Clearly, Japan is a most important market for digital consumer products.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Japan is a well-educated, technological society. It is a free society, protects intellectual property.
Japan can't get anything on the market very cheaply because it has a large, relatively highly paid workforce which you can't fire.
Japanese tend to put sales and market share first. They make many products with the aim of raising sales. But then profits decline, and companies find themselves falling into debt... I changed the mindset at Canon by getting people to realize that profits come first.
We are a country of artisans and a country of manufacturing. I think Japanese textile technology is the best in the world.
India and Japan should develop a complementary relationship in information technology.
Japan's very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don't think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that's already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor.
However in countries outside of Japan I think game music is still a potential growth market that has not yet developed to the extent that we are seeing in Japan.
Opening new stores outside of Japan is important, but training our employees is even more important.
The typical big Japanese company has somewhere between a third and 40 percent of its revenues coming from developing countries, and about a third of Japan's exports are also to the emerging countries, so in a strange way, Japan, which has very little internal growth, its big companies are a good way to play the emerging markets.
I received from my experience in Japan an incredible sense of respect for the art of creating, not just the creative product. We're all about the product. To me, the process was also an incredibly important aspect of the total form.