Only in Tokyo, Part 8: Samsung, LG, Lexmark...

Walking up and down the aisles of hi-tech superstores can be:

1 - trying; there's a real din! Console and gaming type music bleeps at you from all sides as do the shouts - no figure of speech this! - of welcome from shop assistants when they catch sight of you. And it's no skin off their nose if you're on the 7th floor and onto your 65th salesperson! Then there are the shouts of those offering cut-price products and all those demos running on all the sale machines, with sound on and turned up. Are you starting to get the picture?

2 - different! Japanese goods are everywhere and there are very few foreign makes. In particular, the Korean brands LG and Samsung aren't given any shelf space in the stores at all!


There are monitors on sale from neither one nor the other. Nor are there any Korean TVs. Here in Japan, the locals buy local and this is displayed as a selling point everywhere. Even more surprising still, no.1 for monitors is Mitsubishi (absent on the European market) and for TVs it's Sharp! Even Sony doesn't get anywhere near as much space as Sharp!


Moving on to the printer section, Brother seems on a par with Canon and Epson. Only HP has succeeded in making a small incursion, a very small one when you compare with the Japanese brands who have three times as many rows, which are twice or three times as long as the ones allocated to HP!


When it comes to peripherals however, Microsft has quite a big area but not Logitech. Though Logicool does. The same brand renamed!



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