Japan's 'cheapskate' marketing of itself as a tourism destination, and its lack of realism about where its overseas visitors are actually coming from, constitute Terrie's main focus this week. He argues that Japanese tour operators are now "paying the price for this timidity and lack of vision." Read Terrie's Take Now

A reader who is a foreign mom married to a Japanese national posed an interesting question to me recently. She has an 18-year old who is finishing off high school and she wonders whether to send her daughter to a university in the US, or let her stay here in Japan. Her daughter is bilingual and until now has been going to a Japanese high school.

This week Terrie considers the commercial consequence of Goodwill Group's failure to renew operating licenses for their nursing homes business as well as need-to-know summaries of Japan-related news and commercial information. Read Terrie's Take Now

This week we wrap up the Japanese-learning experiment by our US entrepreneur recently arrived in Japan, TP. Clearly his is not the only program that works in learning the language, but for those of us who are naturally language challenged and who didn't do a year of high-school here as a teenager, it's a course that can work. TP wraps up by making some observations about what it really takes to get the job done, and about mistakes made and lessons learned.