Word: largest
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...gross national product, while Britain exports 20.5%, West Germany 26.7% and Canada 29%. Among the major non-Communist industrial countries, only the U.S. exports less of its G.N.P.: 6.9%. For most Japanese companies, the biggest sales and greatest competitive challenges come in the domestic marketplace. Hitachi, Japan's largest manufacturer of electronic goods, exports only 27% of its production...
...Later in the decade, MITI wanted to keep Honda, the motorcycle firm, out of the auto business But Soichiro Honda, the company's legendary founder, who was known as Old Man Thunder, defied the government, brought out his minicars and built the firm into Japan's third largest auto manufacturer behind Toyota and Nissan. In industries that are growing, MITI has been unable to curb competition. "It's a free-for-all," says James Abegglen, vice president of the Boston Consulting Group, "like a barroom brawl with no mercy shown...
Japanese firms will end talks suddenly when they see trouble ahead. Last May, executives of Nippon Kokan K.K., Japan's second largest steelmaker, halted negotiations to buy Ford's Rouge Steel Co., mainly because it could not reach a labor-concession agreement with the United Auto Workers. "What the Japanese wanted most was a totally dedicated and committed work force like they have in their plants," said Thomas Page, a Ford executive vice president...
...Kenji Ekuan, 52, a former Buddhist priest who founded GK Industrial Design Associates, Japan's largest and most innovative design firm, the matter is partly a philosophical one. "We Japanese," he says, "are the most avaricious people. Infinite desires but infinite time and space." To Ekuan the traditional bento-bako - the stacked lunch box packed with its careful array of distinct morsels - is the true ancestor of that emblem of modern Japan, the box full of microchips. Both represent a culture of linear flow: the processing of information, sensuous or electronic, through standardized components that can modulate content rapidly...
...Gakkai teaches that continual repetition of the phrase Namu Myoho Renge Kyo, derived from the title of the Lotus Sutra, one of the Buddhist scriptures, is the key to success, happiness and the good life. The group has produced a political offshoot, Komeito (Clean Government Party), with the third largest number of members in Japan's legislature. The growth of the new religions has slackened since the late 1960s, apparently because of increased affluence and secularization...