We've been here in Japan since Sunday and I'm finally getting around to blogging it up. We've been super busy, as always. Tokyo is huge and large parts of it are lit up like a Christmas Tree. We're staying in Shinjuku with is the area around the main train station here in time. On the other side of us is Takashimaya, which is the Tokyo equivelent of Times Square. Lots of lights and shops. The food has been great. We did something we wouldn't have dared do in China, which is to go to a Japanese restaurant and just point at random things on the menu or on other tables. Everything has been great, but the prices are high here. Last night we had a big sushi meal. One of the shrimp sushi things was so fresh it was still twitching, I'm not kidding. If you poked it, it would tense up. It was crazy.
Some weird things though. Our cell phones worked in China but not here. There seemed to be more English spoken among the Chinese than here. The Japanese are much more formal than the Chinese as well. Exchanging business cards at the beginning of a meeting is an absolute ritual, and they're very particular about it. Basically, you walk up the the guy, and he'll hand you his business card with both hands, bow as he does it and say his name. You have to grab the card with both hands in return and read it immediately. You then repeat the same process in reverse.
Anyway, the weather has been great, and we've had some good customer meetings and some less productive ones. But you can't win them all I guess. Several meetings have been high up in buildings around Tokyo with amazing views of the bay or the city. We're done with our customer visits now, which is a good thing. We're running some training tomorrow, then we head back across the pond. The view pictures below are from my hotel room. Pretty nice, eh? The hotel isn't as nice as the one in Beijing but it's very well located, and still very nice. Oh, and the auto-bidet on the can is way cool. I want one.