[游记]东京印象

Never been to Japan, even it only takes 3 hr. by air from Shanghai
to Tokyo, and I was excited about that when we decided to show about
CEATEC, the largest IT related trade show in Asia. Everyone knows that
the Japanese market is highly difficult to penetrate, so when we planed
the trip, we did not set our expectation too high

Looking down from the window in the place, it looked like Tokyo is
quite similar to Shanghai, except it covers with more trees. At the
airport, we got trouble on getting a rental car, since I did not have
an international driver license since they did not take CA license, we
all got 2 rental cell phones, in Japan, and they adopted their own
standard as opposed to stand GSM or CDMA systems. The air is quite
clean, and all roads are small, people drive at the left hand of the
roads, I felt lucky without getting a rental car handy, otherwise there
might cause some troubles, as what I did at Hannover during CeBIT 06,
which I gonna tell the story later

At CEATEC, we saw something totally different to similar trade shows in
the US, in Germany and in China. Japanese companies spent a lot on
lavish decoration, hiring models in taking care of their booths,
however, they seldom offer non-trivial gifts and fancy foods to
visitors, as opposed to what American and European exhibitors normally
do. The exhibition halls are quite modern, and there are a lot of
visitor, and all of them walk at the left hand of the way, just like
the way they drive; food is also good, people are polite but relatively
shy. At CEATEC 2005, one could feel that Japanese electronics giants
are slowing recovering from the long-suffering recession, and they are
doing quite well now. BTW I went to downtown Tokyo in visiting Prof.
Fujita at Univ. of Tokyo, they have advanced research facility there

Anyway it was a totally different experience during the one-week
time we spend in Japan, both from American point of view, and from
Chinese point of view. When we look back at the history, Japan was just
a developing country one century ago adopting close-door policy, and is
a country almost without any natural resources, yet with the most
largest population density. However, Japan now is the world’s second
largest economic superpower, and the amount of progress, both socially
and economically, they’ve made so significant in such a relatively
short amount of period in history, we have to admit that Simple Is
Beautiful indeed works at least in Japan