Triumphant Return from The Japans

I'm back, even if some of you didn't know I'd gone!  I took a business trip for my huge corporate employer to Japan over the last week.  I didn't have a lot of warning that I was going which is why I didn't post a "see ya's all later kinda blog" before heading out.  I even made a weak effort between the very long working days and numerous drinkings of Japanese beer to update the blog with an "I'm in Japan!!!!" kinda post, but was defeated by the intermittent wireless in the hotel.

Anyway, for what it's worth, I've been to Japan several times (including a year-long stint as a college exchange students), so it's a place I'm pretty familiar with... I like it there a lot and enjoy any chance to go that I can get.  This trip took me to Kobe, a small city on Shikoku, and a smaller industrial city near Nagoya (or maybe more accurately near Toyota).  I had been to Kobe (maybe known to you as the site of the devastating Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995) once before during high school for a volleyball tournament, and I think that's probably when I started my love affair with things Japanese that resulted in my aforementioned college exchange there-- interestingly enough, I don't recall discussing the earthquake much or noticing a lot of damage or anything, even though I was there around one year later.  Kobe is a pretty cool city with some neat features (the Ijinkan-- barbarian houses-- left over from when Kobe was a trade port for early European traders are an example) and some cool places to hang out. 

I got to travel with three other guys, who all turned out to be decent travel companions.  Work travel in Japan was fairly fascinating as factories there are very different from our own.  There's a ton of automation, and the Japanese are able to cram a decent process into an unbelievably tiny space.  Supplier relationships are also executed in a very different way-- kind of paternalistic and definitely not arms length.  I think there's some things we could learn from each other.

This blog has been brought to you by mild jetlag, which saw me awake at ~4:30 AM and has given me a bit of extra time before work.