Help, I Can’t Breath, And Sound Decibels on Shoes

The past few days I’ve ridden on lots of trains. Probably 20 or more trains as I have been going to customer meetings. Because Tokyo is so big and everything is so expensive, most companies purchase or lease space with little room for growth. If/when growth happens, companies often expand in the area of Tokyo where the expansion is needed in order to be close to the customer, and to cut down on train expenses. Therefore, a lot of companies have small offices all around the city. Visiting one customer over two days for different meetings required me to visit 3 different sites as the different meetings included some of the same people and some different people. This alone accounted for about 1/2 of the train rides. And because Tokyo is so spread out, it often requires switching trains to get from one place to another.

Most of these meetings include several different nationalities since I’m in our international business group. One customer visit included Americans, Japanese, Koreans, and a Chinese-American. Japanese seems to be the main language as the Japanese generally outnumber the others. The American expatriates generally have a simultaneous translator beside them. These translators are amazing as one language goes in the brain and another comes out with only a few seconds delay. Of course, since the exchanges are interactive, these people are constantly changing the direction of the language. I think this has to be one of the toughest mental jobs there is. Being fluent in two languages is impressive enough, but being able to convert languages simultaneously in whichever direction the discussion is going is amazing.

Another meeting I had included Mexicans, Japanese and me. It was quite interesting, as we had prepared our presentation in English as we thought the Mexicans spoke English. When we got there, we learned that they didn’t speak English. Luckily, they brought along their own Japanese/Spanish translator. He was not simultaneous, so we had pauses between conversations as he translated what was just said. We quickly switched to Plan B and things went pretty smoothly. I then switched from presenter to PowerPoint button pusher listening to the exchange and trying to follow along.

This morning I experienced a new level of crowdedness on the train. Michael likes to compare the morning commute to a box of raisins since raisins are touched on all sides when in the box. Today’s ride was 2 boxes full of raisins packed into one box. I was so squished that I literally had a hard time taking full breaths. Luckily the train made a slight turn and everyone squished to the other side. Once the train leveled out again, I could at least take full breaths for the rest of the commute as I had managed to take advantage of the train’s tilt and reposition slightly. The poor guy in front of me actually had his face pressed against the window several times as the train leaned in his direction and 50 or 60 people fell against him. It looked painful.

One of the things I admire most about the train stations is the women walking in very small, thin high heels. These generally tend to be open toe with very thin straps across the feet. The heels are about 2-4” high. The sole is about 1/4” thick. They seem very uncomfortable and dangerous, but the ladies truck around like nobody’s business. They don’t seem to slip or be slowed down at all. It’s very impressive. The only downside for me is that when they walk down stairs, these shoes are very loud as they slap on each step on the way down. I think they slap their feet down to make sure they have good traction and they don’t slip on the steps. They seem about as loud as a lawnmower, and when you have a group of ladies all walking down the stairs at the same time, it can actually be painful on the ears. How these women motor around in these shoes is impressive. It must be painful, but they seem to handle it just fine.