I’m having a bit of a vacation after the hard work of the Phoenix Comicon, relaxing in Las Vegas with Mrs. J-List. While I’m here, the awesome J-List staff will be shipping out orders every day.
Being a business owner, I often find myself observing the companies I see in the U.S. and comparing them to Japan, and vice-versa, to see if I can identify business ideas in one country could be imported to the other. In Japan, it’s common for restaurants to present customers with an oshibori (a rolled-up hot towel) to clean their hands with before eating, but preparing these towels in an efficient way can be expensive, so there are businesses that do nothing but collect, wash and deliver these towels to restaurants every day. One business that’s very beneficial to society are 代行 daiko (“substitute driver”) taxis, which work like regular taxis except that there’s a second driver who will drive your car home for you, if you’ve had too much to drink, with the other driver following behind. Another company I’m a fan of is TOTO, the Japanese manufacturer of “washlets,” those bidet toilet seats that wash your butt for you. It’s a given that nice hotels in Tokyo will have these amazing toilets, yet every time I visit Las Vegas I wonder why none of the casino hotels have added them to the hotel rooms for the guests to use…it sounds like a big opportunity for TOTO’s U.S. branch. Of course, I sometimes notice business ideas in the U.S. that might be exported to Japan. In San Diego I visited a pizza chain called Project Pie which brings the Chipotle/Subway style “choose your ingredients as you move along the counter” approach to making personal-sized pizzas, something I thought would go over well in Japan.
