Brett, Kaoru and I had breakfast together in the usual café at the station.  Kaoru left to go to work, and Brett and I caught up with Mikiko, Mark and Jack, to discuss our strategy.  We (all except Jack) caught a taxi to Kachidoke to see how things have been going.  I had partially been monitoring their usage through Logmein logs, so was quite optimistic.  Unfortunately this wasn’t to be the case.  Out of 24 “events”, they had used the system 11 times.  A bit disappointing, but all part of the way they don’t run leagues, and aren’t ready to change, despite acknowledging that the way they do things isn’t profitable.  A very cultural lesson for me – they want things to change, but won’t do anything to make the change happen.  When you want to help somebody, but they don’t want to do what needs to be done, it is very frustrating.

Our next destination was Nishifunabashi.  We had already received an email from them (which Mikiko had translated) saying the players like the animations and their team names, the Player Login screen is useful, etc.  All the stuff we know.  So again we went in to the meeting very positive.

We were told about a couple of issues that had come up, and that they hadn’t used the system since March 18.  When I checked the Dashboard, I could see NO saved games on it since January 25^th (when I was last there, most likely).  I looked at the event log and could confirm the tablet had not even been turned on since January 25^th.  So now we were aware that not only are they not using it, but they are flatly lying to us.  We were very disappointed by this, and told them what I had found.  After their initial reaction of saying “the computer is wrong”, they started to realise that we can audit what they are doing, and blamed it on not being told the importance of using the system.  We were also told that Konami will not be spending any money (so effectively, they won’t be buying it).

Back at the hotel, we got changed.  Then Brett, Mark, Ange and I went to dinner (Mikiko and Jack had another meeting to attend).  Brett and I finished the night with a few drinks at the “Top of Shinagawa” – the bar on the top floor of the Shinagawa Prince, to get our thoughts together and do some strategizing (although a few Long Island Iced Tea’s later, our strategies may have been a bit flawed!