This is a Japanese word meaning “hospitality” which has become suddenly famous as Miss Christel Takigawa, a prominent presenter of Japan, introduced in the IOC conference to host the 2020 Olympic and Paralinpic Games in Tokyo as an essence of Japanese heart. Although this word is naturally known among Japanese, actually this word is not used so often and sounds very fresh even for Japanese as a word expressing the society and culture of Japan and the Japanese heart. “Omotenashi” is utterly different from the manualized service of “smile is free of charge” of the famous fast food restraunt. “Omotenashi” is an autonomous act of sensing a feeling of a person and of trying to satisfy the person.
If “Omotenashi” is applied to the patent business which we routinely engage, it is to commonly understand an inventive technology and its background together with an inventor or an agent, to conceptualize the technology as a technological thought, to express the technology properly by using the patent language based on the rule of the Patent Law and others, to prepare application documents satisfactory for the client, and to acquire patent rights.
To that end, we understand the invention as a technological thought in connection with prior arts and intend to work hard to the best of our ability to be able to offer you the “Omotenashi” described above in a true sense even though it involves difficult works such as;
- speculation of position and value of the invention,
- consideration on differences of actual situation of each country, beside Japan, such as founding spirit, national strategy, social climate, and others, e.g., the respect for human rights of the United States (Manifest Destiny) and resourcing of people of China (human-wave tactics) (see Our Column “Ridge Road in Mist”,
- understanding of not only articles of laws and standards such as the Laws of Patent, Utility Models and others, but also of their fundamental ideas (see Our Column “Utility Model”), and
- expression of the technological thought by using a tool of language which is not always competent as a tool for expression and communication (see Our Column “In the beginning was the Word”).
