Todd was actually an MBAer who came to Japan in the mid 80's when Japan's economy was at its height (when they were the number one US debt holder, buying Rockefeller Center and Columbia Pictures and other trophy US properties and companies, and everyone thought they were going to take over US economy someday soon). He first worked in the hot Japanese stock market as trader/analyst, then for big Japanese and international firms as marketing liaison. He was actually starting out his own business with these projects he hired me to do, using the business relations he had built throughout his previous years in Japan.
The first couple of campaign projects were easy, using phones/computers to collect customer demographic and preference information for some Japanese food/candy companies, yet they were the first of its kind in Japan. He got confident with me and the technology and got bigger and bigger projects from bigger and bigger clients to do while building up his business in the following years.
For example, one major project we did was for Philip Morris Corp. (yes, that big, evil tobacco company of the world, and we helped promote cigarette smoking for them :) It was a combined $40 million dollar campaign that included TV commercials, highway billboards, newspaper ads, and our telephony gig with one same theme story line--A floppy disk was stolen by a bad guy, your mission is to get it back... what vehicle do you want to use for the chase--press 1 if you want a helicopter, 2 if you want a Porche... now he's right in front of you, press 1 if you want to cut in front of him, 2 if you want to ram him from behind... sorry you missed him, try another time... etc. I had to design a scheme to verify the legitimacy of the PIN the caller enters per their cigarette box, collect their sex/age information, and when and what little prize (a cap, a T-shirt, or a cigarette lighter) to give out when they make a move selection. I also had to keep tally of where the calls fall out and wrote a separate utility program that fetches such data from all different sites and compiles them so Todd can input them to his Mac to come up with a pie chart and other presentation graphics to show his client, in this case, Leo Burnett, the top ad agency in Japan for Philip Morris. Also the data of winners of little prizes need to be kept so they can be entered into a lottery at the end of the campaign for the chance to win the top prize of a Toyota truck.
The programming itself was not that hard, but the pre-campaign testing and preparation was the real drill, because once the campaign started, it ran 24/7 all over major cities in Japan--from Sapporo to Hiroshima, Tokyo to Osaka, Nagoya, Yokohama, and Sendai, for a whole month and a half non-stop. If my program hangs, or gives out excessive amount of prizes, or allows ineligible people to get them, by contract we (Todd) were liable for all the damages created.
The crew we used for testing, logistics, and customer support were all Japanese, 6 or 7 of them, men and women in their early 30's. They were actually the core staff of the former exclusive distributor in Japan for the US company whose communication boards I used for the projects until the Japanese economic bubble burst and their company disbanded in the early 90's. I can still remember Todd and I and all the Japanese crew sitting in a crammed, smoke filled office, telephone simulators at hand, making calls all at once, pressing different selection keys to go different scenario routes, then pulling out the result printout to verify if they were 100% correct according to the designed program flow and test schemes, over and over again.
Here I have to give praise to the Japanese work ethics I saw there. The typical Japanese workers were dedicated, detail minded, straight shooters. No cutting corners, no skimming the surface, no smart second guessing on their own, just honest to God rule following and execution. The result is then, as we liked to say there, "If Mori san says it's OK, then we know it's OK." Mr. Mori was the chief tester and technical support guy we had there (and the heaviest cigarette smoker I have ever met in my life--that's why I sometimes nicknamed him, jokingly, "Mr. Morijuana").
I also remember on the eve of the campaign launch, a few minutes before mid-night April 30th, we all sat in front of the rack-mounted computers in our tiny Tokyo office, nervously watching the screens that were running a generic screen saver program I wrote, wondering how the "grand opening" would look like in a moment. Then the clock turned 12 AM May 1, all the screens brightened up, status lines flashing with call status and call count updates, without a glitch... We stood up and joyously congratulated each other with cheers of champaign Todd brought in, for all the hard work we had gone through for weeks prior.
Weird things still happened during the campaign, though. For example, a few days after the campaign started, we noticed from the daily reports Osaka sent us (we contracted with NTT--Nippon Telephone and Telegraph, the AT&T of Japan--to have our computers and telephone lines set up at their local offices and asked them to fax in the call report my program automatically generated every morning--Mind you, this was the day before Internet was born, oh well, Al Gore had invented it by then, but we just didn't know it :) that it didn't seem to be taking calls for a few days. Todd had all the Osaka phone lines rerouted to Tokyo and sent Mori and me over there to check it out. We couldn't find anything wrong and even replaced the computers there to see if that made any difference, but no dice, the problem persisted. We then re-examined the call reports, and noticed the calls seemed to stop coming in around 7 AM every morning, about the same time when the office cleaning lady came in and started her daily work. We suspected when she plugged in and turned on her vacuum cleaner, it triggered a power surge that knocked down our computers in the office. So we told them to move the computers to a different location where it had its own power source, and the problem went away. Case of mystery solved!
Living in Japan, or Tokyo in particular, was not a hard thing to do. The city was very foreigner friendly, with safe streets, clear signs, polite people, and a superb subway/train system that after a few trips and a couple weeks living there, I not only could go around the city by myself without problem, I also knew how to go straight from metropolitan Tokyo to Narita international airport 40 miles away using the cheapest route possible. But living there was expensive. During the Philip Morris campaign, Todd rented for me an "apartment mansion" that was about 10' by 7' small (I hesitate to use the word "big"), bathroom, stove top, and a pull-down bed all included, for the equivalent of $1500 a month, and you--or actually the company you work for--had to go through a credit check and pay the real estate broker "gift money" that's about one month's rent worth to get it!
In that sense, Japan was not that foreigner friendly a society. Take Todd's example, he had been living and working in Japan for over 7 years by then, spoke fluent Japanese, married to a Japanese woman, and got his permanent residency, and still, he told me when he sometimes had to wave for a taxi at night, he had to cover his face so the taxi drivers wouldn't recognize he's a foreigner and not stopping for him, and when he was buying an apartment house there he had to use his wife's name for it because otherwise as a foreigner he could not get a mortgage or own a house there (the rules may have changed since then, though).
I did get what I came to Japan for, a lot: I got to eat great Japanese food every day, literally. The after-work group dine-out "ritual" is part of Japanese work culture, as you may well know, and the restaurants in Tokyo were basically all mom-and-pop shops, each with great specialty dishes of their own, using the freshest and best quality food ingredients to begin with, to woo their precious customers in one of the most competitive metropolitan culinary markets in the world. And indeed sometimes you feel the happiest hours the Japanese workers have every day is when after they have a few beers and good food in their stomach, they talk to you heart to heart, or show you their wild side that you don't usually see during the day. At an on-sen (溫泉, hot spring) retreat we went to after the campaign, for example, the sha-jo (社長, President) of the former distributor company jumped on the dinner table almost half naked, danced around, then landed on my lap and hugged me. And the girls sang and danced great Karaoke all night long after the dinner. Hardy workers, hardy partyers, I suppose.
I tried to memorize all the Japanese alphabets (Katakana 片假名 and Hiragana 平假名) and learned a few useful Japanese phrases during my stay there. For example, when in a restaurant, if you don't know what to order, just say "o-su-su-me" ("your special/recommendation of the day?"). Or when in a store, point to the thing you are interested in, and say "i-ku-ra" ("how much?"), then "ta-kai-de-su-ne" ("too expensive!"). Or when in a packed subway train and you need to get off right away, just say the magic word "su-mi-ma-sen" ("excuse me!"), and the crowd will part way for you in no time! Finally, the kill-all phrase for all your Japanese communication trouble: "ni-hon-go-wa-de-ki-ma-sen" ("I don't speak Japanese!").
One day at a train station, though, a westerner came over and started speaking fluent Japanese to me that I had no idea what it's about, so I said to him in fluent English that I am not Japanese and don't understand what he said, but if he can speak English then maybe I can try to help him. He got a little surprised at first but quickly switched over to English and told me he just needs to find out where and when to take a train to a certain station he needs to go. I told him if he tells me the station name then maybe I can tell from the train's schedule board which is written in kanji (漢字, Chinese character) what he needs to know. So he told me the name of the station, but then, unfortunately, I had no idea how that pronunciation relates to its kanji writing. He finally gave up on me and turned his way for a real Japanese to solve his problem!
In light of recent disasters in Japan, I decide to try to contact some of the people I know there and see how are they faring. I Google'd and then LinkedIn'ed Todd Newfield through Internet--the last time I met him was in year 2000 when I brought one of my programmers to attend a trade show there in Tokyo and we had a lunch together. He is actually now living in Canada, teaching international business and going for a PhD program of his own at a university in British Columbia, with his little boy that his Japanese wife just gave birth to around the time I last met him, so to give him a flavor of his native country before the boy grows up, he said. He said he misses Japan and still prefers living there to his native country Canada. I believe him, because I could tell while working with him in Japan that he really enjoyed the excitement and the pace of things that were happening around his work and living life there, and I remember he told me when he went back to Canada to visit his parents or friends, they said he speaks English with a funny Japanese accent. And he does sound that way.
I also called another Japanese friend who had been sending me postcards with his family pictures for a few years until about 10 years ago. I found his mobile phone number and made a call and left a message with my email address, and voila, I got his email back right the next day! He said his family and friends are doing all right, but the city of Tokyo is undergoing rolling blackout nowadays, and he has to help out some friends/customers of his who live in the Sendai area. We exchanged a few emails since and are both glad we get reconnected again!
God bless my friends and all the people in Japan,
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