This is 3Bits & Change, an email about building a service and retail business. This one was written to some groves from KCRW via a slow VPN.
[It’s Wednesday here now. This post is from Monday. It got nudged a day when the Wi-Fi went sideways.]
Good day,
We neglected to eat breakfast and got on a commuter train around 7AM. No coffee. And, weirdly we seemed like locals. No one else, none, had coffee either. Just wild. I later found out that it’s not polite to eat or drink in public spaces. This includes commuter trains, the train station, etc. This includes breakfast.
Note the Ben Davis backpack. They’re all over the place among the youth. Founded in SF in 1935.
Kitchen row
It’s not likely called that. It felt like that. There is a shopping district in Osaka that has a density of kitchen stuff. Mike, who I’m traveling with, has been coming to one of these stores for ~20 years.
New this trip is the store next door. Japan, a series of islands, was unified over the centuries. The more remote islands have been more isolated from international trade. We may have found a set of new makers! We’ll see.
We have nine of their knives on the way back to the shop. DM to take a look at them early.
A stone company
In the basement level of a fashion forward part of town there is a nondescript building. After having been inside I can only guess that the company has been there and operating on different principles than its current fashion forward neighbors for decades.
We wanted to purchase stones and equipment. And while this company makes them and distributes them to the USA they would not sell to us. They’d sell to our friends in country who could export to us, maybe.
All of that was shared in the first 3 minutes of arrival via Google Translate. However, the experience was 45 minutes of us looking at brochures in Japanese, using Translate and drinking coffee. Our host insisted. Insisted!
He plays video games for hobbies. And, with killer shoe and denim stores outside his office he did not mention either when I asked what trending fashion we should look at bringing home.
So much shopping and gaming
Culture is driven by what you do?
Well, in Osaka, there is a lot of people out shopping on Monday night. A lot!
Small arcade like games are sprinkled about groups of friends and very frequently multi-generation families.
I’ve seen this book signing a few times now. It’s a type of passport of sorts? I don’t know.
And if Japan has lead gaming via video games in the west there is certainly a culture of gaming. This “cafe”(?) was filled with a game like chess on one side and Othello players on the other. Older gentleman filled the place.
Heads up tho… most of the restaurants don’t open until later in the evenings - kinda like the coffee shops in the morning. If they’re open, folks don’t eat until later anyway.
Change
So much learning. So great to be in Japan.
In the next issue we’ll track a long day of trains that took me from a very rural area right to the center of one of the busiest intersections in the world.
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