It wasn't until he turned 18 that Daisuke Kuse saw businessmen dressed in dapper suits up close and personal. Until then, Kuse — having spent all of his childhood surrounded by working-class families and friends in a small town in Kyoto Prefecture — had barely the foggiest idea of who they were.
"I only had this stereotypical image I picked up from watching TV shows where they were portrayed as apologizing profusely to their clients or wiping sweat off their foreheads with handkerchiefs or something," Kuse, now 25, said.
"To me, they were borderline fictional."