2012 Japan Trip

March 1, 2012March 17, 2024

I went to Japan for a month-long trip in February 2012 for travel and business purposes. So this blog is about the journey.

Business

Meeting with Various IT Companies

I met with many IT companies and they want to cooperate with my company but almost all of them concluded they can work together if I will be in Japan not in Istanbul.

Meeting with H.I.S. Headquarter IT Managers

H.I.S. is one of the top travel agent in Japan. They have 200+ offices in Japan and 100+ offices around the world.

I developed a custom e-commerce site for the H.I.S. Turkey office and I wanted to have an opportunity to work with the H.I.S. Japan headquarter directly. I met with two IT managers and the topic was increasing the speed of their leading e-commerce site for Japan market, his-j.com

I offered to speed up load time by about 30% by refactoring the e-commerce application. Managers asked me what will happen if the website speed will increase. I answered that both conversion rate(increasing sales) and organic traffic from search engines will increase. But they replied that increasing sales is not their work, and for increasing traffic, they pay an SEO consultancy company 1.000.000 yen/month so it is also not their duty.

Moreover, they are still interested in working together but I wanted to give them the SaaS service which will automatically optimize the front-end code for future changes from their developers but they did not accept this model as they wanted to host the app themselves.

fc2 clone project

I had a friend who want to create a project which is a clone of the fc2 site (WordPress.com-like blogging platform website). But it turned out that the fc2 site is famous not only for blogs but also porn content. I refused to work on such a project.

Leisure

Friends, Food and More

I enjoyed meeting with friends living in Japan and business partners.

I enjoyed Japanese food, especially at good restaurants which I could not go to when I was a university student because of the limited student budget.

I saw a Japanese belly dancer for the first time while enjoying our dinner at a Turkish restaurant with Vaner Alper, the head of Bumed Japan (Bogazici University Alumni Organization) and my ex-Japanese girlfriend.