Day 3: Monday

FYI, I'm currently writing this post at 4:40am here in Tokyo because we are headed to the Tsukiji Fish Market: the largest fish market in the world!

Though this picture doesn't show how exciting yesterday was, it was actually a lot of fun. The day was full of business-related activities like company visits and a tour of the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

The picture to the left is of a salaryman sleeping on the train. My paper for this trip was on women in the workplace, so I naturally did a lot of research on what work life is like for the men in the country as well. Most of the people we saw on the trains were sleeping; some were even resting their eyes while standing. The reason for this is that many salarymen (essentially what we in American call white-collared men) work not only a standard 8-4 or 9-5 shift, but also stay late to get essential work finished and then go out to a restaurant or bar with the boss and colleagues to socialize after work. This means that they don't get home until 10 or 11 at night and then have to do it all over again. You can understand then why there are very few women in management positions. If women worked as much as men, there would be much fewer children because daycare is also not very prevelant here in Japan. As you may imagine, this actually is a big issue in Japan because many women do wish to work and so are choosing to just not marry or have kids until late in life or not at all, meaning the country's birthrate is much lower than other developed nations. Japan is actually facing a major issue in the future of having almost half of their population be over 65, and in need of healthcare. Without enough of the younger generation in the workplace, they will face a shortage of money to help pay for this healthcare. Therefore the government and some large companies are starting to realize that they need to look at their work-life balance to allow more women the ability to work AND have children. It is a very slow process but some of the companies we visited seemed to have made good progress.

I thought this was an appropriate picture because we spend so much time on escalators. They are everywhere in Japan with many, like this one, being in the metro stations. As you can see, everyone is learning that the proper way is to stay to the left so that those in a hurry can walk up on the right.

Here we are all dressed up nice by the building where the Squire Sanders office is. Squire Sanders is and international law firm that started in Cleavland, Ohio. [I will have to finish this post later, as we are leaving for the Tsukiji Fish Market in 3 minutes so I need to get to the lobby. Enjoy the rest of the pictures and I will describe them more later]. Okay, it is 8:06am here (7:06pm EST) and I just arrived back from the fish market and a delicious sushi breakfast. Tuna here is AMAZING! But, you'll see pictures of that in my Day 4 post.

Back to Squire Sanders. This picture is of the conference room we met in. We learned a lot of interesting facts about the legal system here in Japan (based heavily on civil law in Germany) and about the benefit of building relationships. I asked our speaker about women in the workplace and found out that the have 8 female associates (lawyers), but no female partners. It was great to hear that they have active management-track women, and didn't surprise me much to hear that there were no female partners, because I think it is fairly similar in US. My assumption is that because partners have to put in such long hours, it would be even more difficult to have a family. According to our speaker, many companies have CSR (?) materials which mention "OG" (Old Girl, like Old Boy) that discuss how women with experience can return to work after having children if they wish. The most interesting thing I heard was that many women who are contacted to see if they'd like to return refuse, but instead offer to mentor young up-and-coming women and share their networks. This can be very beneficial for the new employees because they now have their own network of college peers plus a network of peers 15+ years their senior.

This is just a tree I liked the look of outside of Squire Sanders.

For lunch we stopped at a ramen restaurant. Here is Jacques with his miso ramen, It is reminiscient of American ramen but much more flavorful and has sheets of seaweed and vegetables in it. I ordered the traditional ramen in a pork broth, which also had a slice of pork in it. It was tasty though the bowl was huge and I couldn't eat it all. While we were eating a really large line was gathering outside the restaurant (we were sitting on a sort of porch). The Japanese eat very fast so turnover in restaurants (especially this sort of simple walk-up restaurant) is swift. I think they may have been getting annoyed at the slow Americans. :

After lunch we made a quick stop at the hotel then visited the Tokyo stock exchange. Here is a picture of my very own stock. AND I'm up 14 yen! :) Notice that red is for positive and green is for negative. That is because in asian culture red is a good or lucky color and green is negative. According to Paul green also means you are impotent. Don't wear green ;)

You may have to enlarge this picture to read it (I lightened the picture a bit so you could see the people), but they put up a sign that says "Tokyo Stock Exchange Group, Inc. Welcomes University of Maine, Maine Business School, 18 May, 2009. How cool is that?

Finally, our last company stop of the day was Avaya Japan, an American subsidiary, and the one Paul and Keiko used to work for. They gave a wonderful presentation about what they do (telecommunications). I really enjoyed listening to the challenges they have with selling voicemail. In Japan, quality is king. Price is a close second but no price is good if the quality is bad. So part of quality is being able to speak to a real person when you call a company. In Japan most companies still heavily rely on the assistant system, where an assistant for the department answers ALL phone calls and then transfers them to the correct person (it is important to answer the phone in 3 rings or less). Calling from outside the company, you can only directly dial one number (the assistant's) for an entire department. The assistant (usually female) also can answer many questions because there are no cubes. People work at large tables, all open, with their own computers and phones. Because of this everyone knows what everyone else is working on. Good and bad I guess. But what it means for Avaya is that convincing companies to switch to voicemail is very difficult.

So this picture is with Aya Sakata, the PR Manager in Marketing at Avaya Japan. Jacques and I are both researching women in the workplace so it was a great opportunity to find out more from a woman actually going through the challenges, Aya is an MBA student on a Manager of Technology track. Her program is also 2 years and targets people who have worked for 10 years or more. She hopes to continue on a management track after school. Because Avaya sells telecommunications they are also very proactive on the telecommuting front, which is very attractive for women who want to have families. They also have a focus on work-life balance. It isn't perfect of course because they still heavily emphasise "face time" in the office, but it is still a great step in the right direction for women.

For day 4: Tuesday (now today) we have visited the Tsukiji (pronounced skeejee) Fish Market and are next meeting with Dentsu, a major marketing firm, here in our hotel, then after lunch we head to Tomoegawa, a manufacturing company specializing in electronics parts, display parts, fine particles, and specialty paper. After Tomoegawa, we hit the L.L. Bean store for a quick visit, then are going to Akihabara, also known as "electric city" which is apparently like Times Square on acid. Then some of us will be hitting the town tonight to eat dinner and explore. More tomorrow!

And please feel free to make comments! I love hearing what people think, or what you may want to know more about.