Word: japanization
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Japan, putting your company on the acquisition block is so shameful that the expression for it--miuri--means "selling your body." So it must have been excruciating last month for Yoshikazu Hanawa, president of Nissan Motor Co., to publicly offer for sale a controlling interest in Japan's second largest automaker. What must have been even more humiliating is that when Nissan's suitors looked under the hood, they became even less interested in this clunker, with its $22 billion in debt and a lineup of flashless cars. The word around the car industry is that the $49 billion company...
Whoa. Just a decade ago, Nissan was synonymous with Japan Inc., the business goliath that was devouring America. The auto company's fuel-thrifty sedans and zippy 240Z sports car put the fear in Detroit long before the Toyota Camry or Honda Accord ever saw a drafting table. Nissan's success gave weight to the myth that Japanese companies were run by enlightened executives who worked in frictionless synchronicity with workers to produce superior cars. In his best-selling book The Reckoning, David Halberstam suggested that U.S. industry, namely the Ford Motor Co., would be consigned to a never-ending...
These days Ford is a global predator with a $23 billion war chest and a market value ($34 billion) almost four times as big as Nissan's. Racked by an economy in an eight-year decline, Japan has a demonic need for the cash and expertise of foreign bankers and takeover experts who are buying, at deep discount, chunks of the country's financial and industrial base. "What has really happened this decade is the true inability of the Japanese to manage in a difficult situation," says ING Baring Furman Selz managing director Maryann Keller, who has studied Japanese industry...
Only a handful of companies have ever lived up to the Japan Inc. myth, and Nissan isn't one of them. Certainly its manufacturing and engineering prowess are world-class. And Nissan still builds first-rate automobiles. It simply doesn't make the right kind, nor does it know how to sell them. "We've failed to understand what the market wants," Hanawa told TIME early this month. "We're reflecting upon that." Deep meditation is more like it. Nissan has been paralyzed by its own bureaucracy and a legacy of tension between management and labor in Japan...
Golden's debut novel, chronicling the lush andexotic life of a geisha in the Japan of the 30sand 40s, has been wildly successful. InMemoirs, Sayuri, an aging geisha recountsher youth spent in the Okiya, a cloisteredbrothel where women trained for the rigors of theGeisha art. Hatsumomo is the primadonna geisha ofthe Okiya, supporting a household of youngapprentices and aged ex-geishas. From the momentSayuri is sold into the Okiya Hatsumomorecognizes her as a challenge to her supremacy andspends the rest of the novel plotting Sayuri'sdemise...