Beijing is now giving 100% of its energy with the whole nation to a success of the Olympics. I’d like to give out my impressions from my business stay in Beijing for 10 days from September 27th.
The manners of the people in Beijing are a lot better compared to only two or three years ago when the crowd of demonstrators threw eggs and tomatoes to the Japanese consular office as a protest against diplomatic Japan’s policies. As well as their need for Japanese people to come to the Olympics, I felt their passion to show how much China has been modernized and democratized to all over the world, and to be recognized.
The main streets in the city are like walking in Disney Land. The cleaners walked in every 30 minutes sweeping around. Someone said to me that Beijing would be full of trashes if those cleaners had not done their job. However, habits like littering, spitting and leaking in the streets tend to vanish if people get used to be surrounded by such a clean beautiful trashless environment.
This major breakthrough in Beijing just reminds me of Japan, which had the breakthroughs in the Tokyo Olympics and World Expo. Having experienced those Japan’s major breakthroughs, I even feel a sense of nostalgia for Beijing today. The restaurants and lounges in the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Beijing have the same or even better sparkle, manners and cuisine as the Grand Hyatt in Roppongi Hills, Tokyo. In other words, they are the world’s best.
The hotels of this quality are being constructed one after another in Beijing, which is producing a construction rush. I see they are going full-out to improve the quality of their service, because those hotels are run by private companies now and they know that the bad reputations spread at once among the businessmen all over the world if they cannot provide sufficient service or cuisine, and they drop out of the competition among the hotels.
It is not exaggerating to say that hotels in Beijing have better qualities than those in New York, the restaurants in the hotels are more delicious than any of those in New York. As New York is not constructing new hotels because of its lack of left space, the competition among the hotels have not been severe enough and the quality of their service is being degraded by the situation that the rooms can easily become full without any efforts. The dynamism of the New York City itself is also becoming out date. In the U.S. where tip system is taken for granted, the salary of the workers in service industries is usually provided from tip mostly. You have to pay 20% of the whole expense as tip at the restaurants in New York City.
This, to be honest, is from nothing but the delinquency and greed of the managers, who don’t want to pay salary to their employees. Now that the era of Asia is said to be coming, we must not lose this culture of ours that we can enjoy the best smile and service without tipping.
At the Beijing airport, four buttons are installed in front of the immigrant officers who check the passports of travelers. By pressing one of the buttons, the foreigners can evaluate the behavior of the officers from “very satisfied”, “satisfied”, “uncomfortable”, and “very uncomfortable”. This is a device to develop officers who used to have utter lack of smile into officers full of sense of service.
This is a so useful system that I wish there were those buttons at counters of every administrative office and bank in Japan too, especially ones in the Social Insurance Agency.
