Word: osaka
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...1990s, Taichi Yoshida, the owner of a small moving company in Osaka, Japan, began noticing that many of his jobs involved people who had just died. Families of the deceased were either too squeamish to pack up for their dead relatives, or there wasn't any family to call on. So Yoshida started a new business cleaning out the homes of the dead. Then he started noticing something else: thick, dark stains shaped like a human body, the residue of liquids excreted by a decomposing corpse...
...restructuring that is still playing out today. The percentage of the workforce employed in part-time, temporary and contract work has tripled since 1990, forcing workaholic Japanese businessmen, many of whom never married, into a lonely early retirement. "Their world has evaporated under their feet," says Scott North, an Osaka University sociologist who studies Japanese work life. "The firm has been everything for these men. Their sense of manliness, their social position, their sense of self is all rooted in the corporate structure...
...could not afford a storefront. The practice was briefly suspended during World War II when food was rationed, but in the decades that followed, street vending, catering to a new generation of housewives who embraced eating fresh local foods, blossomed. Then, in 1970, an international food expo held in Osaka introduced Japan to coffee and hamburgers. Chain restaurants and all-night supermarkets opened in step with the nation's booming economy and food vendors fell by the wayside. (See pictures of Japan in the 1980s and today...
...think this is very much Toyota's fault, and its recent failings are just the tip of the iceberg. Japanese engineers and businessmen must seize the moment to renew the world's faith in their industry. Yukihiro Nishimura Osaka, Japan...
...Japan's whaling ships estimated that annual per capita consumption from its catch might amount to less than four slices of sashimi a year. If Japanese whaling - which is allowed under the international ban only on a very small scale, as "scientific research" - ended tomorrow, your average salaryman in Osaka would barely notice...