Day 3: Mitsui, Meetings, Kabuki and Sushi

Today we were blessed with a sleep in, with the day not truly beginning til 8:45am. Breakfast was a fairly standard buffet, which I enjoyed Vegemite on toast thanks to Claire. After meeting in the lobby we were off to Mitsui's head office in Tokyo via the public transport system. The system is very much like Perth's train system, with smart cards to get on and off the subways. The trains were busy, yet everyone was extremely polite and considerate. When exiting the subways, people would form orderly queues and move at the same pace, which was crazy! All the stations have free wifi and were immaculately clean.

We received three presentations for the Corporate Planning and Strategy  department, which means more business cards!

Yay!

The first talk was about global Mitsui, it's business vision, values and structure. An incredibly interesting lecture about the new corporate slogan 360 degrees business innovation, which summaries the Shogo Shosha, which invests in a portfolio of companies and then assists in management of these companies through things like supply chain management and negotiation, as well as how Mitsui is planning to respond to challenges in the future, such as the mining slowdown, despite mining currently making up the vast majority of profits, and the expanding and aging population world wide. It was an incredibly captivating view of corporate management decisions and the values and ideas that drive the Japanese corporation, particularly in comparison to my experiences with Bradken.

Our next talk was about Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). This was looking at the obligations of Mitsui to contribute to sustainable development. This covered their support of the UN Global Compact 10 Principles, which includes removing corruption and the need to abolition forced labor and child labor. This was intriguing as to Mitsui's attitude towards culturally and socially entrenched attitudes that oppose these 10 Principles, which is to refuse to work with those who attempt to break the principles regardless of the business advantage. I think this is very admirable and a pursuit worth supporting.

Our final talk was about Mitsui's social contribution. The primary funding goes into the environment, with ownership of forests and educational programs about forests and sustainable use of wood. Mitsui employees also do volunteering and raise money to address poverty or to donate to a wide variety of charities. It is truly an amazing commitment to social responsibility.

After our meetings we met with the Mitsui Prospective Employees, a group of intelligent talented individuals who have just finished their University education and will be graduating in March, ready to start work with Mitsui. We had lunch, a Bento Box, with them and discussed their plans for our free days with them in Tokyo. We also learnt a fascinating way to sort people when we were randomly allocated a buddy to take us around Tokyo. Mine is a civil engineer who loves maths and physics, so I am excited to see what he thinks will be of interest to me. He was keen when I discussed robotics with him, so here's hoping. 

After three hours of hilarious conversation, we were off to the Kabuki Theatre. The building itself was super impressive, looking shockingly out of place in an area of high level modern development. However, it was gorgeous, both on the inside and on the outside and the theatre, whilst overly long, was very entertaining. I wish I could have understood what they were saying, as the humour when translated was quite funny, but often we knew the joke long before it was delivered, which ruined the joke a bit, It was also disappointing that neither play we say featured male actors in female roles, as they said that the makeup and costuming made these character extremely beautiful.

Main Entrance of the Theatre

Signs out the front of the Theatre

Theatre Roof from the Inside

The huge stage!

We left the Kabuki Threatre and headed through Ginza to a Sushi Restaurant. The streets were very busy and after saying all day that Tokyo felt like Sydney, just with asian language signs, we finally hit the Tokyo we had all expected. Tall shopping buildings, neon lights and people as far as the eye can see. It was a gorgeous sight to see. 

Now THIS is Tokyo

Shops and lights everywhere

Apple Store on the corner

It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas

Sushi isn't my favourite dish. We had mystery potatoes as an entrée, but after stomaching raw fish once, I really couldn't do it again. It didn't help they snuck in wasabi under the fish. I couldn't stomach it tonight. But it was interesting to see the different sushi; seawater eal, cuttlefish, fermented soybean, sea urchin. It was a beautiful looking pile of sushi, with plates the entire length of the sunken table in a traditional Japanese dining room.

Clint and Josh sitting at the table. We were sitting at table level, not on chairs.

One of the Sushi plates featuring eel (bottom right) and sea urchin (yellow, bottom left)

When we returned to the hotel we tried on some Happi and had our photo taken by the hotel. When it comes up on Facebook I will post it up. After which, we decided to grab some snacks from the local corner store, which ended up being free because on the way Clare found 1000 Yen, enough for everyone to have something small. 

It was a busy day and tomorrow looks to be just as busy. Hopefully tomorrow I can find a charger adaptor for my laptop, because battery is down to two hours. I noticed that whilst almost everywhere has two pin sockets, the Kabuki theatre had three pin. Shame I didn't have my laptop with me at the time.

Till tomorrow!