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Name card
The Japanese name card (meishi) is similar to its Western counterpart in being a small oblong card giving the owner's name, title, company, address and so on. However, in Japan it is not simply a reference but, rather, an essential part of the process of meeting strangers on all but very informal occasions. In Japan, the company or group to which a person belongs is more important than his qualities as an individual and a man's position in that company is extremely important to the dynamics of any kind of meeting; the meishi provides an instant status-reference and allows business introductions to proceed smoothly. On a more practical level, the meishi indicates the correct characters to be used when writing the person's name (due to the complexity of the Japanese language, this is not always apparent from sound alone).