Word: otani
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These, like the doings of sumo wrestlers and high-class prostitutes, gave a rich subject matter to 18th century graphic artists like Suzuki Harunobu, Kitagawa Utamaro and the theater caricaturist Toshusai Sharaku, whose image of the actor Otani Oniji III playing a samurai's manservant, all red-rimmed eyes and stylish snarl, is a deliciously succinct expression of fictive bloody-mindedness. Through the medium of prints, the range of things that could be depicted widened to take in all Japan. Katsushika Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji and Ando Hiroshige's Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido...
...effervescent sophomore at the University of Texas at Austin, found herself outside a Los Angeles hotel the other day handing leaflets to a busload of Japanese tourists. "Konnichi-wa," she greeted each one with a little bow. "Good day." The flyers urged the visitors to boycott the New Otani Hotel, which has been fighting a three-year union-organizing effort by its mostly Latino employees. And to reinforce the message, as soon as the tour bus closed its door, Campos and four other college students hopped inside a van and tailed it along the freeway. As the bewildered tourists emerged...
...only 10.4% of private-sector employees now unionized--down from 16.8% in 1983--the motto of John Sweeney, the federation's new president, is Organize or Die. Some $20 million is earmarked for membership drives, and the tactics are increasingly bareknuckled--as in the effort to drive away New Otani's tour business. The number of organizers deployed by the federation has increased more than tenfold since 1990. And defying labor's stereotype as a bastion of old white males, the new organizers are mostly in their 20s and 30s, mostly female and, like Campos, increasingly from minority groups...
Most of the New Otani employees are immigrants. And the tactics used against the hotel are typical of the unorthodox new weapons of labor's "corporate campaigns." Local 11 of the Hotel Employees & Restaurant Employees sends delegations to Japan and Hong Kong to rally Asian unions against the hotel and urge travel agents to avoid it. It has secured endorsements from scores of the city's Asian and Latino civic and business groups, as well as 11 out of 15 city councillors, and it blocked rush-hour traffic with a sit-down protest last spring that resulted in 57 arrests...
...found themselves reluctant to embrace the gamut of militant tactics. There were nervous titters during training when Quynh Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American organizer, mentioned "Dumpster diving"--searching through company trash for information. And when hotel workers laid out plans for street theater during a wedding reception at the New Otani, many had misgivings. "I don't want to protest at someone's wedding," said Ramos, the Brown University student. "That's their very important day." But after much discussion, she and other dissenters agreed to participate. "I had to stop and think, 'What would Cesar Chavez do?'" she said...