A Taste of Japan

These things can all be true simultaneously: travel can be boring, exciting, mundane, eye-opening, pedestrian, exhilarating, frustrating and fulfilling. Whether it's for business or pleasure, a familiar destination or a new one, the act of going beyond your usual four walls to someplace else offers an opportunity to see the world from a different angle. And if you are as fortunate as we were to go on holiday to a completely new place, and try and immerse yourself in all that it has to offer, you get all these things in spades. Below in no particular order are a few random impressions from a recent foray to Japan, where we were lucky enough to be able to spend a few weeks traveling and seeing and eating.

A sense of Zen. According to the 2022 edition of the Religion Yearbook by the Agency for Cultural Affairs in Japan, about 48% of Japanese are Shinto, 46% practice Buddhism, with the remainder practicing Christianity, and various other religions. And so perhaps it's no surprise that shrines and temples are ubiquitous. But it's not just the big, well-known ones like the Silver Pavilion in Kyoto or Meiji Jingu in Tokyo. If you walk the cities and towns, you find one on virtually every block or so. Sometimes it's just a small statue and a few candles, other times a carefully curated structure and small garden tucked behind an office building. But there are countless places as you move around for quiet and reflection.

Liquid/paper. Walking big cities and small towns you notice an almost complete absence of litter. The weird corollary is that there are almost no trash cans. It seems that whatever detritus people create they take with them and dispose of in homes or offices. Almost the only receptacles you see are for empty bottles and cans located next to the countless vending machines which seem to be on almost every block. Beyond just water, they dispense hot and cold tea and coffee in cans, soup, hot sauce and more. You could probably live out of Japanese vending machines if you had enough change.

Blossoms everywhere. We never planned it, but wound up there at the height of cherry blossom season, which occurred early this year. The trees are everywhere in the cities and countryside, and are augmented by azaleas, chrysanthemums and a riot of other flowers. They offered a welcome dose of color to the otherwise mostly monochromatic buildings, and paired with the traditional gabled roofs provided that quintessential Japanese visage.

What did I just eat? As with many places, the local cuisine is worth sampling if you are adventurous. We had sushi of course. But beyond that there's shabu shabu, tempura, yakatori, yuba, matcha, soba, unagi, red-bean donuts and more. There are multi-course meals from the formal kaiseki to the family-style obanzai, and the food courts in department stores are as large and diverse as any Whole Foods. Or you can just hang out in an izakaya, a kind of local pub, and order a bit of anything. We ate it all. Well, almost: we didn't make it through the chicken hearts.

Crowd controlled. Walk up to any intersection and people are waiting patiently for the light to change. No one, and I mean no one, crosses until the light turns green. Even if there is no traffic anywhere, no one moves off the curb. Do so, and you all but hear audible gasps - but no one follows you. You quickly learn to join the crowds and wait for the correct time to cross.

Not as lost in translation. Unlike in most of Europe, where even unfamiliar words and names can be at least read and puzzled out, signs in Japan are in Kanji, making them indecipherable to those not fluent. Additionally, most restaurants have solid fronts without windows, and might even be on the second and third floors of buildings. Twenty years ago when I was there, this made it all but impossible to wander and make any informed choices about eating out. However, with the benefit of Google Translate and Google Maps, it is far more possible to find a place and to read a menu. More than once we were able to confirm an establishment not by its sign but by the color of its awning, and to read a menu with daily specials that would otherwise have remained a mystery.

Bits and pieces. No one eats and walks. Businessmen dress like it's the 1960s: dark suits, white shirts, dark ties. Those that have a few words in English are happy to use them, and pleased as punch when you tell them how well they speak. Rest rooms are ubiquitous, well maintained, clean and free, but without any way to dry your hands: most people carry small towels in their bags. Between 7-11's, Lawson and FamilyMarts, you never need to go more than a block without hitting a convenience store. Cash is often the preferred or only way to transact business. For all its density, the country and its people are very quiet, polite and measured.

In all, a welcoming place that's more than just a little foreign. But if you're willing to give it a go, you'll find an amazing place chock full of sights: take a look and judge for yourself. And the bathroom thing? Except for the towels, we have a lot to learn.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford loves to travel to new places. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Pay Attention!

A few years ago there was a flurry of reports that dissed us as not being able to focus. Based on dubious unsourced studies funneled through Microsoft, and reported by everyone from The Daily Telegraph to TIME Magazine, we humans purportedly had an attention span shorter than a goldfish, which clocked in at an average of 9 seconds. It made for good copy, but it was bupkis. Follow-up by numerous fact checkers found there being no real basis other than some cherry-picked facts which didn't actually say that. Even the anecdotal evidence disproves it: I won't point out that you've already done better than the goldfish just by reading this far, not to mention binge watching "The Last Kingdom" or an entire season of "The Great British Bake-Off." 

However, if not an actual complete kernel of truth, there is some veracity to the underlying idea. The reality is that over the last 20 years our attention spans have shrunk. You can blame your phone or your iPad or Twitter or TikTok or your email. All of them are clamoring for you to look at them. And that has meant that while 2 decades ago our focus on screens averaged two and half minutes, these days it is closer to 47 seconds. 

Research by Dr. Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine shows that not only do we only focus for less than a minute on a screen, but that it takes us about 25 minutes to circle back to the original task. It seems we spend about 10 minutes before we get interrupted on a task (vs a screen) and switch to another chore, and then the same thing repeats. The net result is it takes nearly half an hour before we come back to job one and continue. That doesn't mean you're doing nothing in the intervening time, you're just not focusing on where you started. And mind you that is switching, not multitasking. Walking AND chewing gum at the same time is multitasking; tuning out the meeting you are sitting in so you can read your email on your phone isn't multitasking, it's picking one over the other.

For sure there are stimuli that cause us to toggle from one to another, such as a vibration or a pop up indicating that something new is at hand. But even if we turn off these external drivers we still do it to ourselves with no prompting. The research shows more often than not that it's not an alert or notification that causes us to jump to another task, but our own internal impulses. It might be an urge, a memory or simply a feeling that we're missing something. We have always been distractable; the lure of the internet, social media and our many devices that can access all of that anywhere anytime has just turned that up to 11.

And while scientists still don't have a perfect understanding as to how the brain actually works, they note that the design of the internet mimics it. There are nodes and spokes that lead from one piece of data to the next, much like the synapses in our head. The hyperlinks in a newspaper article lead us to a concert listing lead us to a Spotify link with a song. We do the same in our heads, when a piece of music as we walk through a mall leads us to recall hearing it at a party which leads to remembering an old friend and the funny tee shirt they were wearing. Is it any wonder that crawling into the web feels like home?

It is interesting to wonder about the chicken and egg relationship between all this and the growth of the online world. Can we not focus because of the design of the internet is short little bits that continually lead us elsewhere, or have we evolved to where we can process information so quickly that the internet had to change to be made up of shorter and shorter bits? As one person pointed out, on the internet the credits never roll.  Put another way, to paraphrase Walt Kelly's iconic Pogo comic, we have TikTok'd the enemy, and he is us.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford is able to focus at least long enough to write this essay. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Counting X's and O's

Most companies find out about their successes or failures these days by way of Twitter or TikTok postings. And while these are certainly worth paying attention to, they are hardly definitive regarding the health of a business. In truth, they are more nuisance than measure as to the state of the enterprise. Sure, there is danger as well as opportunity in a post from PrettyGirl379 that laments why a tube of lipstick is dry, or one from BornToParty29 that the heel of her stiletto broke off. But using those as a guide to plot a long-term business strategy is a fool's errand.

That's because as catchy as viral public anecdotal feedback can be, executives require hard data on which to base their decisions. To do that they use all kinds of metrics to measure how well they are doing. In the past it used to be that physical tallies were all that mattered. Called O-data, or operational data, these were based on a particular unit of measure: units shipped, calls made, traffic through the door. Each of those helped to quantify whether a firm was going up, down or sideways. 

However, those don't report on what are perhaps the most important metrics, the ones which drives those underlying numbers: the customer's view of a company. That accounting falls under what is referred to as X-data, or experience data. It fills in the gap between "what is happening" and "why is it happening." 

There are multiple measures in this bucket as well. For instance, the CSAT or Customer Satisfaction Score, measures how satisfied customers are with an organization's products and/or services. There's the CES or Customer Effort Score, which tallies how much elbow grease a customer has to put in to buy a product or resolve an issue. But perhaps no score is as prized as the one that charts how a customer views a company, and indeed how they talk about it to their friends and family. Talk it up, and business is likely to grow. Talk it down, and the future isn't so rosy. That's the idea behind the Net Promoter Score, or NPS.

In practice, the math is pretty simple. Customers are surveyed on one single question. They are asked to rate on an 11-point scale the likelihood of recommending the company or brand: "On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this company's product or service to a friend or a colleague?" Based on their rating, customers are then classified in 3 categories: detractors (less than 6), passives (7 or 8) and promoters (9 or 10). NPS is determined by subtracting the percentage of customers who are detractors from the percentage who are promoters. If all of the customers gave a score of 6 or less than the NPS would be -100. If all said 9 or 10, then the Net Promoter Score would be 100.

The challenge for companies is it takes so little to change that score. One bad customer service experience, and down the scale they slide. We have all tried to sort out a bad charge or make a return, and the call or chat went from cordial to all caps. Odds are you dished about it with your girlfriend or office mate, and given a choice the next time around clicked over to a different outlet.

Take two of my recent experiences. I tried to add an international plan to my mobile phone for an overseas trip, and what should have been a 5 minute point and click turned into a 40 minute online chat, including an attempt to sell me more products. On the other hand, a problem with an online parking app resulted in an "We're sorry" and a $10 credit in less than 5 minutes. Had I been surveyed, the first experience started at a 9, went to a 7, and slid to a 5. The second started at an 8, then jumped to a 10. 

Yes, it's brutal, but that's how I scored it, and I wasn't even the Russian judge. In the first case Verizon has the advantage of being such a dominant player that switching ain't so easy. But they gave me an opening and a reason to at least keep my eyes open for an alternative. T-Mobile? AT&T? Not just yet, but give it time.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford hates taking surveys. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Imposter

 It's not as if I was trying to be deceitful. That said, I didn't try to dissuade the impression either. I just figured I would let it play out, and it went my way, then so be it. If not, then that was fine as well. I wasn't trying to gain an unfair or illegal or immoral advantage over my fellow human beings, but if someone wanted to make an assumption on their own time, and if I was going to be the beneficiary, who was I to complain?

That was never the thought when I went to buy a new suitcase. As a person who travels more than some but less than others, I started with a consumer grade rolling bag that lasted for a year or three, then started to show its age. The handle wouldn't retract without a struggle, and the zippers required a Herculean effort to get them fully closed. I replaced it with an upgraded model, but this too got long in the tooth after repeated trips. When the rubber on the wheels finally popped off, the resulting plastic hub made it sound like I was herding a hive of angry bees down the concourse. The withering stares I got from the other passengers convinced me to go luggage shopping once again.

I perused the reviews, finding several models that promised long life and happy trails. But they all were more or less that same, not much different from what I had. Then I realized that the thing to do was to look not at the reviews but at the users. And who uses a bag more than any other? Why, pilots of course. I kept my eyes open on my next trip, saw the bags they were dragging around, and found them online. To be sure they were a bit more expensive than the usual, but were built to last and be easily repaired. The average long-haul pilot does about 460,000 miles a year: if it worked for them, my travel schedule would be a walk in the park.

It took a little adaptation on my part, as the pilots' bag was constructed differently than what I was used to, with an exterior frame, less interior space and more outside pockets. But in practice it was no different than a new refrigerator or dresser: once I figured out where to put stuff, it all fit. From a user perspective, it was like any other suitcase, perhaps a tad heavier. Put your put stuff into it, drag it behind you, and open it at the other end. My socks didn't notice the difference.

What I did notice was the deference the air crews gave it. When I put it in an overhead compartment, it never got shuffled around. When I gate checked it on small planes, it was usually one of the first ones off. If I was further back in the line and they threatened to check bags as they ran out of space, they always seemed to skip past me. Why? It was identified (or mistaken) as one of them.

And on this most recent trip it was not the bag, but its human handler that got the nod. As I rolled on, the stewardess looked at my bag, then grinned at me: "I suspect you're in my line of work." Not wanting to lie, I settled on a reply that was truthful but kept me in the game: "well, I do fly a bit." I proceeded down the aisle and settled into my exit row aisle seat, adding to the perception of a person with some inside pull. When she set up to do the safety briefing, I offered to hold her props and made it a point to pay attention (as I imagined a non-working crew member might do). 

If she mistook me for one of her tribe, and wanted to share the secret handshake, I didn't dissuade her. No, I didn't get upgraded to First Class or score a special meal, but I did get extra snacks and she checked on me several times as she went by to see if I needed anything. I graciously accepted whatever small favors she was giving. But not to worry: if she had asked me to come to the cockpit and help out the pilot, I promise I would have come clean.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford is traveling again for work. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Beyond Milk

Call it fake or artificial or cultured. Whatever the label, there was a time just a year or so ago when the meat substitute market looked to be growing as fast as iPhone apps. Products from companies like Beyond and Impossible were popping up not just in grocery stores but at fast food outlets and restaurants, paired with positive reviews in multiple publications online and off. But of late it seems the trend is losing steam. While supply chain issues and inflation had an effect, there's the simple fact that the number of those who have tried it and dislike it is steadily increasing (from 16% in 2021 to 19% in 2023), while those who intend to try it is trending downwards (from 14% to 12% in the same time fame).

Yet despite that short-term move the longer term outlook is positive. Almost every expert expects that the market for alternative protein sources will increase. One says it will double by 2028, another says it will grow more than 50% year over year through 2030. The end result is that in the not-to-distant future your burger is just as likely to be grown on a stalk as on legs.

Which begs the whole question of what to call "it." If you stick with the name of the source you're on safe ground: beef, turkey and pork leave no doubt as to their origin. But when you call something "meat," it becomes murkier. Right now we generally associate that term with animal protein, though it's worth noting that the word itself comes from Old English as "mete,", which translates simply as "food." So in that context Hooray Foods plant-based bacon and Field Roast's Celebration Roast vegan turkey are meat, regardless of what four-letter word your Uncle Herb wants to call them.

That kind of battle was recently fought and won (or lost, depending on your point of view) in a similar arena. In February the Food and Drug Administration released draft recommendations that allowed oat, soy and almond drinks to keep using the term "milk" as part of their product names. It's been a four-decade long fight, as the dairy industry has sought to bar the use of the term if the liquid didn't come from an animal. As Chris Galen of the National Milk Producers Federation said, "You don't got milk if it comes from a nut or a seed or a grain or a weed." Put more succinctly in 2018 by the then head of the FDA Dr. Scott Gottlieb, "An almond doesn't lactate."

But just as with its protein siblings, the growth in plant-based beverages has grown while consumption of traditional cow's milk has declined. Globally the plant-based beverage market is growing at 12% a year, while the growth rate for dairy (which includes all animal milks) is expected to rise by just 2.5% over the same time period. It's true that there is a nutritional difference between animal milks and plant based products, and the FDA addressed that as well. They said that if a carton of rice milk contains less vitamin D or calcium than dairy milk, the label should provide that information to consumers. But the bottom line is that you can keep drinking what you are drinking, and not have to switch to oat juice or soy nectar.

One wonders what other industry trade groups will put up a fight. After all, the French won't allow anything to called champagne if the grapes aren't grown in that region of the country, and you can only call a cheese Parmigiano Reggiano if it is produced in the provinces of Parma, Reggio Emilia, Modena, Bologna and Mantua. And don't you dare call anything a Vale of Clwyd Denbigh Plum unless it was grown in that very small section of Wales. Perhaps that explains why they just gave up and threw in the towel when they created "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter." When life hands you lemons, and all that.

There are battles still to be fought: ice cream vs frozen dairy treat? Can you really churn peanuts to make butter? What about black pudding or head cheese, English muffins or Russian dressing? And exactly which lady's fingers are in that trifle?  On the bright side, at least freedom fries died a quick death, so perhaps sanity will prevail.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford likes egg creams, which contain neither eggs nor cream. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.