Link Building for a brand new site - what's good recently?

Hi,
I have been away from SEO for a year or 2 but I'm making a new site now and wondering what to do. I did do SEO so I know basic on-site stuff, so basically I need to know what is needed for link building now.

When I was doing SEO before = 3-4 years ago, I have had a lot of success by blog commenting, links on profile pages, forum posting, and I used the same keyword again and again as an anchor text. It worked.

However, now, it seems Google is much smarter and a lot of blog comments are no-follows and the owners seem to erase a comment more often if the commenter's name is a "keyword", plus it doesn't seem to work much now. Profile pages don't seem to work anymore either and the same is true for forum posting, and it seems too many same anchor text links can hurt.

For my former sites I also made a blog network and it worked fine, but I hear G is starting to detect it more and besides it is (was anyway) really time consuming and I don't have that time now and outsourcing this is kind of scary.

Another thing is my new site is in English, and all my business before was done in Japanese so all the sites was made in Japanese. Therefore I'm hesitant to put links on them because it must look unnatural to Google to have a lot of links coming from foreign sites especially in the beginning.

Now starting up a site, I'm wondering what I should do.
BTW, this is a site for an actual physical business as well, so I can't do very aggressive things (more chance to hurt your business than web-only businesses). Also I'm doing this for someone so especially I don't want to do something which could end up in being penalized.

What I am thinking about doing:

*Some reciprocal links on the same business sites
*business directories
*Search engines
*some blogs as many as I can handle, and maybe make a mini network?
*Social bookmarks

This is as many as I can think of now as something which wouldn't hurt. But what else I can/should do? How much should I use the same anchor text link? Should I still do some blog commenting (even without keyword anchor) and profile pages? I'd also like to know what would be the priority in terms of effectiveness and quick results.

I am especially cautious because it is a new site and I don't want it to look unnatural.

Any advice is appreciated.
Thanks in advance.