Colonel Sanders, Elvis, Mickey Mouse, and Jack Daniels have been enthusiastically embraced by Japanese consumers in recent decades. But rather than simply imitate or borrow from the West, the Japanese reinterpret and transform Western products and practices to suit their culture. This entertaining and enlightening book shows how in the process of domesticating foreign goods and customs, the Japanese have created a culture in which once-exotic practices (such as ballroom dancing) have become familiar, and once- familiar practices (such as public bathing) have become exotic. Written by scholars from anthropology, sociology, and the humanities, the book ranges from analyses of Tokyo Disneyland and the Japanese passion for the Argentinean tango to discussions of Japanese haute couture and the search for an authentic nouvelle cuisine japonaise. These topics are approached from a variety of perspectives, with explorations of the interrelations of culture, ideology, and national identity and analyses of the roles that gender, class, generational, and regional differences play in the patterning of Japanese consumption. The result is a fascinating look at a dynamic society that is at once like and unlike our own.
After two decades of reinvention, Japanese companies are re-emerging as major players in the new digital economy. They have responded to the rise of China and new global competition by moving upstream into critical deep-tech inputs and advanced materials and components. This new "aggregate niche strategy" has made Japan the technology anchor for many global supply chains. Although the end products do not carry a "Japan Inside" label, Japan plays a pivotal role in our everyday lives across many critical industries. This book is an in-depth exploration of current Japanese business strategies that make Japan the world's third-largest economy and an economic leader in Asia. To accomplish their reinvention, Japan's largest companies are building new processes of breakthrough innovation. Central to this book is how they are addressing the necessary changes in organizational design, internal management processes, employment, and corporate governance. Because Japan values social stability and economic equality, this reinvention is happening slowly and methodically, and has gone largely unnoticed by Western observers. Yet, Japan's more balanced model of "caring capitalism" is both competitive and transformative, and more socially responsible than the unbridled growth approach of the United States.
This text rethinks the contours of Japanese history, culture and nationality. Challenging the mythology of a historically unitary, even monolithic Japan, it offers a different perspective on culture and identity in modern Japan.
Re-envisioning Japan is the first truly comprehensive book on Japanese export textiles of the Meiji period (1868-1912), featuring stunning examples from all over the country. Lavishly illustrated, the book features fabrics that explore the craftsmanship and remarkable talent of Meiji artists and artisans who produced goods for export markets. The makers of Meiji textiles sought to modernize traditional modes of visual representation, aspiring to create "paintings in silk thread," at times even replicating specific Western paintings. More often, they collaborated with contemporary Japanese painters to create dazzling new images that more than ever before realized the aesthetic potential of silk thread as an artistic medium. This book showcases these spectacular ornamental textiles in dazzling color reproductions and many close-up details.
Over the last two decades, Japanese firms have challenged U.S. dominance in many manufacturing industries. This challenge has increasingly come in the form of transplant operations, and recognition has spread that their success owes a great deal to superior manufacturing management. Despite the ups and downs of the business cycle in Japan, there remains a core of world-class Japanese companies that have developed manufacturing management systems that companies throughout the world strive to emulate. In this edited volume, a team of eminent scholars uses case studies and large-scale surveys to explain in depth the process of transferring and transforming the best Japanese Management Systems (JMS) by both Japanese- and U.S.-owned firms. While the most successful of the Japanese manufacturing transplants rely, to varying degrees, on home country management techniques, they have had to adapt them to fit U.S. conditions. Similarly, the growing number of U.S. firms that are adopting these techniques to strengthen their own positions face a considerable challenge in transforming them to fit local conditions. A new environment necessarily compels the transformation of JMS. But despite the hurdles firms face, the evidence presented here and elsewhere strongly indicates that key aspects of JMS are remarkably transferable and successful in the United States. Combining scientific data with clear and engaging prose,Remade in America is a rich analytical resource for manufacturing professionals, as well as scholars and students of management and business.
In a stunning rebuke to a large group of naysayers, Jim Rohwer convincingly argues that the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998 was not a turn for the worse; rather it was short-lived and helped rid Asian markets of many of the problems that were holding it back. Now, while most analysts go wild over the American economy, Rohwer provides the key insights into why America is due for a slowdown while Asia is poised for tremendous growth and opportunity. Jim Rohwer has long experience in Asia as both a journalist and a business executive. The highly informed account in Remade in America comes from his own on-the-ground observation and analysis, as well as knowing all the major players in business, government, and the media in both America and Asia. Telling, in-depth interviews with people ranging from Lee Kuan Yew, the former prime minister of Singapore, and Jack Welch, the CEO of General Electric, result in deep insights into Asia's great potential. The future of Asia is as much about the United States as it is about Asia, for the forces that revolutionized the American economy in the last twenty years provide the clues for what is to come in Asia. The key to Asian growth is understanding how Asian companies have learned from the strengths of both American and Asian business models. Remade in America clearly charts how Asian industries have started managing themselves based on American standards of corporate, technological, and economic performance that began to be adopted in the late 1990s, while incorporating their own strengths of cooperative corporate and social organization. Asia is ideally suited to take advantage of the Internet revolution, and we are only now starting to see its enormous potential in this area. Rohwer's insightful analysis of Japan, China, Taiwan, South Korea, and Southeast Asia shows how, as these countries start to combine the ruthlessly efficient market democracy and accountability that America pioneered with the Asian domination of dispersed manufacturing and assembly of components, there will be major opportunities both for American corporations and for investors. In addition, technology will not only enable Asian economies to improve on their traditional strengths, it will also help Asia greatly improve its traditional poor performance in services and distribution. Remade in America is a provocative and useful book, not only for those with direct business interests in Asia but also for readers who want an informed look at this dynamic and important part of the world. There will be a new Asia, Inc., one in which such matters as finance and technology will be handled in an American way while people will be managed along Asian lines in their interactions -- a powerful combination that we ignore at our peril.
This book explores social movements and political activism in contemporary Japan, arguing that the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident marks a decisive moment, which has led to an unprecedented resurgence in social and protest movements and inaugurated a new era of civic engagement. Offering fresh perspectives on both older and more current forms of activism in Japan, together with studies of specific movements that developed after Fukushima, this volume tackles questions of emerging and persistent structural challenges that activists face in contemporary Japan. With attention to the question of where the new sense of contention in Japan has emerged from and how the newly developing movements have been shaped by the neo-conservative policies of the Japanese government, the authors ask how the Japanese experience adds to our understanding of how social movements work, and whether it might challenge prevailing theoretical frameworks.
Magisterial in vision, sweeping in scope, this monumental work presents a seamless account of Japanese society during the modern era, from 1600 to the present. A distillation of more than fifty years’ engagement with Japan and its history, it is the crowning work of our leading interpreter of the modern Japanese experience. Since 1600 Japan has undergone three periods of wrenching social and institutional change, following the imposition of hegemonic order on feudal society by the Tokugawa shogun; the opening of Japan’s ports by Commodore Perry; and defeat in World War II. The Making of Modern Japan charts these changes: the social engineering begun with the founding of the shogunate in 1600, the emergence of village and castle towns with consumer populations, and the diffusion of samurai values in the culture. Marius Jansen covers the making of the modern state, the adaptation of Western models, growing international trade, the broadening opportunity in Japanese society with industrialization, and the postwar occupation reforms imposed by General MacArthur. Throughout, the book gives voice to the individuals and views that have shaped the actions and beliefs of the Japanese, with writers, artists, and thinkers, as well as political leaders given their due. The story this book tells, though marked by profound changes, is also one of remarkable consistency, in which continuities outweigh upheavals in the development of society, and successive waves of outside influence have only served to strengthen a sense of what is unique and native to Japanese experience. The Making of Modern Japan takes us to the core of this experience as it illuminates one of the contemporary world’s most compelling transformations.
This book uses the figure of the salaryman to explore masculinity in Japan by examining the salaryman as a gendered construct, and is one of the first to focus on the men within Japanese corporate culture through a gendered lens. Not only does this add to the emerging literature on masculinity in Japan, but given the important role Japanese corporate culture has played in Japan's emergence as an industrial power, Romit Dasgupta's research offers a new way of looking both at Japanese business culture, and more generally at important changes in Japanese society in recent years.
“Engineering” has firmly taken root in the entangled bank of biology even as proposals to remake the living world have sent tendrils in every direction, and at every scale. Nature Remade explores these complex prospects from a resolutely historical approach, tracing cases across the decades of the long twentieth century. These essays span the many levels at which life has been engineered: molecule, cell, organism, population, ecosystem, and planet. From the cloning of agricultural crops and the artificial feeding of silkworms to biomimicry, genetic engineering, and terraforming, Nature Remade affirms the centrality of engineering in its various forms for understanding and imagining modern life. Organized around three themes—control and reproduction, knowing as making, and envisioning—the chapters in Nature Remade chart different means, scales, and consequences of intervening and reimagining nature.
