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Talked dialogue [How a Japanese businessman negotiates with an Arab king] (Part 1)

Author, Businessman in Japan and the Middle East Akira Takatoriya x Brand Consultant Jun Fukuda

Takatoriya: “One of the first things I wanted to do was to show that even an ordinary businessman can go as far as this if he puts his mind to it. I was also asked by the publisher, Seikaisha, to write this book with the hope that Japanese people would see the bigger world and bigger things. I wanted to show them many examples of how interesting things can happen even to ordinary salarymen when they work like this. I tried to make it as mild as possible, but at times I gathered together interesting things.

Actually, I have had more intense experiences. When I was near the Gaza Strip, the border between Palestine and Israel, where tear gas and suppression shells were flying, it was still a single missile, but recently, when I saw the video, I felt that the missiles had become more intense with a series of missiles. I was there in 2014, after the Gaza invasion, when the situation was a bit tense, as if a third intifada was about to happen. (omitted).

Frankly, it’s a distant event in a distant country, and I don’t know why they are fighting in the first place. They have to start every TV program with an explanation of the Palestinian issue. That’s how little people know about it. Because it is like the Gaza War, which is happening 7,000 or 8,000 kilometers away, fighting over an area smaller than the size of Tokyo. To be honest, there are not many Japanese who are that interested. However, there are cases in which Japanese people who have come to know about the war out of righteous indignation react radically, and Japanese people on the Israeli side who are good friends with Israeli people support them. From a history major’s point of view, it’s just a matter of course that countries fall. I look at it from a bird’s eye view of where that country could not sustain itself. The nation of Israel, or rather the Jewish people, was once born in B.C., rose and fell.” When I said, “The Palestinian people should take a long time to get their country back, because it took hundreds or thousands of years to get it back after it was destroyed and became Ashkenazi (*2),” the Palestinians gave me a very bad look.

Edited by:
Junko Io

Junko Io

Composition: Mikiko Taguchi

Photographed by
Yukiko Koshima

Date: June 30, 2021

◆ Reference

How I am dealing with the Arab kings?” (Seikaisha) Akira Takatoriya