I like to use Twitter (and Facebook, and Google+) to keep up with our customers and send random links about Japan as well as updated J-List products. The other day a report of a shooting fatality in a Denny’s in Chiba Prefecture popped up in my RSS feed, so I tweeted it out to my followers. Gun violence is quite a rare thing in Japan, and nearly always limited to spats between yakuza crime gangs, thanks to an unspoken social rule against violence to innocent third parties which Japan’s gangsters are too polite to break. The reaction to my tweet was interesting — there was more surprise that they had Denny’s restaurants in Japan than at the shooting itself. For the record, Denny’s has been a fixture in Japan’s famiresu (family restaurant) industry since 1973, offering a unique selection of Western and Japanese dishes, usually with a bit more wafuu (traditional Japanese style) elegance than their competitors like Skylark, Gusto and Coco’s. The restaurants are operated by 7&i Holdings, the parents group that also owns 7-11 convenience stores, and when the company executed a corporate redesign a few years ago they got the really bad idea of putting the 7-11 logo on the Denny’s sign, which always makes me want to order onigiri rice balls when I’m there. Like just about every other company in Japan, Denny’s recently started licensing anime to bring in customers, like last year’s tie-in promoting the K-ON! movie.
Denny’s Japan is owned by 7-11 and always lets you know it.
