Word: nipponization
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...modern weaponry, Japan has been able to concentrate investment on automated industry. The destruction of its factories by wartime bombing left it free to rebuild with the latest technology. To do that quickly, the new industrialists bought patents and licenses from everywhere. Says Shigeo Nagano, chairman of Nippon Steel, which today produces more tonnage than any other company in the world: "So long as we had to start from nothing, we wanted the most modern plant. We selected the cream of the world's technology. We learned from America, Germany. Austria and the Soviet Union, and adapted their methods...
...severe postwar capital famine, all industry had to borrow heavily from government-regulated banks. Even today, Japanese companies generally get more than 80% of their financing from loans and less than 20% from sale of stock?about the opposite of the ratio in the U.S. Nagano estimates that Nippon Steel's debt is equal to what four or five American steel companies would owe. To a Western executive that might seem to leave the economy extremely vulnerable to a Penn Central-type collapse. Japanese find that being in hock has its advantages: corporate Pooh-Bahs do not have to worry...
...company song. At Toyota the day opens with five minutes of supervised calisthenics. There is a vast range of fringe benefits: discount meals at plant cafeterias, cut-rate vacations at company resorts, cheap rental in company apartment houses (roughly $10.80 a month for a two-room flat in one Nippon Kokan building in Yokohama...
...there were two job openings for each high school graduate; this spring there are 7.7. Japan has also bought export growth largely at the price of skimping on internal investment in housing, roads and pollution control. The country's industrial pollution is perhaps the world's worst. Says Nippon Steel's Nagano: "We need more roads, harbors, bridges, housing. People are living two families to a six-mat (9 ft. by 12 ft.) room...
...chokazoku tend to be clannish. Two-thirds of them reside in Queens, many in the Flushing neighborhood. About 150 bachelors have crowded into a building on Manhattan's West 103rd Street, where they rent rooms for $6 a day. For relaxation, the Japanese gather in the Nippon Club, which is across the street from Carnegie Hall, or in East Side piano bars for a drinking bout to let off tension. On Sundays, those who do not play golf with American business contacts play golf with each other, jabbering happily about business in Japanese. Says one of the chokazoku...