Start of the race finale. My boy P1 is number 14.

I’ve been in Japan with the family for the past couple weeks. We come here to visit family and friends, talk bikes, and help the kids practice their Japanese. Most of our time is spent around Hiroshima, Osaka and Kyoto and then during each trip we do some traveling to other regions. This is my fourth visit of three to four weeks each so I’ve now seen quite a bit of Japan. I enjoy my time here but don’t claim to understand much at all of what’s going on around me. It’s not just the language barrier; Japanese society is just enormously different from anything else I’m familiar with. It’s also quite private and discrete making it even harder to learn about why people do things the ways they do and why the country is put together the way it is.
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I find all sorts of things in my Workcycles mailbox. Most is just work, a bunch is just spam to be marked and deleted and then there are mails like this one. It’s not really spam like the Nigerian money scams, the fake UPS delivery messages or the sex pill ads since somewhere I’m probably on a list of people of companies who do international business. But clearly it’s aimed for a different public, a different kind of business, a different kind of person; one who apparently knows quite well what it’s like at their “Asian supplier” and would prefer, thank you very much, to not have to experience it “again”.

Type “inspection partner” into Google and their site comes up on top: https://www.inspectionpartner.nl/ So they’re apparently real. It’s a Dutch firm and they do both product inspections and social audits. I suppose then they offer valuable services, but the means of communication leaves something to be desired. Or is it supposed to be confrontational? Or is it just a bad match of image and text?

It caught my attention in any case. Any thoughts from the audience?