The Japan Business Insider Newsletter

"The possibilities for mobilizing the experience, imaginations, and intelligence of workers, both employed and unemployed, are limitless."
~ Emlyn Williams~

For most of my youth (and maybe yours) when you went into a job interview you would give the interviewer the answers you believed he or she was looking for.

Quite often those answers were lies, distortions, or lined with self-doubt. After all, you wanted to get to work and begin holding your proper place in society.

If it took a few distortions or naive assertions such as "I want to help your organization develop the next Game Boy," or "I want to lead the effort to develop cars that run on meglevs"....so be it.

Fast forward to the winter of '09. Many of those people who clawed their way into the system with self-deceit and lies and were then able to endure its chains during good times, are as easy to spot as a stripper heroin addict in a room of Born Again Christians. They are unemployed or hanging onto their job by a nose hair because they never followed their dreams and their fraud was finally sussed out (slang for discovered).

Japan is deeply effected by the recent dark clouds circling the economic planet. "As GM goes, so goes America," and as Toyota goes, so goes Japan." Many people have bought into this mindset, and have caused a run on the mind bank. People and governments are gasping for air and a fresh approach.

Rewind to those first job interviews. Isn't what you really wanted and what you finally settled for vastly different? You settled for a salary, and promised your employer in return that you would be a good boy or girl, follow orders, and sell your soul to the boss-devil as long as they could pay your bills plus a little alpha.

This morning I watched a microcosmic view of "bread line" mentality in a New York Time video (Watch it!). All the people in the video are hungry to work and many seem to have good skills and abilities. But they are standing in line with many thousands of others at a job fair hoping against hope that they will win the job lottery for less than 40 positions offered by the boss-wo(man) inside.

You and I don't need to stand in line. You need to evaluate who you are: your passions, your abilities, and your dreams...and then take action.

You and I have infinitely more worth than the salary a boss wo(man) can offer you. Let's stop chasing crumbs when we can have the pie. It's all a matter of attitude and follow through. Believing is seeing.

Japan Niche Opportunity of the Week

A recent article in the Japan Media Review asserts that ebook publishing has thus far been an unmitigated failure on both sides of the ocean.

The reason for that failure is that most people are unwilling to shell out hundreds of dollars (or the Japanese equivalent) to buy a special reader device that will allow you to conveniently store books on a handheld device.

The article the asserts that on the American side this business is dead in the water, but on the Japanese side there still holds promise:

"Several factors are now playing into Japan's latest e-books offerings: the mainstream popularity of manga (graphic-based novels) in Japan, the vibrant screens of the latest PCs and cell phones, and the fact that more than 50 million Japanese are subscribing to entertainment content services on their cell phones. Throw in Japan's huge train-commuting population, with the common habit of packing cell phones and hand-sized paperbacks to pass the time, and you have fierce competition for the eyeballs of mobile readers." ~Japan Media Review~

I beg to differ with the naysayers of online ebooks. Although there are distinct challenges for handheld devices, I believe they are quite suitable for petite Japanese with small hands/fingers compared to the monster-size ones of their American counterparts.

Moreover, I would guess that Amazon and Barnes and Noble are too cumbersome to compete in this stealthy online industry.

The smaller players who use ebooks as a tool to building up dedicated email lists and then deliver an array of backend products to a starving niche whom they get to know intimately are in a dominating position in America. Thousands have become millionaires just by using ebooks as a tool rather than as the main course.

The opportunity lies with bringing this know-how to Japan in the native language. The players in this field - contrary to what the Japan Media Review would have you believe - are doing swimmingly well stateside and around the world.

The sales funnel/system is instrumental to success. The writer must be prepared to be a professional speaker at events worldwide. He/she must also learn the art of affiliate promotion.

These skills are much more evident and mainstream in the United States until now. The big book outlets don't get it. One person in particular does and his name is Alex Mandossian. I know him personally and he is a dynamo in the online and offline publishing promotion field.

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

Empowering Japan Resources

Building Management & Maintenance Services

Japan's metropolitan areas are overflowing with buildings stacked upon buildings. Keeping these buildings well maintained is big business in good times and bad.

Building Maintenance Human Fair

A.I. Capital

Tokyo Property Advisors

New City Property Services KK

A.D.W. Tokyo

NIS Group

Savills Japan

Jones Lang LaSalle

DTZ

J-REP Japan

Mitsui Fudosan Investment Advisors

Mitsubishi Estate

Office Data Service

Nippon Kanzai

Serviced Apartments

Colliers Halifax

Sun Frontier Fudousan

CB Richard Ellis

Shin-Ei Real Estate Business

Planners International

Daito Trust Construction

Shimizu

Setup of Building Maintenance Operations and Major Qualifications

Plaza Homes

Tokyo Midtown

Platinum

Sanko Estate

Atox

Guide to Japan's Otaku and Pop Culture

Alifista.com is a new blog that shares aspects of Japanese popular culture, everything from anime & manga, to beautiful idols and jpop artists, and also updates on the latest figurine releases. A good resource to keep abreast of this money-making stream of niches. CLICK HERE to read the blog.

It's Nothing To Sneeze At

Whenever allergy season arrives, in come the medicine wagons (pharmaceutical concerns) with the panacea to a national disease...hay fever (kafunsho in local dialect).

This latest contraption, a filtering nose plug called Nose Mask Pit, allegedly controls 99.9% of the pollen entering into your system through the nose. Even if that is true, unfortunately there is another inconvenient orifice which can capture loose-canon pollen. We commonly refer to it as the mouth.

Key points: This product is being hyped just before the pollen season but will not be available until September. Every allergy season is a great time to promote remedies; people are conditioned to get sick by the media and the constant reminder given by mask wearers that germs are in the air and ready to attack. If you are healthy, quite easily you can buy into the sickness mindset.

Touring a Japanese Bookstore

Though some of my subscribers live in Japan, a majority do not. I found this blog which takes you on a tour of a Japanese bookstore. Many people ask me to assist them in selling their product line, but are unwilling to learn the fundamentals of the business or industry they wish to sell to. Hopefully, other entries in future issues will cover the range of businesses. CLICK HERE to tour the bookstore.

Multilingual Living Information

Council of Local Authorities for International Relations (CLAIR) has on its website a multilingual guide to living in Japan. A great resource for newcomers and an occasional gem for veterans. To read/download your language's version, CLICK HERE.

A Comparison of Japan and U.S. Research & Development

Read this white paper published by Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI) which analyzes and compares the objective, the nature and the performance of R&D projects in the US and Japan, based on the first large scale systematic survey of inventors, focusing on the R&D projects yielding triadic patents. CLICK HERE to access the report.

Something About Japan: Japan's Crisis of the Mind

A straight-on Op-Ed article in the New York Times recently points out the sobering truth about Japan and the Japanese. As a 28-year expat, the article by Masaru Tamamoto of the World Policy Institute hit all the right notes. It is impossible to remove the cancer until we admit it exists. Read this frank assessment by CLICKING HERE.

This Week's Challenge

The Ultimate Gift

A wise woman who was traveling in the mountains found a precious stone in a stream.

The next day she met another traveler who was hungry, and the wise woman opened her bag to share her food. The hungry traveler saw the precious stone and asked the woman to give it to him. She did so without hesitation.

The traveler left, rejoicing in his great fortune. He knew the stone was worth enough to give him security for a lifetime. But a few days later he came back to return the stone to the wise woman.

"I've been thinking," he said, "I know how valuable the stone is, but I give it back in the hope that you can give me something even more precious. Give me what you have within you that enabled you to give me the stone."

Thoughts From Above And Below

Before You Stand in the Bread Line