Word: suzukis
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Fast-forward to the year 2001, a decade into Japan's seemingly endless post-bubble recession, and talk of an RWS has all but disappeared. Eight of Japan's best players are now wearing U.S. major league uniforms, including new Seattle Mariners' signee Ichiro Suzuki, perhaps the greatest pure hitter the Japanese game has ever produced. And Japan's national sport seems in danger of becoming a farm system for the American majors. Until this year, only pitchers had ventured abroad, notably Hideo Nomo who took his corkscrew delivery to L.A. in 1995 and won Rookie of the Year honors...
...past decade, Shojiro Suzuki has watched his wealth slowly slip away. The 861-sq.-ft. house in Tokyo that he bought 13 years ago for 60 million yen ($492,000)? It's worth half that now. The stock portfolio worth 16 million yen ($131,000) back in the late 1980s? A paltry 3 million yen ($25,000) now. His salary of 8.5 million yen ($70,000)? The same for 10 years. To make matters worse, last week the stock ticker in his office's front window taunted him every time he walked by. On his way out Monday...
...pale man with graying hair and an easygoing smile, Suzuki has spent his entire adult life at his firm, working from 8 a.m. until 10 p.m. daily. He joined the company out of high school, in 1974, drawn to the firm because it managed his father's portfolio. "This is more serious, much worse than when the bubble burst," Suzuki says, referring to 1990, when the bottom fell out of Japan's stock market. "We cannot see any future...
...wears a hole in an old one. He is worried that if the company decides to drop its twice-a-year bonuses, as other firms have, he won't be able to make his house payments. "Even when the economy does recover, things may not be that much better," Suzuki says. "We're never going back to the good old days...
More and more employers these days are supporting the work of community-minded professionals like Suzuki. They have to. Even with the economy slowing, a tight labor market has prodded companies to satisfy their employees' ever increasing need for work/life balance and social consciousness--or risk losing them to more progressive competitors. This is especially true in fields like technology, financial services, banking, insurance, travel and law, where employers have to work hard to woo top talent...