Back on Earth - Tuesday 9th November 2005Posted on 2005/11/09 13:32:52 (November 2005).
As it happens today was not a great day. We had quite a lot of appointments, and as I anticipated I had to fight with my boss to defend yesterday's decisions taken at the meeting with the client.
Problem is that I have now to go back to the negotiation table, not in person, but via e-mail.
This meant a long evening with the agent trying to put together a good letter so that the client doesn't get offended but we make our point. It's a nice effort of mixing a very direct language like english with Japanese mentality which fortunately both me and Kutsunugi san have in abundance (he said more than one time that I am more Japanese than him!!).
Finally around 11 in the evening we sent the mail, let's see tomorrow what do we get...
During one of the appointments I could not avoid taking this picture (see above). The guy there is the president of a insurance or security company, he is introducing himself (on the right hand side of the pic)... I find this thing extremely NAFF and extremely Japanese.
First of all the guy is UGLY, this is a rather poor attempt under the advertising point of view, and there is no punch line to the message it's just the formula that is used in almost every introduction in Japan.
This is the western way of reading it.
The Japanese way is totally different. The guy introduces himself, which is always a very polite and generally good thing to do. He's old, which means that he has power (he's infact the president of the company), and also he must have done his job properly to get to this point. The message is obviously targeted to older people, who can appreciate this way of doing business and that are the one with most money either to invest or to get an insurance...
To a Japanese I think that this advert is reassuring, to me it was sad. The new Japanese society is getting more and more westernized (which is a great shame IMHO), so these forms of expressions (the advert) will, in due time, die to make space to something different.
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