48 HOURS IN JAPAN
Meeting your professional partners is a natural thing to do before to create a company, and decide to spend all your energy in the development of a brand which potential seems obvious to you. Nevertheless, when you work with Japanese guys, you got to prove yourself.
In the present case, it took me two years of visio meetings before receiving an official invitation to visit them in Japan. This opportunity beeing provoked by couple of misunderstandings, or mistakes of translation - from myself too of course. My english is correct, not so fluent.
At the airport, it started in a relaxed way : shake hands with my partners, who came to pick me up by car. And there I had my first surprise, and in the meantime not that much : In Japan you watch TV when you drive. A bit of news, and a lot of Baseball.
The traffic is not that bad in Tokyo. We are going to the station to take the famous Japanese train, because this very long day is not finished at all for me. I left France 24 hours ago, but it is only 9 am here in Tokyo, and the guys are in good shape.
The program is that we are going to drive for an hour to the station, then take the train for another hour to visit one of the factories, to see and understand how my gloves are produced.
The factory is situated in Nagano, a small town - for Japan - stucked between The mountains, well known from some of us because it organized the winter olympic games a few years ago. The factory has plenty of machines, all Japanese.
Every machine produces directly hands, as we can see on the photo on the right side. About 20 per day, which is not much, but with a perfect quality, and all finishes are made in the same factory. Sewing, ironing, and packering.
Fumio is very proud of his production. The gloves are directly knitted with touchscreen fingertips we can see in the blue colour on the photo. Nothing to knit or ad, it is magic. We will spend the morning after talking about the remaining elements we needed to talk about.
After the factory, visit of a temple - the main photo in "the brand". We will finish the day like in a movie, in Fumio's favourite place, small restaurant owned by a friend of his, very typical.
Some Japanese brands have got common names with the European, but not always in the same activities -:)
I am going to taste in this charming restaurant plenty of specialities, with fish only. You can see on the photo on the left one of them - in yellow - with oysters, not my favourite one.
End of the meal, we will taste the sake of course, just to be sure to have a perfect digestion.
End of our meeting, the day after, the guys will take me to Shibuya for a bit of shopping in this famous district of Tokyo, and a few photos.