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

Let's just remind ourselves that the top activity foreign tourists want to do before coming to Japan is to try some particular type of food.

We heard a story a few years ago about just how autocratic and strict the management methods of Mr. Funai were, which in the beginning no doubt contributed significantly to his success.

What we do know is that out of roughly 1,183 travel agents who are members of the Japan Association of Travel Agents (JATA), only 105 (8.87%) are registered for Inbound business.

It was with some interest that we saw several articles and one investor presentation about one of Japan's largest bedrock IT companies, Fujitsu.

Despite the massive contracts and various preferences JTB receives every day, the company barely improved its sales and profit numbers overall in FY2015 and FY2016.

The Parliament passed legislation that will legalize home-sharing, otherwise known as "Minpaku". Initially the main beneficiary will be Airbnb, who now becomes the first U.S. sharing economy company to make it big in Japan.

How to carve out a stake converting Kyoto "slum area" houses into Airbnb stays. This is a great example of how you can help lift the fortunes of an entire neighborhood.

An interesting peek into one slice of Japan's travel industry future can be found from a pair of law suits presently going on in the USA between the ex-CEO of Zozi.com, TJ Sassani, and the company's largest shareholder, KLP Enterprises.

It's not the first time we've heard (or seen first hand) how negative the Japanese high school experience can be, although we'd be the first to acknowledge that many kids have great school experiences.

I was introduced to one entity in China and we were discussing the best places to run adventure tours. Mostly the conversation was about remote regions that have very few domestic let alone foreign tourists ...

Data from tradingeconomics.com shows that job ads are near their recent peak. Clearly demand outstrips supply and as a result, recruiters, who are also prolific job board listers, are doing a roaring trade.

Tink Labs, had just raised US$125m to implement an ambitious plan to put a free smart phone into every room of every participating hotel chain in all major tourist destinations in Europe, North America, and Asia.

When a tenant causes a minpaku house to burn down and it takes 2 other dwellings nearby with it, where does the responsibility lie? And what of the 3rd party houses?

APIs are indeed hard work to implement. The supplier offering an API needs to think deeply about their business and at which points in their existing systems they are willing to inject outside requests for action.

One of Japan's big 3 parcel delivery companies, Yamato, dropped a bombshell when a "inside source" revealed that they would gradually end their same-day deliveries for Amazon Prime customers.

In risk averse Japan, the thrill scale is a bit more docile than some other locations, but the most iconic and visually spectacular events are superb. The olden-day Japanese were particularly good at vivid colors, lighting, and shapes.