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We have substantially improved our position in Japan which now represents a major part of our business.

Basically, people in other countries don't want to have to work quite as flat-out as they do in Japan.

Clearly, Japan is a most important market for digital consumer products.

Japan can't get anything on the market very cheaply because it has a large, relatively highly paid workforce which you can't fire.

Increasingly, corporate executives who don't speak Japanese are coming into Japan. Unlike their predecessors, they expect their employees to be able to communicate in English.

We have a lot of customers in Japan, but they don't quite get the local content that they always need, so we want to encourage all of our product teams to start thinking globally.

Sometimes when you're in different countries, everything has become so homogenised and there's a Starbucks and McDonald's everywhere, and you could feel like you're in Florida. But in Japan, you know you're there.

When we start a new store, we make sure that we transfer enough starter culture from other stores that are already Whole Fooders, who've already incorporated our values and our culture within themselves into the... into the store.

One of the great tragedies is that there is so much less open land available in Japan today. Many Japanese come to New Zealand because of its beauty.

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.