When you walk into Ikea, you know that it’s not an American company. Those meatballs, for one; the blue-and-yellow logo, minimalist-gone-folk designs, the importance it places on nature, and those infinitely punnable product names . It's a Swedish brand proud of its roots, and expects its global consumers to adapt to its way of doing things. Don’t like fish in a tube ? Too bad — Ikea hopes you’ll try it one day and change your mind. At Uniqlo, its Japanese heritage goes beyond retail staff wearing yukata and providing Japanese-style gift wrapping over the holidays. The business is run on the idea of “omotenashi” — a very Japanese-specific brand of hospitality and customer service. If you’ve ever traveled to Japan, you’ll immediately know what it means. It’s gestures as simple as being handed your credit card with two hands, and courtesy as pronounced as anticipating your needs before they occur to you. “There are days-long seminars just on that concept alone,” says Jay. Even though Uniqlo is planning for its overseas stores to outnumber its Japanese ones within the next year (currently there are around 840 shops in Tokyo alone and 650 abroad), there’s an expectation that all employees display omotenashi, which is taught to every single worker in a weeks-long training program . Jay also believes that the idea of efficiency is a very Japanese concept. “In Japan, they value longevity and simplicity. You get there by innovating at every level within the company. Things get better and better, but also cheaper and cheaper.” Uniqlo boasts that it’s able to do that by keeping operations at a low cost (for example, the company leases all of its retail spaces to stay flexible and has no qualms about shutting down underperforming stores), it places large-lot orders to keep prices down on luxury natural fibers (hence $80 cashmere ), and it has a streamlined design-to-manufacturing-to-retail process that minimizes waste. Rumor has it that Uniqlo is so good at predicting exactly how many units it’ll sell that it never has to resort to major discounts to get rid of overstock. Sales usually top off at 30%. Japanese culture is also largely non-symbolic, meaning that there’s a tendency to remove the romance, nuance, and associated culture from items (which has made Japanese dressers some of the most prolific offenders of cultural appropriation , but also some of the most creative). Jay recalls an exercise he did at Uniqlo in 1998, when he placed a pair of khakis on the table and asked his Japanese team what they saw. “I said, I saw in these khakis Bobby and John Kennedy playing a high-end sport on the beach with cocker spaniels running in the water. I saw khakis worn with a white T-shirt. My team just saw a pair of khakis. Oftentimes, Japanese have no tradition of Western clothing and culture, so they totally objectify things.”