Tsukiji Fish Market, AMEX, Edo-Tokyo Museum

The early bird gets the.....well fish in this case. According to all the literature I have read prior to leaving for Japan, the Tsukiji Fish Market is one of the tourist must sees while in Japan. However, there is a catch. The fish market is an open auction for fish from all around the world. The tourist attraction is largely based around the "silent" auctions between vendors and local restaurant chefs, among others.

Unfortunately, upon our arrival we discovered that the fish market was closed to tourists due to the recent events of the earthquake. Although I'm unaware of the connection between the two, many things in Japan have been limited out of respect.

Not all was lost. In fact, I would sit down to have the best sushi in my entire life as a sushi breakfast is associated with the fish market experience. Yummy.

Moving on to our final business meeting, we rode the metro to the offices of American Express in Japan. We were given an excellent presentation on the Japanese consumer credit market and some of the new technology being used to drive spend. One of the problems faced by AMEX and others is determining their NPS (Net Promoter Score). NPS is a measure of how likely cardholders would be to promote AMEX products to their friends, family, co-workers. The issue is that on a 1-10 scale, Japanese, reflective of the cultural expectation of quality, often rank experiences a 5 or 6 making it very difficult to draw any information about what is working well or not. My suggestion was to change the scale to emoticons to relate more to feeling than analysis but something tells me it might not be a winner.

After the AMEX meet we headed for the Edo-Tokyo museum which is right next to a Sumo arena. We caught a few glimpses of some Sumo wrestlers but tickets were unavailable. The museum was very nice and informative about Japanese history. With exhibits grand and small I was really impressed with the level of detail and care put into everything. Pictures say a thousand words so I will let them tell pick up the story from here..