John Linton We arrived in Japan yesterday evening and (after a ten hour flight) endured the almost two hour transit from the airport to our hotelĀ in the Ginza and were grateful to have arrived in one piece and undamaged. The hotel (and its staff) was a perfect example of why I chose to come to Japan to 'celebrate' the 'end' of my working life. Everything about the hotel was sheer perfection in every possible way. It easily surpasses the 'intrusive elegance' of the better American and European hotels and improves on the best of the Asian hotels (at least the few I am familiar with) with a minimalist elegance that I have only encountered in Japan. The reception area for this hotel is on the 38th floor and as you approach the reception desk itself you realise that the back 'wall' behind the reception desk is actually a floor to ceiling 'window' some 30 meters long with a panoramic view over Tokyo and as it was well past sunset all that you saw were brightly lit buildings right to the night horizon - it was spectacular.
When I first came to Japan as an adult it 'changed my life' in several ways. Apart from the obvious elegance and sophistication of so many aspects of Japanese life, which a non-sophisticate as I was then and remain today couldn't help but notice, there was an overall calmness of every aspect of 'business life' which were the reasons for my being in Japan for the first and all subsequent times up to today's brief holiday. It would be a cliche to say that I felt 'at home' for the first time in my working life but, cliche or not, that was an almost immediate and powerful effect. I visited Tokyo, Skuba City, Numazu, Kyoto, Nagano and other parts of Japan over the following few years several times and each time I experienced the same feelings.
Apart from those general feelings I immediately related to the Japanese work ethic and it changed the way I worked from the first trip onwards. I very quickly learned how to adapt my very 'Australian' ways of both negotiating and 'understanding' people's strong and weak points in any negotiation and although I had considered myself a much better than average 'sales person' up to the time of my first visit I became, as far as my limited talents and abilities allowed, infinitely better at everything I did in business life.
While being profoundly positively affected by those things (elegance, perfection, work ethics) I also saw the barbaric aspects of the same positive cultural aspects of the Japanese - perhaps an intrinsic natural reverse of striving for perfection in so many aspects of a person's life. I don't have any ability of explaining how I see that as an obvious result so I will spare you any attempt at pop psychology or half baked nonsense I could come up with.
So I hope to have a pleasant few days re-visiting Kyoto and taking my family to places like Akihabara and Shinjuku as well as doing the more typical touristy things of attending a tea ceremony and a sumo match and walking round the Imperial palace. It will also be good to eat real Japanese food again in some of the more interesting Japanese restaurants that have apparently become even more refined since I was last here some 30 years ago - there appear to be more Michelin star restaurants here than in Paris including at least one 3 star restaurant.
I am looking forward to the day.