If Muhammad Azlan Bin Amran was worried about the Asian financial crisis, he did not show it. Trained in Japan, the thirty-two-year-old engineer worked for Japanese electronics giant Canon, Inc., in a factory near Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital. Showing off a brand-new production line for new-format cameras that he helped design, Azlan bragged, "We picked up this production line from Japan because we wanted to learn how to do it. It's the first model of advanced photo system (APS) cameras, and it's just a copy. Compared to our parent factory in Oita (Japan), we're just a coffee shop. Oita is like a hotel. But we're the best coffee shop in the world, and our customers like coming to coffee shops."