Word: steeling
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...America, that a cultural fascination with machinery that had been growing since the early 19th century reached its apogee. One is used to reading, in prattle like Tom Wolfe's 1981 book Bauhaus to Our House, that the American affair with machine culture during those years -- functionalism, steel-and-glass buildings and so forth -- had been imported, as intellectual fashion, from Europe. Nothing could be further from the truth. The concise and mighty industrial-based forms of American building, conceived by architects from James Bogardus in the 1850s to Louis Sullivan in the 1890s and by the engineers...
...Henry Adams' Virgin, to the Renaissance and Gothic nostalgia that had assuaged the cultural elites of New York and Boston at the end of the 19th century; welcome to the dynamo, to the total plan, the slick shell housing, the fins and flanges, the didactic sheen of stainless steel, the Aztec-style bracelet of imperishable Bakelite. Goodbye, Hell's Kitchen; hello, skyscraper...
Still, not all Japan's troubles can be traced to the yen. Some of the country's older industries, including steel, shipbuilding and coal mining have been declining for the better part of a decade. One reason: they face fierce competition from what economists call the newly industrialized countries, like South Korea, Taiwan and Brazil. The NICs compete largely by paying lower wages. The average hourly salary of a South Korean steelworker, for example, is one-sixth the level of his Japanese counterpart...
...Japan's steel manufacturers, who played such a vital role in the country's postwar resurgence, now find themselves besieged by foreign competition. Among the fiercest rivals are South Korean and Brazilian steelmakers. Japan's five largest producers could lose some $2.3 billion this year. In the coming years, some 40,000 workers could lose their jobs. Says Yutaka Takeda, president of Nippon Steel: "This is the worst crisis we've faced since we started making steel...
...reduce its work force from 24,000 to 17,000 by year's end. One 90-year-old shipbuilder, Hakodate Dock, was once the largest employer in the city of Hakodate. Now the company has no orders at all for next year and beyond. In shipbuilding, as in steel, the most forceful challenge comes from South Korea, whose currency, unlike the yen, is pegged to the dollar. South Korea's share of world shipping is expected to climb by year's end from 10.7% to 28.4%, while Japan's portion will drop from 49% to 41%. Says Kazuichi Murai, director...