めいし

Today I had some business cards printed, and it took forever.

The place I went was very close to me and the only printing company I knew of in the area. Business cards are very common, and extremely important in Japan, so I had high hopes that they'd be able to help me. Unfortunately, this was no Kinkos, and when I went in with my digital file on USB drive, I was told they had no way of opening it. They had a big offset printer going, and all the carbon copies and light boxes to go with it, but they had to have a way to open a digital file!

So I went to school and printed a hard copy, this was good in a way, as it allowed me to see the couple different versions I had made. Some were ornate with clipart, others more traditional Japanese text only. I went back to the shop and asked which image was their favorite. Bad idea, as it involved a lot of delaying and discussion and back and forth, calling for a second opinion, and eventually I made the choice myself. The Japanese man did point out that one design was definately an American めいし, while another was Japanese めいし, and his comment did make me realize that as a foreigner, I would make a foreigners めいし.

After this little discussion, I was invited to sit for tea, during which another Japanese man came from upstairs, with a laptop computer and a version of Illustrator. Could've saved a step there. Unfortunately he was running Illustrator 9, so I ran home quickly to resave my file, then we both went upstairs to a dedicated business card printer. This is what I was looking for, quick and easy. Yet it wasn't, because this guy didn't know Illustrator. At all. So I ended up fiddling with the file myself, trying to use keyboard shortcuts and guessing which menu option I wanted before I had the file all set to print. And then it printed wrong. I knew immediately what the problem was, their printer did not like embedded raster files, but I had no way of explaining this. About 10-minutes later during which the guy fiddled with the settings and did the best he could to act like he knew what the problem was, he finally suggested that they do the cards via offset. I was ok with this, as they gave me the same price, but also meant he wanted me to create a file with proper registration and crop marks. No problem, but why can't he do it?

After a quick trip home again, fixing the file on a computer I could actually read text on, I went back with a two new files. One with the crop marks as requested, another with my raster image converted into vector so it would print on their dedicated めいし printer. After a false start with the crop mark file, where my helper could not figure out how to get it to print onto a page without being cut off, I asked him to try the other file upstairs. It worked, and I left with a stack of 2-sided cards to give out in my travels and to people I have already met. But still, this was no Kinkos and it felt like I was renting equipment to do the work myself! That's the way it works sometimes, and being from a graphic arts background, I'm a bit more informed than the average client. The cards are nice though, and the translation a friend did for the back will be very useful as an introduction with 'much-less-likely-to-speak-any-english' Japanese people I will meet in August.