THE NEW BREED-How Aspiring Foreign Entrepreneurs Cope in Japan-Chris Mathison

hidden”     The cutting edge in small business can often be found in the high-tech, computer-oriented “garage” operations like those of California’s Silicon Valley. In the unlikely location of Tokyo’s Ginza is one such garage: an “executive hole in the wall” that serves as home for fledgling ZA Communications, where Chris Mathison and his partner Mark Dennin display the fruits of three years’ hard work-a multilingual typing tutor and a word processing package.
    “Mark and I were freelance teachers and copywriters who, three years ago, fell in love with computers,” Mathison says. “All our friends were getting involved with American imports- IBM, Apple- but oh no, not us! We got into Japanese ones, and went straight for that kanji ROM.
    “We looked around and saw that Japanese businesses were having a tough time coping with English business correspondence; so we came up with ABC, a bilingual word processing enhancement for creating routine business letters, faxes and telexes. We found 300-400 standard letters that were regularly used, generalized them, and created models that can be easily put together and edited; so what might have taken a secretary five hours can be done in 20 minutes. It’s designed so that a gaijin (foreigner) boss and a Japanese secretary can parallel their work.
    “Then we saw that most secretaries have extremely varied competency in English typing skills—and even worse in kana (the Japanese phonetic syllabaries). So a secretary might be whizzing away in English, but when she gets to kana it’s hunt and peck time. We thought, why not map these keyboards?
    “So we came up with TYPE*RlTE, a multilingual typing tutor, which we’re site licensing directly to universities and business schools. We spent 18 hours a day for three years putting these things together, supporting ourselves by teaching computer applications.
    “The biggest problem we had,” Mathison says, “is credibility. The Japanese have always imported software—except for Japanese word processors—the one thing they produce domestically. So here are a couple of foreigners who can barely speak Japanese, with this tiny little company, saying, ’Hey, we think we can make a contribution to this, too.’”