Travels to Japan

Last month I took a trip to Japan to meet with some of our customers.  We have started selling ASIC replacements in Japan.  Many Japanese customers had purchased their ASICs from the major Japanese semiconductor vendors.  And now, those same vendors have been End-Of-Life-ing their products.  This creates the same sort of demand for replacements ASICs as we have seen elsewhere.  And now that we have a partner in Solekia, it is a good time to increase our sales in Japan.

I have been to Japan once before, 25 years ago, on a trip to Osaka.  I had ventured into their subways, and backed right out again for fear of getting terribly lost because I couldn’t read the signs.  The fear never left me, and now I was going to have to face it on this trip.  Fortunately, I have my smart phone, with its’ built in GPS.  This allows me to know where I am, even if I can’t read a station sign.

As is frequently the case, the fear is worse than the reality.  While most station signs were in Japanese, there was always an English sign somewhere, and that was enough to get me to my destination.  My hosts were also concerned that I might disappear before an important meeting, so they met me at the hotel each morning to insure that I did arrive where I was supposed to be, and at the correct time.  I tried to go totally native, but I do admit to a strange longing every time I passed a McDonalds.

We visited two ASIC customers during my trip to Japan.  One was located in Tokyo, while the other was perhaps 200 miles north of Tokyo.  I rode the bullet train there at a speed of 150 mph, which was faster than I had been on a train before, with my old record being 100 mph in the UK.  It was a nice trip, and I enjoyed looking out the window at the countryside.

That area of Japan was near the reactors that were damaged in the Sendai earthquake, and some of the towns had erected public displays of the current Geiger counter readings.  That was interesting, though the readings were just ambient on a sunny day.

I had an additional day of magazine interviews on our ASIC program.  Fortunately, I had a good translator.  I have tried to retranslate the articles back into English to see what I have been quoted as saying.  Apparently it was not too bad, as we have already been getting sales leads from them.

The most difficult part of the trip was the time zones.  It wasn’t that I had trouble adapting.  That was easy.  It was the phone calls I kept getting between 2 and 4 in the morning from the US from people who didn’t realize I was in Japan.  It was hard to wake up and participate in a surprise conference call while not sounding like an idiot.

Overall, it was a good trip, and I am looking forward to my next trip to Japan.