IKEA

I was going to IKEA last Friday to inhale Sweden for a while and enjoy the Swedish food. It was on that way I got the idea. Globalization, this week’s assignment, what could be better then referring IKEA to globalization and the other way around. The questions I wanted to get answer to in my research were how IKEA has succeeded in Japan and how the company has affected the country in both positive and negative ways. The article IKEA: The Japanese misadventure and successful re-entry writes that IKEA did several tries to open an IKEA store in Japan in the 1970 but the demand was not high enough to succeed in Japan. IKEA was not ready for Japan and the Japanese people were definitely not ready to drive it home and put it together themselves. IKEA came back to Japan in 2006 to give it a new try and according to the article IKEA’s new plan for Japan, was Japan now a much more open country for new ideas and IKEA was a much better known company in the country. I also discussed this with my speaking partner Chiaki how said that one reason why she thinks IKEA succeeded this time was because the Japanese people these days have a very good image of Sweden by associations to quality, high education and a good wealth fare system. I asked her how she thinks IKEA have affected the country and she says that by having IKEA in Japan more Japanese people can afford to buy fashionable home furnishing to good prices.

When I were at IKEA in Osaka I took the chance to talk to Kazuhiro who have been working on IKEA as a manager of the living room area for one and a half year. He said that IKEA’s positive effects of being in Japan is that more Japanese people got interested in home furnishing, especially younger people and people with less money. The negative effect is that IKEA have effected the local stores a lot. He said that he think most Japanese people would choose IKEA before other Japanese companies. A proof of this is that IKEA expended from one store in 2006 to five stores in 2009.

Japanese baseball.

Baseball have become more and more popular in Japan since it was brought into the country in 1870´s by an Amaricaborn englishteacher living in Japan. As it occures to me, baseball is not just a sport, it has a big place in the japanese culture and society. As they mention in the movie Kokoyaku, the Japanese people have taken baseball to their hearts and their homes and i read that many Japanese people says that the rising sun in the Japanese flag should be replaced with a baseball. That statement certainly define their love to the game. The love for the game is equally big when I see ten thousends of Hanshin Tigers fans at the arena as when I pass by a young Kansai Gaidai student everynight on my way home from school or when the Komatsu employees play baseball every Sunday. Baseball is a very fascinated sport to me although it dosn´t exist in Sweden. Europe in generall pays more attention to their own sports while Japan seems to be more Americanized. Of all the numbers of sports which Japan has given to the rest of the world like Judo, Karate and Sumo it is only fair that they incorporate foreign sports in return. It would be very interesting to watch both a American baseballgame and Yakyo (Japanse baseball) to see if the sport differences from country to country. According to this article the sport is similar in the basic but differs in other ways. For example how they pay attention to different thing in the sport. Baseball relies on power and physical skills while Yakyo relies on finess, speed and mental acuity. The article also describes how the audience act different at the games. I took some nice pictures while I watched the Japanese students practice at Kansai Gaidai baseball field, I will definitly spend more time there, watching this fascionated sport!

Open mic night

Me and my friends went to Tokyo for silver-weekend. We spended most of our time in the wonderful Harijuku area and while we were walking down the shoppingstreet, we found a very cozy, small, quite shabby but still very nice bar that we decided to check out the same night. The primary reason why we chose that bar was because all of us are really big music fans and the pub have livemusic every night. Besides from this night of course, when they had open mic night for comedian instead! We were quite disappointed that they didn´t play any livemusic but there were a crazy man, running around in the pub, screaming. We found that very interesting so we joined the tree japanese women who already watched the show. 

I´m not an expert in this area, I have never been to a comedian show in Sweden and neither in Japan, but still I can tell that this was something extraordinary... All of the comedian were guys accept from one who was a transvestite. They were all very loud, they often came out two at the time and laught and talked very fast to eachother. This way of comedy show match very well with the explaination of the japanese comedian style "Manzai" which involves two preformers, a straight man ( Tsukkomi) and a funny man (boke) - trading jokes at a great spead. Most of the jokes is about mutual misunderstainding, double-talk, puns and other verbal gags. Even though we didn´t understand a word, they were still very eager to make us feel like anyone else in the audience. There where only tree japanese women in the audience and us, but the show where still very serious. All of us got one paper each with the different comedian names on, the papers was for voting, quite difficult for us when everything was i japanese. The night ended up very funny although we went there for music. 

One more thing about the japanese humorscene, rumor say that if you aim at somebody in Osaka (with a fake gun a.k.a. your finger) they will pretend that they gotten shot... Can anybody comment this rumor?