Darshan Pawaskar

Just came back from Japan. I was there for 2-3 weeks on Business trip. Visited 15-20 customers for our IT and India Market Entry business. There is more business for Japanese companies in India than other way around. Except for IT where we are dominant. Japan is big in manufacturing technology and Infrastructure. Until now they were betting on China, Taiwan, Philippines, Indonesia and recently Vietnam. But now because of India's emerging market potential and its proven manufacturing hub capabilities and geographical locations for Africa and Middle East, it's attracting a lot of Japanese manufacturing companies. The Big ones have the capital and means to enter into new markets. But the SMEs are still struggling despite of ODA funding and assistance from JAICA and JETRO. We plan to bridge the GAP providing highly diversified services from Business consulting, Operations, Sales, Technology Partnerships, Factory setups, Merger/Acquisition Facilitation for Factory/Exhibition visits and working with the Bureaucracy and Government. The potential is huge here for Japanese bilinguals, Interpreters, Translators.

The main differentiating factor is the kanji symbols, which applies to chinese as well. Getting used to the concept of having a symbol rather than alphabets in a language is one of the barriers. Apart from that there are two other scripts hiragana and katakana(foreign words). Once that is overcome or you get used to that concept, learning path becomes easy. Once you start loving the concept of kanji, you can see those symbols everywhere like decoding a puzzle and can understand meanings without even knowing the pronunciation. For Indians, the grammar, sentence pattern being closer to Hindi, Marathi helps a lot.