On Mon, Jan 13, 2020 at 08:13:27PM -0800, Heather Madrone wrote:
In a similar vein, I realized that I deeply value quirky businesses where people come together to try to fill a need in the world. Many of these businesses provide mundane things at reasonable costs, and the people who work there are uniformly pleasant to work with.
We were in Japan on holidays last year. We visited Tokyo and some of its surrounding cities and towns, spent New Years Eve in Kyoto (and, again, explored around a bit), then went to Hiroshima, the "Rabbit Island" that is nearby and back to Tokyo to get the plane home.
When we were there, we noticed that Japan seemed to be full of very small businesses that took life, let's say, slow. Once we were having breakfast in front of a place that repaired bicycles. The guy (we like to think he was the owner, though he might as well not be) was working almost in the street, with his garage open, anyone could see what was inside. We left with the feeling that, as atrocious as Japanese work ethics might be, specially when one's talking about big businesses (we saw it more than once in Tokyo, people leaving big offices building at insane hours), other side of its business life was not as horrible.
Lately, my wife and I have started watching a TV program called "Japanology". You can find many, if not all, episodes on YouTube. Coincidently, yesterday we watched one about "Shinese", or long established business. As one of the people interviewed in the program said (quoting from memory): "There are a lot of companies that aim for 10 % growth for a couple of years. Shinese are happy with 2 % sustained growth, they just want to be here for years to come". This is the episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tG6tgTMzXGY
Cheers, -- José María (Chema) Mateos || https://rinzewind.org/
