My job

I suppose I should go into some more detail about what kind of work I'm doing here. Our office is officially a part of the State of Missouri Department of Economic Development (DED, as they call it around here). What our office specifically does is basically act as a liaison between Missouri-based businesses and Japanese businesses. Our clients are all Missouri companies that are looking to export and distribute their product/services to Japan and so they hire us to find businesses here that will import and distribute their product/services.

Yesterday, Ted had me look over some of the more active clients' profiles. There is a company that manufactures and sells auto maintenance machinery (like the heavy equipment you would see at a NTB or gas station; machines to balance tires, etc.). They, apparently, already have business with a company here, but they have recently not been happy with their service, so they are asking us to find some new contacts for them. It's also apparently very confidential, so I am of course posting it all over the internet. hehe.

Another brand new client is Bekemeier's, a company from Branson, Missouri that makes fruit-flavored butter spreads. They sell their stuff all over the country, I guess, and now are looking to go international. Most of the stuff I did yesterday was for Bekemeier's, actually. I researched in a couple Japan Trade Directories to try to find some potential distributors of their products here in Japan. They also sent some samples and they look delicious, but I'm not allowed to try them. :-(

So that's most of what we do. Sometimes, I guess, we also get asked about tourism in Missouri by some of our Japanese contacts, but that's not too often. Ted said most of what I'll be doing these 2 months is "market research," meaning finding out what people are interested in, etc.

There are also Trade fairs/expos fairly often that we go to. For example, there is one starting tomorrow that we will go to that is specifically for environmental products and services. A lot of the vendors there deal with landscaping and stuff like that, and we have a client in Missouri who does a lot of landscape architecture, so we are going to do some market research for them at the fair. woohoo!

Well, that was probably way more information than you needed about my job, but there you go. Now Ted wants me to translate some application form for him. さよなら！sayonara!