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Customer service goes hand in hand with a smile, and none take this more seriously than the Japanese. But how serious are they really about smiling? Apparently, very serious:
In a positively Orwellian move, 15 Tokyo railway stations will be equipped with smile detectors to make sure that their staff is smiling enough. Frowns will literally be frowned upon. High tech meets mood control.
Many of the major websites have localized versions of their pages for different countries. Most of the time it’s just a plain translation of their “regular” website (for example Apple Japan, Yahoo Japan and MSN Japan, to name just a few), but sometimes localization is taken a BIG step further.
There is no denying that there are some significant cultural differences between East and West. Since we here at Pingdom deal a lot with web hosting companies and are generally interested in the hosting industry, we have on occasion stumbled upon some Asian hosting websites which to our Western eyes have a very different look [...]
