Word: hoshino
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...Masafumi J. Hoshino...
...million is spare money. There are plenty of demands to be met; these demands must be vocalized and the administration must be willing to listen. An aesthetic enhancement, perhaps, but the reconstruction of the Memorial Hall tower serves only to distort the concerns of Harvard University. MASAFUMI J. HOSHINO...
Some Japanese have lost everything: personal and business bankruptcies have soared. Shinichi Hoshino is afraid to reveal his real name. He has not declared bankruptcy, but that is a technicality. After running a bar and a mah-jongg parlor, he ventured into real estate in the early 1980s. By 1989 he employed 40 people, and that year he sold 100 apartments to customers who bought them as investments and tax shelters, netting $1.7 million in profits. In retrospect, he says, he should have realized that the boom was topping out, but "every month the prices continued...
...from a peak of $36,000 a month to $5,600. That is not enough even to begin repaying the $5.8 million he owes to a bank and a leasing company; he pays a pittance of $450 a month in interest to the leasing company, nothing to the bank. Hoshino resignedly says "the way things are can't be helped." But he does rail at politicians who "just work for their own political party or faction, and not for the entire country...
...printed surreal posters that seem only incidentally to be advertising, but in the pages of magazines there is artsy typographical chaos. There are delightfully showboating aluminum office towers (such as Fumihiko Maki's Spiral building in Tokyo) as well as brand-new buildings made entirely of secondhand wood (Atsuo Hoshino's House of Used Lumber, on the outskirts of Tokyo). The familiar and the provocative, the traditional and the radical, the ascetic and the deluxe, the indigenous and the foreign -- all coexist in contemporary Japanese design...