The Circle Of Trust - Aug. 2001

Last spring I attended the Asia Pacific Orchid Conference in Nagoya, Japan. I always love to travel to Japan because I know it will be both clean and safe. Those are virtues not available in may places in the world. Although their economy has suffered recession and deflation for the last 10 years, it is still a very expensive place to travel. Through a bilateral treaty, the airfares are artificially high to help protect the Japanese carriers. It does not hurt the profits of foreign carriers, who are required to overcharge all of their passengers going to and coming from Japan.

One of my favorite indulgences in Japan is sushi. This trip was the first time I was brave enough to try one of the automated sushi places. This particular place was located in a subway tunnel, along with several hundred other retail shops and restaurants.

There is a two-level, T-shaped conveyor belt that carries product from the kitchen and chef to waiting customers. Cups for tea and soy sauce are on the lower belt. The sushi, fried eel, etc., ride on the upper belt just a little above eye level and, presumably, sneeze level. I was looking for the wasabi (very hot horse-radish) and saw a glass container of green powder that looked like the dehydrated wasabi powder I have purchased in the United States. Just before I put the powder into my soy sauce, the nice man to my left stopped me and pointed at the empty teacups passing in front of me, indicating that I should put my wasabi in one of those instead. He now has a good story to tell family and friends because I learned that in Japan, unlike the United States, the sushi chefs put the correct amount of wasabi inside the sushi. We Americans demand control of the amount of hot stuff we get.

At this little sushi restaurant, the consumer receives a wide variety of choices from a continuously moving flow of small plates. You take only and exactly what you want; the rest goes on by for someone else to select or not, as they desire. The chef can gauge the demand for the various offerings in real time. Anything not selected goes past his eye every four minutes. He can also just look up and see what is left on the whole belt. Each individual portion is quite small, so there is no food waste like a traditional restaurant.

I also shopped at the Mitsucoshi department store while I was in Japan. What a study in contrast: this store was nine floors of everything you could ever need. The store is crowded even when there are no customers because you are always within sight of at least 40 employees. But at the automated sushi restaurant, there was only one waitress for 40 seats. Her job was to bring you a beer or soda if you called for it. She also took away the used plates when you left the restaurant. The most important of her jobs was to count the color-coded plates-five different colors for the five price points. You get your bill from her and take it up to a register to pay. If you sit close to the register, the cashier counts the plates.

With all the scanning power and data collection modern retailers have, they do not come anywhere near reacting to customer demand like this little sushi restaurant does. With our highly mechanized greenhouses, we cannot come close to serving our customers as efficiently, with as little wasted product and human effort, as this little subway tunnel restaurant.
There is a circle of trust in the sushi restaurant. The restaurant has to trust their fish supplier and I have to trust the restaurant that the fish is fresh. The fish is served raw. If the bacteria count exceeds a level that my body can process, very bad things happen. Very fresh fish is tricky, because it does not stay fresh for long. If it is mishandled anywhere in the distribution chain, the length of time the product stays fresh drops drastically.

Does this remind you of any other perishable product? Maybe the difference is that when the fish is not fresh people get sick. When the flowers are not fresh, people only get cheated.

I do not think it is that different. I think people get sick of being cheated.