Hello,
Welcome and thank you for visiting the website. Let me start off with some personal background: of my 31-year career at DSM, nearly 13 years were spent in Japan. It was certainly not in the planning when I joined DSM as a fresh graduate in 1985. I happened to be assigned to the research of a product / business which was expanding into Japan. After all, we were in the heydays of the Japanese bubble economy.
I came with curiosity and interest but knew very little about the country. I did not expect that I was entering a country where I would feel more at home than I do in my own country, the Netherlands. Of course, there were several things to get used to and adjustments were necessary, but I found out soon after I arrived that in many ways the Japanese culture, norms and values matched me very well.