Mark & Mary Devlin - Crisscross K.K

Essence of Diversity in the Song, “Imagine”

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I. Arrival in Japan during Bubble Economy, First Edition of “Tokyo Classified”

―You are a husband and wife team, and you have a magazine with a lot of nationalities working under you, just like a mini-United Nations. Thank you for taking the time to meet with us. We are trying to help the Japanese public to be more and more aware of what Diversity and Inclusion really mean, and how to work in a more global, international community. This is one of the reasons why we have been on this quest to find the essence from people like you, who are working already in such an environment.
First of all, could you please give us how you got started as K.K. Crisscross, including the history of the founding and development, overview of the operations and the scale, as well as the make up of your workforce. Personally I would like to know why you chose the name, Crisscross, which is so unusual. Also why you selected Japan?

Mark: Well, that is the first thing, of course. We both studied engineering in Scotland.

Mary: We met on our first day at university. Mark was 16 years old, and I was 17 years old. So we were very young.

―Oh! Was this love at first sight?

Mary: No, we actually didn�ft like each other. It took a few months.

Mark: Yes, it took a few months, a few years, a few decades.

Mary: Mark and I have strong opinions, so of course, we argued a lot when we first met.

Mark: So we went to the university together, and at the end we had to sign up for careers. Mary had a very good job with Anderson Consulting and went to London. I really did not know what I wanted to do, so I thought I would take a leap and come to Japan for a year. Then, I could go back to London and say, “Oh, I�fve been to Japan�f, and you know, that would have been advantageous as a skill.”

Mary: In those days that was very cool. Japan was at the top of the world.

―What age were you, 20?

Mary: 22, maybe.

Mark: Japan was in the bubble. It was very attractive! In the UK media it was very exciting. It was always about Japan ― Japan was taking over. China has the same type of media attention now. So I saved to come over. I worked as an English teacher, editor, and at a few other jobs. After a year, Mary came over to join me. She gave up her job.

Mary: I came first of all for a long vacation to see if I would like Japan, but as soon as I arrived here, I knew that I was going to really like it. On the first day, I felt, “Wow! This was great.” I went back to London, and after a month, I put in my notice. After a few months, I came over to join Mark. Luckily I was actually hired by the same company in Tokyo but on a project basis with Anderson Consulting. They were doing a big project for UBS Bank. I was working on that project, and UBS asked Anderson Consulting if I could join UBS.
So I went to UBS for a couple of years. By that time, Mark was working for Jardine Fleming Securities. So we were both in the finance industry. It was just after the bubble, so things were getting tougher. Then, I thought I was leaving UBS to join another big finance company, and in the end, it fell through. I had actually signed a contract, and after many months of keeping me hanging on, they said, “I�fm sorry we are not employing you.” I thought my career was finished (finger points down). I actually found myself unemployed.

Mark: It�fs definitely hard to be unemployed in Japan. It�fs expensive, of course, and far away from support. I was still working at Jardine Fleming. One day I met a person in a bar. He said that he was starting a new magazine called “Tokyo Classified.” I thought it was an interesting project, so I volunteered for Mary to work for him.

Mary: He was working in the finance company in a very senior position. He had a good idea to start a classified ad magazine so that foreigners could contact each other. We thought that was a great idea. He was not going to work in the new business, but he wanted to put some investment and find someone who would set the business up and actually run it for him. So Mark volunteered me.

Mark: But it so happened that we all met a few weeks later and we started to decide that it was a good idea to do the project together. In fact, he chose the name, Crisscross. He did not put any deep thought, but he went to Hong Kong and just bought a company named Crisscross by looking down a list. There was no meaning to the name. However, the problem for us at that time was there was a group, a rap song by two young teen-aged rappers, and the band was called Crisscross and the song was called, “Crisscross that will make you want to jump!”

Mary: When our partner came back from Hong Kong and told us he bought a company, Crisscross, we said, “Oh, no! Because we could only think about the song; every time we mention the company name, people are going to say, “Jump, jump.”

Mark: We did not like it so much, and we did not use the name for years.

Mark: In 1993 autumn we started working to plan the business, and by 1994 February we published our first edition of Tokyo Classified, which I could actually show. This is it!

―I remember when it came out. Wasn�ft it smaller?

Mary: No, it was always this size.

Mark: So this is the first issue. Simply 4 pages with color, red. The content was all classified ads. Basically it was for buying or selling any type of item. Announcements or finding a place to live, finding friends and partners, finding jobs, and so on. You can see that this was what we said. “Hello from Tokyo Classified. This magazine is for you. It�fs about time you had a poet to broadcast your message to the world. Want to sell, buy, meet, have a party, you can do it here.” Basically the idea was from the very beginning the magazine belonged to the people, and the people made the magazine. Just apart from this message here, they added their own content. Up until then, people like Mary and I had come to Japan, and at that time there was no Internet, no Satellite TV...

Mary: Even magazines were very expensive. They were very high priced. We were cut off from our home countries. International telephone calls were very expensive. So if I phoned home to my parents, I would talk for less than 5 minutes. It was 350 yen a minute or 400 yen a minute.

Mark: We were really isolated. We came with the idea that Japan was a bubble economy; it was wonderful, full of flashing lights, interesting culture, but when we went out here, the actual support system in the community was very weak. This magazine was basically to help people to survive at the beginning.

Mary: I think perhaps for expats, who were coming over, they had their companies looking after them and certain systems were in place. They could join the American Club, but for other people who were not at that level, then, it was quite difficult to get into contact with other people or to know what was going on. That was the aim of the Tokyo Classified at that time.

Mark: I think I would like to expand that a little bit. In the 90�fs there were high level expats and there were some travelers, who stayed to become English teachers. But what happened after the Bubble was that many new “middle class” foreigners came to Japan. People like Mary and I came. We found that we could live here and do things. The middle class group grew, and the others became smaller. The magazine�fs growth represents the growth of that community of people, who came in the early 90�fs and 80�fs. They had to survive and buy things themselves. They needed basic information but then, as time went on, they wanted to do more things, find out more about the city, about Japan, and find more entertainment. So that�fs why the magazine grew, compared with the Weekender, which stayed with the shrinking number of high-level expats.

―I know after the bubble burst a lot of the foreign subsidiaries were not sending very expensive expats, especially with children because of the expensive schooling at international schools and all the costs.

Mark: But at the same time, many people who came, were younger people like ourselves. They were attracted to Japan. After a few years they found it quite good. Some of them found Japanese girl friends, wives or businesses that kept them here. They were growing up and getting better jobs. They had children and were becoming more integrated into the society.

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