Word: ginza
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Hanawa is indeed struggling over what should be the most drastic restructuring effort in Japanese corporate history. So far he has off-loaded a few subsidiaries (leasing and advertising), banned corporate entertainment and sold the company's 15-story headquarters on Tokyo's glitzy Ginza. In a more dramatic gesture two weeks ago, Nissan Diesel, the group's commercial-truck division, announced it was closing a plant in Gunma, north of Tokyo, and eliminating 3,000 jobs in the process--a radical move...
...they reinvented Godzilla. Instead of barrel legs that galumph through the Ginza, Godzilla now has runner's calves to sprint down Broadway. The lumpy, rubberized-corduroy look has given way to the towering if scaly athleticism pioneered by H.R. Giger's mantid man-eaters in the Alien series. And while the snub-nosed, micro-eared Godzilla of the '60s and '70s had a vaguely mammalian mien--appropriate for a creature whose Japanese name, Gojira, is an amalgam of kujira (whale) and gorira (gorilla)--the fin-de-siecle Godzilla has a crocodilian brow, iguana affectations, a T. Rex crouch...
Overtime and expense accounts have severely been trimmed, radically changing the lives of many salarymen. The Ginza in Tokyo once sported 4,000 clubs where businessmen passed the late hours drinking, eating and chatting with young hostesses. Several hundred clubs have been forced to close, and many more are up for sale. Yuri Hirota, mama-san at the Club 48, used to keep an employee at the phone all night doing nothing but summoning hard-to-get taxis. Now cabs can be hailed by stepping out the door, but penny-pinching customers prefer to take trains -- and since the last...
...action, however heartfelt and furious, was probably futile. Japanese rice farmers drove their tractors down Tokyo's Ginza to protest the opening of Japan's closed rice market. With the U.S. and the European Community (except France) now in accord on agricultural products at the gatt talks, Japan must either sign on or risk losing trade access. Moreover, Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa has hinted at a shift, warning that Japan "must avoid at all costs those things which might endanger the successful conclusion of the GATT talks...