Terrie's Take -- A weekly roundup of news & information from Terrie Lloyd.

Evolable Asia is the leader in the sector of domestic and Japanese outbound air ticketing - a market that is worth about JPY1.5trn annually, selling about 2.6% of all domestic flights.

(1) A foreigner loitering in a car parked in a Japanese neighborhood would be quickly spied by a local or the police. (2) The Japanese are aware of the need to preserve some basic engineering capabilities in-country.

The government announced that it would be allocating JPY11.2bn in funds, five times the 2012 number, to help Hokkaido tourism recover from the September earthquake.

Last week the audio/car electronics manufacturer, Pioneer, announced that it was selling a large private placement to Baring Private Equity in Hong Kong. The placement will be for JPY60bn, and appears to give Baring control of the struggling firm.

A company to catch our attention this last week was Huber, a matchmaker of mostly Japanese students acting as low-cost uncertified guides to foreigners who feel intimidated by the language barrier here.

Uber Japan pulled off a bit of a coup, by announcing completely unexpectedly that it was teaming up with Fuji Taxi of Nagoya and launching the Uber taxi app with Fuji.

Not challenging the big foreign firms who control the inbound market causes lost revenue not getting reinvested locally, and this hurts the development of new products and services.

Like many Japanese fast-rising internet companies before them, the Mercari senior management have a "bug up their butts" about taking on the e-commerce sector in the USA. Why this market is so important to them at this early stage, versus Asia, is not exactly clear.

Instead of the local players making good in Japan, it has taken a Taiwanese firm to show the locals how to revitalize the market. And the way they are doing it is really interesting.

Also foreigners do their bit to make lives of disadvantaged children better. Recently we interviewed Michael Clemons, the founder of the NPO named YouMeWe NPO and a social impact fund called eMPOWER.

While my fellow Japanese passengers knew to be patient and endure, the foreign tourists could only wait about 30 minutes before they started fidgeting and needing more information.

After some embarrassing exposes in the press, the government has cracked down on some of the worst offending employers - the ones withholding passports and salaries, seeking sexual favors and unpaid overtime, etc.

Unfortunately for Kochi, although they got the boats and the visitors, in reality it hasn't resulted in the economic boom that they expected. The tourists are visiting the shops. But once in those shops, they are looking but not buying.

Well, after nearly 40 years after her creation, the cat who is really a be-whiskered pre-teen British girl named Kitty White (yes, really, according to Sanrio), has been responsible for most of Sanrio's JPY60bn in sales last year.

The japantravel.com website and Japan Travel KK company were both started in December, 2013, but the idea and test version of the site came in mid-2011, shortly after the devastating 3/11 Tohoku earthquake.