How can you be dynamic and conservative at the same time? Tokyo seems to pull off both, at least from the outside. First impressions are of a hustling, bustling city at the forefront of modernity. But come across any person and you will soon be met with astounding formality. Don’t shake hands, bow. Don’t say who you are, present a business card, while bowing of course. Smile all the time. Bow. In fact what I seem to have encountered is almost an Asian Scandinavia. Just like Sweden and Finland, people are very polite, largely quiet, they get on with the job. However, underneath, deep waters run. In Japan there is a publicly acknowledged concept of “group think” where the community comes first. But there is also an acknowledged existence of the “private universe” where people take themselves off to BE themselves. The two don’t meet much in the open. And the traditional view, that the company you work for comes first above all else, still prevails. I do wonder what the consequence must be for family life and what it’s impact might be on children as a result. Having gone out for a drink with an Australian-born contact here who has been here for 15 years, I realised also that although Japanese people are fascinated by Western culture , they don’t actually want to imitate it wholesale – what they do instead it take it and adapt it to their own setting. Hence why go to any place where there are young people and you will find a much more easy-going attitude to things. Even so, there is this underlying and unspoken “group thought” that ‘we will all act relaxed now’…