Of all the jobs I've held in Japan, by far the most challenging was the four years I spent during the baburu keizai (バブル経済, bubble economy) as a trend watcher for a market-research company.
This was around 1987, before the Internet era, when the only practical way to collect data in the public domain was to sift through newspapers, magazines, trade publications and government white papers.
I later learned that the work I was doing was called shudai naiyō bunseki (主題内容分析, thematic content analysis), which involved looking for words and phrases that frequently pop up in the mass media and trying to follow the direction by which consumers spent their discretionary income. Our team reported on this to foreign companies and other organizations eager to make inroads on the Japanese marketplace.