
Hospitality and Customer Service in Japan
Hi everyone, my name is Li and I am a teacher at EC, Asty campus.
I love to play videogames, watch anime and read manga
. As a foreigner, one of the nicest things we get to experience is the great Japanese hospitality and the wonderful customer service in everyday life
. Every shop owner has always greeted me with a smile and a cry of irasshaimase J (sometimes a deafening cry at that :P)). At times the lack of communicative understanding does pose some problems, but with a lot of hand gestures and broken JANGLISH (half Japanese half English), we somehow get the situation sorted out.
Every time I have been to a restaurant
, the owners and staff have treated me very well. Most of the time I can simply point to a picture on the menu and the lines of communication are loud and clear J. I remember this one time I went to an Izakaya restaurant where they had no pictures and ordering food was extremely difficult. The waitress tried her best to explain it to me via various hand gestures and body language (I think at one point she was telling me that she likes to hula dance :P), but as hard as she tried I just couldn’t understand her well. Sound like a dilemma? Well maybe it could have been but fortunately the waitress and owner were nice enough to give me a couple of free samples J
. Hooray for me J. They brought me about seven or eight different food items that I could sample. Of course the samples were only small bite size pieces; but nonetheless, I was able to find some very tasty food items, so I ordered three of those dishes and one of those dishes I ordered twice (I now love Yakitori
J). I guess this is why Japanese hospitality and service is revered as being amongst the best in the world.