Fashionable talk

Japanese companies are copycats,' says Yumi Asahara, managing director at Technimetrics in New York. 'If one is doing something then more will follow.' Asahara's seen it all before. She's been in Japanese investor relations for some nine years now and in that time has seen a radical change in how the function is perceived in Japan. For the first six years she says it was as good as dormant. No-one was interested. Three years ago, as foreign investors moved into Japan in force, executives started