The Xenophobe's Guide to the Japanese Tapa blanda - 1999

Sahoko Kaji is a much travelled economist and university professor. When at home, she enjoys the genial nature of the people and the fact that things work. When abroad, she revels in Western emancipation and independence but constantly finds herself checking that the taxi will indeed be coming to take her to the airport.
Apart from this typically Japanese desire for precision, she has been influenced by the cultures of both East and West for so long that she has accepted she belongs to neither and simply floats somewhere in the middle. But then again, everything is transitory.
Noriko Hama works for a Japanese multinational. An economist and author with a special interest in economic developments in Europe, she lived in Britain from the age of 8 to 12, after which she was plunged back into the Japanese education system. In the 1990s her job returned her to London for a further 8 years.
She is frequently invited by television and radio to give her views on European and Far Eastern economic affairs which she attributes to her belief that to achieve recognition in her profession you have to be convinced that you are right and that everyone else is wrong. She works hard to give this impression.
Jonathan Rice is a management consultant who specialises in explaining Japanese business style and tactics to Europeans - and vice versa.
Involved with Japan since his schooldays in Tokyo, he has headed a British electronics company in Japan, climbed Mount Fuji and been a judge in the Yamaha World Popular Song Contest. He loves noodles and hanami but can live without Japanese electioneering and tamagotchi. His East-West confusion is best illustrated by the fact that he was Japans leading bowler in the 1972 cricket season.