The Japan Business Insider Newsletter is the only English newsletter concentrating on success strategies and niche business opportunities in Japan. Stay informed and know where and how money is being spent and made in Japan.

 All You Need To Succeed in Japan ... For Free!

Published by
Richard Posner

Website
http://www.successinjapan.com 

Contact Us
newsletter@successinjapan.com 

Thoughts From Above And Below

It'll Cost Ya...

"The coward regards himself as cautious, the miser as thrifty."
~ Publilius Syrus~

I'm as guilty as the rest of the mob.  When a relative stranger approaches me, gains my ear, and ultimately convinces me that they have a real solution to my personal or financial problems...well, I still hesitate and reach back to make sure my wallet is still stewing in the rump pocket.

Let me get in your face and mine.  Life is not a saintly adventure.  It is full of cataclysmic choices.  When you have weighed the pros and cons of doing or buying something, make a choice.  NEVER pocket veto a chance to be right and to move your life forward one notch or a hundred.

In these dismal economic times, when most people are licking their FEAR (False Evidence Appearing Real), resolve to be decisive. 

The alternative is to find your fame and fortune in a soup line with all the losers shaking with fear and unwilling to invest in anything or anyone that could possibly improve their lot.  Get out of that line.

Think about the moments when you say, "If only I could afford to get help with XXXX, I'm sure I could succeed."  Most likely you have been saying the same thing for ages, hoping against hope that God might intervene with oodles of money or a knight on a white horse who will sweep you off your feet and gallop you away to the castle of your dreams.

Let's say a financially-secure relative takes his precious time and explains to you a formula to get a job by the end of the month, though you have been on the dole for six months.  It all sounds logical, but when your friend says it will cost you $200 in envelopes, paper and stamps and  another $100 in phone bills...you balk.  "I can't spend money," or "My spouse wouldn't let me do that," or "That sounds good, but you're different than me." 

So you keep your dwindling cash in the rear pocket and continue to pray for divine intervention.  Of course, you don't receive it, unless you consider one meal a day at McDonald's to be divine.

That friend then gives you tough love and tells you that you are the most moronic piece of cockroach feces on the planet.  He tells your wife that she's a  disabler, and then shrugs his shoulders and walks away saying, "It's your life, fool."

Husband and wife look at each other in flashes of rage and utter despair.  Finally the husband says, "I'm going to invest in that stationary and stamps and send out hundreds of resumes."  He does so and, lo and behold, three weeks later he's back at work.

The lesson?  Find good advice from successful, ethical people and then follow it to the letter.  Going cheap is very costly and stupid indeed.  Think always of what your Return On Investment (ROI) may be, if you act.  There are no guarantees of success when you step to the plate, but the soup line crowd will most definitely keep you treading water forever.

Japan Niche Opportunity of the Week

The Stage

Which is more efficient:  Addressing thousands of people with a cogent message under one roof or addressing one person in their living room with a no-brainer deal? 

People who successfully leverage themselves out of the rat race always use other peoples' minds and efforts, as well as technological tools.  Being a one man show is the kiss of death to building a long-term asset. 

The answer to your leverage challenges is to learn how to create teleseminars and webinars which can be archived and made accessible 24-7.  While this idea may sound nice, very few businesses inside and outside Japan use this strategy because of a false perception of a learning curve obstacle.

The Opportunity

In so many ways Japan sadly lacks behind the United States and several other westernized nations in promoting user-friendly ways of starting and operating a Small Business Home Business (SOHO).  Most bookstores and cafes are unfriendly to people wishing to do business when and where they feel comfortable.  More on that particular beef in a future issue.

Teleseminars give the common person a chance to promote their products and services for less than the cost of a coffee and scone at Starbucks.  If done properly, you can make thousands of dollars in less than a few hours by phone. 

Please save your skepticism for your breadline friends.  There are tens of thousands of verifiable people doing it successfully.

Let me start off simply by saying that if you download Skype (zero $$)  + Skype Call Recorder (zero $$) + Audacity for audio editing (zero $$)..you can interview people who can give you great content about their specialty and can become joint venture partners for promoting their products and yours.  No time limit using this method, though you may have to take bandwidth into consideration.

For holding teleseminars (call in only), their is an absolutely free system called Basement Ventures.  This system  has a 250-person free conference call capacity.

Of course, if you want to learn from the ultimate guru of teleseminars who will take you from A~Z, I unquestionably recommend someone I know and  have met at a seminar, multimillionaire teleseminar genius, Alex Mandossian.  He's made hundreds of millionaires.

Japanese marketers do not have the science of teleseminars/webinars available to them.  They are walking in the dark and looking for a way to reach their target markets.  I'm looking for partners who would like to work on bringing this technology to Japan.  Contact me at teleseminars@successinjapan.com 

Want to Introduce Your Product or Service to Japan?  Looking for partners?  CLICK HERE.　

Empowering Japan Resources

Kanto Professional Networking

Heads Up

I encourage everyone to look at Japan as a place for business, commerce and opportunity in the Twenty-First Century.  It is a not only a strong launching ground for enterprise, but the last, great hope for the survival of this planet.  Please fill out the form below and join our Japan prosperity circle:

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Help for Foreigners Crushed by Recession and Shrinking Job Market

The Japanese government is readying an aid package to help foreigners residing in Japan who are unemployed due to the effects of the slumping economy. The plan has three pillars, including a new tax allocation system targeting local governments to alleviate school tuition fees for such residents.  The plan is expected to go into effect in March, according to a government spokesmen. 

Another component of the plan calls for an increase in the number of interpreters and counselors at state-run employment service agencies in areas with many working foreigners.

The government is also planning to launch a website that provides administrative and other necessary information for foreigners living in Japan.

The bottom line:  there are many desperate foreigners here who, even if they get work, will be the first fired when business tapers off.  Many of them speak passable Japanese and will be willing to consider support jobs to get your entrepreneurial scheme underway.

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Japans Trading Partners in Numbers

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Cosplay Pilgrimage Starts in March

Here's something for expats in Japan to consider copying.  An American travel agency, Pop Japan Travel, is beginning a one-of-a-kind tour of Japanese Pop Culture.  Cosplayers, anime fans, and Japan otaku unite for a cross-country Japanese extravaganza in mid-March.

The tour begins in Osaka with the Nippon-Bashi Cosplay Matsuri,  the largest such festival in the world.  Then the group will be off to the enchanting ancient capital of Japan, Kyoto, where visits to historic temples will be interspersed with a visit to the Kyoto International Manga Museum and a cosplaying of samurai and geisha.

To learn more, visit their website by CLICKING HERE.  More importantly, consider this tour as an inspiration to put together a similar one in the summer vacation season called Obon in August.

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Make Yourself at Home

Piqniq is a social network for English-speaking families living in Japan. Their goal is to create a Japan-specific online community and information resource to help families get things done in a country where simple tasks can easily become complicated.  To learn more, CLICK HERE.

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This Week's Challenge

Don't Follow the Follower

~Earl Nightingale, from The Essence of Success~　

Processionary caterpillars travel in long, undulating lines, one creature behind the other. Jean Hanri Fabre, the French entomologist, once lead a group of these caterpillars onto the rim of a large flowerpot so that the leader of the procession found himself nose to tail with the last caterpillar in the procession, forming a circle without end or beginning.

Through sheer force of habit and, of course, instinct, the ring of caterpillars circled the flowerpot for seven days and seven nights, until they died from exhaustion and starvation. An ample supply of food was close at hand and plainly visible, but it was outside the range of the circle, so the caterpillars continued along the beaten path.

People often behave in a similar way. Habit patterns and ways of thinking become deeply established, and it seems easier and more comforting to follow them than to cope with change, even when that change may represent freedom, achievement, and success.

If someone shouts, "Fire!" it is automatic to blindly follow the crowd, and many thousands have needlessly died because of it. How many stop to ask themselves: Is this really the best way out of here?

So many people "miss the boat" because it's easier and more comforting to follow - to follow without questioning the qualifications of the people just ahead - than to do some independent thinking and checking.

A hard thing for most people to fully understand is that people in such numbers can be so wrong, like the caterpillars going around and around the edge of the flowerpot, with life and food just a short distance away. If most people are living that way, it must be right, they think. But a little checking will reveal that throughout all recorded history the majority of mankind has an unbroken record of being wrong about most things, especially important things. For a time we thought the earth was flat and later we thought the sun, stars, and planets traveled around the Earth. Both ideas are now considered ridiculous, but at the time they were believed and defended by the vast majority of followers. In the hindsight of history we must have looked like those caterpillars blindly following the follower out of habit rather than stepping out of line to look for the truth.

It's difficult for people to come to the understanding that only a small minority of people ever really get the word about life, about living abundantly and successfully. Success in the important departments of life seldom comes naturally, no more naturally than success at anything - a musical instrument, sports, fly-fishing, tennis, golf, business, marriage, parenthood.

But for some reason most people wait passively for success to come to them - like the caterpillars going around in circles, waiting for sustenance, following nose to tail - living as other people are living in the unspoken, tacit assumption that other people know how to live successfully.

It's a good idea to step out of the line every once in a while and look around to see if the line is going where we want it to go. If it is not, it might be time for a new leader and a new direction.

For those who have tried repeatedly to break a habit of some kind, only to repeatedly fail, Mary Pickford said, "Falling is not failing, unless you fail to get up." Most people who finally win the battle over a habit they have wanted to change have done so only after repeated failures. And it's the same with most things.

The breaking of a long-time habit does seem like the end of the road at the time - the complete cessation of enjoyment. Suddenly dropping the habit so fills our minds with the desire for the old habitual way that, for a while, it seems there will no longer be any peace, any sort of enjoyment. But that's not true. New habits form in a surprisingly short time, and a whole new world opens up to us.

So, if you've been trying to start in a new direction, you might do well to remember the advice of Mary Pickford: breaking an old habit isn't the end of the road; it's just a bend in the road. And falling isn't failing, unless you don't get up.