Author: Lucy Craft, Reporter

All Japanese train stations play a little tune to warn passengers when the doors are about to close. But out of the hundreds of commuter stations in Tokyo, only Takadanobaba, a busy neighborhood favored by university students in western Tokyo, has the privilege of playing the theme song from "Astro Boy," that cartoon boy-robot hero of the 1960s. Takadanobaba is home for Tezuka Productions, founded by the late and lionized father of animation, Osamu Tezuka. The beret-wearing Tezuka created Astro Boy and in the process inspired a generation of roboticists and helped cement Japan's abiding love affair with robots. As I write this blog, at my son's desk, I am distracted by his collection of manga comics, especially a pink and purple paperback - about a cute robotic cat named Doraemon.

Step into Fast Retailing’s corporate headquarters, just a stone’s throw from the famed Budokan sumo arena in central Tokyo, and it becomes immediately apparent why -- true to their name -- the company is helping pioneer Japan’s shift to saner working hours.

The staff is young, with a surfeit of 20- and 30-somethings -- Japan’s Me generation. The mildly counter-culture feel to the office is heightened by its Casual Friday dress code, observed every day of the week. (Since the company makes and sells cheap chic, this is one of the few places in Japan where you can’t get busted for showing up in cargo pants and a t-shirt.) Many of these employees are refugees from other companies, giving Fast Retailing an even more “cosmopolitan” hue than the standard white-shoe, Japanese lifetime employment company.

Japan comes up small beer when it comes to size -- in square mileage, it’s no larger than the state of California – and foreign coverage of this country is overwhelmingly concentrated in Tokyo. But even so, a single city does not a country make. There is no shortage of business stories playing out across the Japanese archipelago, which is why it was thrilling to hop a plane for the island of Shikoku, the “Tibet of Japan,” perhaps the last corner of Japan that is untamed and so draws intrepid young Japanese hankering after the slow life. Japan’s curmudgeonly and renowned critic, American intellectual Alex Kerr, chose the rustic charms of central Shikoku for his retreat, calling it the last bastion of Japanese tradition and unspoiled nature.

Our brief on this trip, of course, was (sadly) not to lose an axle and all sense of time on a Shinto shrine-studded mountain road, but spend two days in the quiet city of Tokushima, home for the remarkable company profiled in our story, Nichia.