Tuesday

I have only been here a few days, and I am already a day behind on my blog. Ugh. Here are the highlights from Tuesday:

Besides retrieving my lost camera and train pass, we also had a lecture on the personnel department at our company. It covered the working experience in Japan, as well as the type of people that the company was looking to hire. There is a lot of intense training, and it seems like company loyalty is a huge part of working in Japan. I was amazed to find that nearly 100% of the employees that start working here out of high school or college remain with the company until the retirement age of 60. Besides lifelong employment, another fact that they were very proud of was the vertical integration that allowed the company to control all aspects of their production and services. It occurred to me that this would probably would not be allowed in the United States due to anti-monopoly regulations.

We also had a chance to sit down with the chairman of the company in an executive meeting room and chat for a while. It was a very cool experience, not only because he has been working here for so many years, but also because he went to UW for his grad school. We talked about Wisconsin, Japan, and the future of rail transportation in the United States.

Edson and I went back to Shibuya to look around some more after work. We found a cool little restaurant for dinner, and checked out a few more stores. I fell asleep watching episodes of Arrested Development.