Osaka

A quick overview of the cities I visited while in Japan: Tokyo (8 days) Hiroshima (2 days) and Osaka (7 days). I have many blog posts from Tokyo because of the corporate activities we had planned. Tokyo was a great opportunity for me to learn about operations and business practice in the big city and capital of Japan. There is also a blog post for my visit to Hiroshima. For this post I plan to elaborate on the things that I learned while in Osaka.

Osaka is located on the south eastern part of the main island of Japan (Honshu). From our hotel in Osaka we were able to travel by use of the Shinkansen, a high speed train that was very useful during my stay in Japan. I think the US should implement better railways for travel, like Europe. Thanks to the Shinkansen we were able to visit cities like Kyoto, Nara, Himeji, Hikone, and the Awaji Island. Also the Shinkansesn got us from Tokyo to Hiroshima (500 miles) in only 5 hours!!

Some of my previous posts are about my visit to these cities and while in Osaka we were able to reach out to many cultural sites of Japan.

Himeji Castle

I was able to spend an afternoon traveling to the city of Himeji. Our professor recommended our group to visit the castle here because it as just recently opened from renovation for the past few years. This was an amazing castle, so overwhelmingly large. I learned about castles during my visit here. I learned that castles had provided a center point for many cities to be developed throughout history. I also learned that many of these places have been built upon man-made rock structures for support/protection/and intimidation. Towards the end of the day when i was about to leave the Himeji castle there was an opera like performance... so i stayed for a little to see what it was like. Very interesting! These "noh" events are done at castles across japan and it was very cool to experience this type of singing. It was in Japanese (of course) but their singing/chanting was very slow, which is different from the typical Japanese language.

 

 

 Noh performance

 

Hikone Castle, Museum, and Gardens

Here was a large area with the Hikone Castle, along with a new museum, and the gardens. This place was similar to a park on top of a hill (plus the castle and fancy architecture). There was a lot of space on top of this "hill" (more like a mountain). Here I was also exposed to the "mascot culture" that Japan is known for. During my stay in Japan I noticed the emphasis on characters or mascots to represent the company/place/or idea.

Gardens

 Museum

Primix

This was a corporate visit to a manufacturing company that creates mixers for various different production methods. Food products, batteries, and many other materials need to be mixed for use. They have an amazing facility. The CEO worked very hard to provide harmony for the employees to both live and work. He brought his company to the Awaji Island of Japan and here he built a manufacturing plant, the new office building, and even housing for the employees! This was an awesome tour and many of my colleagues mentioned that they wanted to here. During our tour the CEO mentioned how he was very influential to the Awaji Island development. He got the city government to build a hospital nearby and he also had to negotiate his plans before developing his new facility. He mentioned how he tried to get a University built! Talk about an influential person! I admired the CEO's ability to have vision for the future.

Fujitec

This was another visit where we were able to tour their building, which is the main headquarters for the company. Here they have a large testing station where they've built a tower to test their new elevators. Fujitec also has a mascot! Funny that a company which makes elevators thinks it is necessary to have a mascot to represent the image of the company. One of the members in my group asked what the meaning of this mascot was supposed to represent. "Tecky" represents Fujitec's high technology with their priority in safety.

 

Nestle

Our last corporate visit that we were able to attend while in Japan. I enjoyed this presentation very much because it was extremely informative of market culture of Japan. During this presentation we learned about the history of Nestle as a company and also their future plans/goals. Our presentation was given from a director of e-commerce and he had been a part of Nestle for over 20 years. He was very insightful and he kept mentioning how Nestle's marketing strategy goes beyond just the product. We learned that in marketing some things are consciously marketed towards the people, and then there are a lot of subconscious marketing techniques. Innovation arises when a company can market through the subconsciousness of its consumers. A company as established brand equity when the market subconsciously agrees with a companies product/perception. Nestle as recently gone to great measures to increase the perception their brand holds. During our presentation we learned that today 70% of advertising is spent on R&D while 30% is spent mass advertising (20 years ago this was the opposite case). We also discussed how for the next generation (my generation) we will have to implement e-commerce in order to maintain growth for the companies' future.