depreciated, life for Japanese companies can only grow more difficult. It is much like China, the factory of the world, where businesses are pushing overseas one after another in order to survive and escape an increasingly cutthroat market at home.
When it comes to language, opportunity belongs to whoever is brazen enough to open their mouth and speak.
Traditional East Asian education, however, places far too much emphasis on grammatical correctness, producing generation after generation of people who are afraid to speak at all.
The moment they do, the self-criticism begins: Was that sentence correct? Was the pronunciation authentic enough?
The representative director of the first Japanese company to reply appears to be something of a name in his field. He has four or five books to his name and has long published occasional blog posts on marketing, business, e-commerce, and corporate strategy. His business model bears a striking resemblance to what I have been imagining.
Some of the business ideas this company president advocates may once have been common currency in the United States or Silicon Valley. I am not sure what direction or culture now prevails among American start-ups after the rise of AI. In Japan, perhaps it was the pressure of the economic climate in recent years, together with shifts in the population, that gradually turned the “exit strategy” into a subject of serious study.
There is something rather uncanny about seeing how much of what this company does resembles what I hope to do.
To widen the circle of people I could approach, I asked Google to find me another group of companies worth contacting.
I have to admit it: Google began with search, and when it comes to casting a wide net and filtering what it finds, it remains more powerful than OpenAI.
While gathering information, I once again looked closely at Japan’s new visa policies and its hard-line approach to deporting illegal immigrants.
Many of those measures invite comparison with Germany.
One of these days, I will set aside an entry to write about what I think of the subject.
讀者留言