Visiting the Tokyo Office

Posted on 2008/03/23 01:03:53 (March 2008).

[Monday 17th March]
Today both Chie and I had arranged to visit our companies' Tokyo offices, the one exception to the rule I had made myself to try and completely leave work behind for two weeks if possible. I had arranged to give a presentation to the people at my companies' Tokyo office about the project I work on, as it is quite a major thing for the company, but not really well known outside of the three or four offices which have people working on it.

The last time I had been to the Tokyo office was when I was interviewing for the job, and as a result I found I was actually a bit nervous on the way there. When I got there, pleasingly I found that the same receptionist who had been there when I'd been interviewing was still there, which was great as I'd always wanted to thank her for her help etc when I was going through the interview process but had never actually caught her name (a bad habit of mine that I don't ask people's names enough).

When I'd been there for interviews I'd only seen the reception area and a couple of meeting rooms, and so I suppose I'd only seen the best bits of the office. Today though I got to see the actual bits where people work and so not unsurprisingly it wasn't quite as flashy any more... and in some places it was very reminiscent of my previous employer's Tokyo office (I guess these are just standard characteristics of Japanese offices).

Anyway, I spent most of the day preparing my slides for the presentation which was at 4. Collectively the people who work on my project have given so many presentations about it that there is no real need to generate any new content - creating a new presentation is usually just a case of picking slides from the finger buffet of previous presentations, with possibly a few connecting slides to tailor it appropriately to the audience. Still though, somehow this ended up occupying most of the day.

The actual presentation went pretty well - I'd not given them much advance notice that I was coming so it was a fairly small audience - around 10 people - but it did seem to generate a fair bit of interest. In terms of the quality of the presentation itself it was definitely a massive improvement on the apalling performance I'd given at my own office back in August of last year - I still don't really understand why that had fallen apart so badly.

After "work" Chie had arranged to meet a former colleague of hers who I didn't know, so I thought I'd just do my own thing. So I headed back to Ikebukuro, and went for dinner at Rohlan - possibly my favourite restaurant in the world. I'm not sure if I'd actually told the people there that I was leaving Japan back in December 2006, so it was actually a bit of an odd atmosphere - I wasn't even sure if they recognised me to start with. Anyway, I'm pleased to report the menu has hardly changed and the food was every bit as excellent as it always used to be - particularly my old favourite the vegetarian tonkatsu. Sheer heaven. On leaving I had a brief chat with the lady who I've always assumed to be the owner, and explained that I'd gone back to England and so on, so hopefully they're not left thinking that I'd desserted them on purpose!

After Rohlan I decided to pop into Quercus for a drink or two - in all the hub-bub of Saturday night I hadn't had much of a chance to just sit quietly and appreciate the usual array of excellent malts they have on offer. So tonight was a lot more like a typical night at the bar from back when I used to live in Japan. Unfortunately Monday is Watanabe-san's night off, but I did have a good long chat with Ohno-san - his second-in-command, and a couple of the old regulars like Ito-san and Horiguchi-san. I also had a chat with a guy who worked for Pernod-Ricard Japan (they own Glenlivet and possibly some other distilleries I'm not aware of).

All in all a fairly accurate recreation of a typical day from back when I used to work in Japan!

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