cool global BIZ

Japanese Dance to Hiroshima's "One World" at Nisei Week Parade in Little Tokyo

 

 

Japanese dance choreographed by Azuma Sumako II and Azuma Kikusue, and demonstrated by Azuma Ryu North America to "One World" by Hiroshima. The dance will be performed at the 2012 Nisei Week Parade on Sunday, August 12, in the Little Tokyo district of downtown Los Angeles, U.S.A. The spirits are strong, even 70 years later. As teens, my late mother and late aunt danced in Little Tokyo before the World War II internment of Japanese Americans. Video courtesy of dosako1's channel on YouTube.

 

 

Entrepreneurship and Immigration: One Japanese American Family's Tale

 

The San Jose Taiko group performed last year at the San Jose Buddhist Temple's annual Japanese obon festival in Silicon Valley, California, U.S.A. Video on YouTube courtesy of TravelWithChris.

Editor's note:  Summer is festival time for Japanese Americans, who honor the memories of their ancestors with prayers and folk dances, with taiko drumming and rice dishes. I republish this blog post each year in honor of my late parents, grandparents and family spirits. It's a reminder of what is most important in life, beyond the next quarterly earnings release.

  

 

THE QUEST TO better one's life is universal. Leaving rice farms and their loved ones in Meiji era Japan, my grandparents boarded ships to the United States before the first Ford Model Ts rolled off the assembly line.  Like the legendary industrialist  Henry Ford  (Photo, left: Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan), Japanese American entrepreneurs had business in their blood, and blood in their business. My grandfathers and grandmothers raised a flock of kids, grew fruits and vegetables on leased land, ran a store near “Little Tokyo” in downtown Los Angeles. Despite legal barriers and brutal discrimination, Japanese Americans rose in the agricultural and florist industries, and launched restaurants, metal shops, tofu factories, commercial fishing firms and other small businesses.

 

THEIR SAGA REFLECTS the spirit and work ethos of all U.S. immigrants and their kin, from 19th-century Irish laborers to 21st-century India-born entrepreneurs. In our modern U.S. economy, immigrant-owned startups churned out $52 billion in sales in 2005, according to research by Vivek Wadhwa, Ben Rissing and Gary Gereffi at Duke   University and AnnaLee Saxenian at the University of California at Berkeley. For old-schoolers who like digging through voluminous yet enriching history, my late uncle Masakazu Iwata, a UCLA scholar and Biola University dean, wrote about Japanese American farmers in Planted in Good Soil: A History of Issei in United States Agriculture (Peter Lang Publishing, 1992).

 

Cherry Blossoms Redux, or Jake Shimabukuro and Bon Jovi Riff on "Sakura, Sakura"

 

Jake Shimabukuro, master of the four-string ukelele, performs the Japanese folk tune "Sakura Sakura," traditionally played on a 13-string koto. Video courtesy of JakeShimabukuro's channel on YouTube. Didn't know the intro to Bon Jovi's "Tokyo Road" gave a nod to "Sakura Sakura" (See YouTube video here.) Nice.

 

REAL-LIFE CHERRY BLOSSOMS are beautiful. But the man-made images are tired and timeworn. The familiar and traditional need to evolve, or end up in museums and library archives, seen only by tour groups and Ph.d candidates. Global creatives -- like Hawaiian musician Jake Shimabukuro, rock band Bon Jovi, and the digital photographers here -- dodge the cliches and seek out the new.  (Also see interesting cherry blossom photos from last spring.) 

 

 

"Dreaming of Spring" by Temari 09 (no real name given), under a Creative Commons license on flickr.

 

We Need More Farmers, Craftsmen and Old-School Entrepreneurs to Create Real Value

 

 

Untitled postcard (1916) by anonymous, showing a German farmer with buffalo in front of his house. Photo in the public domain, on Wikimedia Commons. From the private collection of Wolfgang Sauber (Xenophon).
 
 

AS MONEY MEN and tech wizards take over the world, we need more down-home, salt-of-the-earth folks to remind us of our cultural and entrepreneurial roots. You know, those old-school farmers, craftsmen, inventors and other throwbacks to an earlier era who create real value and services that uplift society. What happened to those guys? This European farmer worked his fields in the early 1900s, while my family ancestors worked their rice farms in Japan and fruit-and-vegetable farms in California in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Worlds apart, they were kindred spirits of sorts. Their sweat-of-the-brow generations ushered in the modern age. Agriculture begat Industry, which begat Technology and Finance, which will give birth to God knows what. Unless it's revolutionary and truly improves life and business, do we need a billion more variations and permutations of mobile devices and investment products? Really? You, too, can be a Luddite for a day.

 

Editor's note: This post was slightly revised on October 25 with a new photograph.

  

CoolGlobalBiz, October 5, 2011

 

Turning Indonese, I Think We're Turning Indonese, I Really Think So, Da Da Da Da Da Da . . . .

 

Nicole Scherzinger and Pussycat Dolls singing "Jai Ho" (You Are My Destiny), the Slumdog Millionaire theme song written by A.R. Rahman. Music video courtesy of ARRahmanVEVO on YouTube.

 

FROM GUNG-HO TO JAI HO:  Japanese management science used to be all the rage. A whole generation of business execs and scholars grew up studying it. Now, we're gonna see a rising wave of leadership books and pricy workshops on Indian and Chinese executives, and their magic business touch. (Twenty-five years from now, it'll be Russian and Latin American managers, plus polyglot global gurus with DNA and Ph.d's from all continents.) In this Wall Street Journal story ("Chinese, Indian Workers Give Bosses Top Marks" by Joe Light), thousands of respondants to a recent global survey by the Kenexa Research Institute gave low marks to the Japanese, and high marks to U.S., Indian and Chinese managers.

 

• Wharton Magazine, "Purpose, Pragmatism and People" by Peter Capelli, Harbor Singh, Jitendra Singh and Michael Useem, based on their book, The India Way: How India's Top Business Leaders are Revolutionizing Management (Harvard Business Press, 2010).

• Amazon.com, China CEO: A Case Guide for Business Leaders in China (Wiley, 2007) by Juan Antonio Fernandez and Liu Shengjun. 

• Bloomberg BusinessWeek, "Karma Capitalism: Has the Bhagavad Gita replaced the Art of War as the hip new ancient Eastern management text?" by Peter Engardio.

• Ernst & Young, "The New Global Mindset: driving innovation through diverse perspectives."

 

 

Editor's note: This post first appeared November 23, 2010.

 

CoolGlobalBiz, September 8, 2011

 

McKinsey Quarterly: Is Sleeping Giant Japan Inc. Awakening in Globalization Race?

 

"Walk in the Rain / Yurakucho, Tokyo" by JamesJustin (no real name given), under a Creative Commons license on flickr.
 

IN THE AFTERMATH of the 2009 financial crisis and Japan's mega-disasters earlier this year, Japanese multinationals continue to face daunting problems. Abroad, they must wrestle with stronger global competition and dwindling market share. At home, they must deal with economic stagnation, weakening production and aging consumers. A recent study in the McKinsey Quarterly looks at Japan's corporate obstacles, and offers possible solutions:

Entrepreneurship & the Global Economy: One Japanese American Family's Tale

 

The San Jose Taiko group performs recently at the San Jose Buddhist Temple's annual Japanese obon festival in Silicon Valley, California, U.S.A. Video on YouTube courtesy of TravelWithChris.

Editor's note:  Summer is festival time for the Japanese and Japanese Americans, who honor their ancestors with prayers and folk dances, with taiko drumming and rice dishes. This was one of my first blog entries, and I repost it each year in honor of my late parents and family ancestors. It's a reminder of what is most important in life, beyond the next quarterly earnings release.

  

 

THE QUEST TO better one's life is universal. Leaving rice farms and their loved ones in Meiji era Japan, my grandparents boarded ships to the United States before the first Ford Model Ts rolled off the assembly line.  Like the legendary industrialist  Henry Ford  (Photo, left: Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan), Japanese American entrepreneurs had business in their blood, and blood in their business. My grandfathers and grandmothers raised a flock of kids, grew fruits and vegetables on leased land, ran a store near “Little Tokyo” in downtown Los Angeles. Despite legal barriers and brutal discrimination, Japanese Americans rose in the agricultural and florist industries, and launched restaurants, metal shops, tofu factories, commercial fishing firms and other small businesses.

 

THEIR SAGA REFLECTS the spirit and work ethos of all U.S. immigrants and their kin, from 19th-century Irish laborers to 21st-century India-born entrepreneurs. In our modern U.S. economy, immigrant-owned startups churned out $52 billion in sales in 2005, according to research by Vivek Wadhwa, Ben Rissing and Gary Gereffi at Duke   University and AnnaLee Saxenian at the University of California at Berkeley. For old-schoolers who like digging through voluminous yet enriching history, my late uncle Masakazu Iwata, a UCLA scholar and Biola University dean, wrote about Japanese American farmers in Planted in Good Soil: A History of Issei in United States Agriculture (Peter Lang Publishing, 1992). 

 

MY FOLKS LEFT their store and farm work when World War II struck. How do you value that economic loss? While uncles served honorably in the U.S. Army, 19 family members -- nearly all U.S. citizens -- were bussed to the Manzanar military internment camp in the high desert of California. On work leaves from camp, my late father toiled in potato and sugar beet fields in Idaho and Oregon, and in the produce market in Chicago. My late mother, a speedy typist, whipped out letters as a secretary for the U.S. War Relocation Authority. Aunts contributed to the war economy by making camouflage nets. How do you measure that productivity? They kept on. They persevered. Seven times down, eight times up, goes the old Japanese folk saying.

(Photo, above)  "Manzanar Boy Scout Memorial Parade" by Frances Stewart of the War Relocation Authority, U.S. Department of the Interior, via Wikimedia Commons.

 

AFTER THE WAR, Japanese Americans scattered throughout the Western U.S. I grew up in South-Central Los Angeles, a cultural fusion over the decades of middle-class European Americans, black migrants from the South and Latino immigrants. The once-thriving Japanese American enclave in the Crenshaw district –with its down-home sushi joints, summer festivals and obon folk dances -- was a cultural sanctuary and an economic hamlet for Japanese American small businesses. But it died long ago, as my generation found the suburbs, middle-class jobs and interracial marital bliss. The early waves of Japanese immigrants and their entrepreneurial drive symbolize the vast ethnic and demographic forces growing stronger by the day in the U.S. Those same forces are cascading worldwide, transforming cities, nations, the economy. The local tales and global story are playing out on millions of like stages.

  

IN A RITE of passage, I spent part of my early career tracing the family arc, hounding my parents for shards of their personal histories.  Spring pilgrimages to the windswept Manzanar site. A trek to Japan, to Buddhist temples and family farms in the green hills of Wakayama and Okayama.  Closure came with President Reagan signing the historic redress bill in 1988 that gave each interned Japanese American $20,000 for what legal scholars call the greatest civil rights violation in our nation's history. A generation of economic dreams deferred, though not killed. During pilgrimages, Grandma always brought cool water to the Manzanar cemetery. The spirits are thirsty, she told my aunt. Beyond the politics of identity, my soul-searching and dusty boxes of documents honored the ghosts and their legacies. It was time to move on.

  

     - Edward Iwata

 

(Photo, above)  "Cemetery shrine, Manzanar Japanese internment camp" by Daniel Mayer, under a Creative Commons license via Wikipedia. 

CoolGlobalBiz, June 27, 2011

 

 

Late Japanese filmmaker Kurosawa's "Mount Fuji in Red" Was Prophetic and Haunting

 

"Mount Fuji in Red," one of eight vignettes from Dreams by late Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. OrenjiStar's channel on YouTube.

 

CoolGlobalBiz, April 29, 2011

HAVEN'T SEEN A movie by the late Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa since my college and post-college art house days. But in the wake of the earthquake and nuclear disaster in Japan,  I had to watch Dreams, one of Kurosawa's last works before his death in 1998. Featuring eight reveries from Kurosawa's dreams, the most prophetic piece is "Mount Fuji in Red," on the Japanese fleeing mass nuclear meltdowns. Kurosawa's 1990 film and the recent cataclysm in Japan also brought to mind the hibakusha, the survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended World War II. I wrote about the hibakusha for the Los Angeles Times long ago. Even moreso today, it's hard to ignore the lasting horror of nuclear catastrophes.

(Book cover, above) "The Warrior's Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa" by Stephen Prince.

 

• DailyKos.com, "Six Nuclear Reactors Explode - Akira Kurosawa's Dreams" by Dartagnan.


• NYTimes.com, "Akira Kurosawa's Dreams (1990)" by Vincent Canby.


• WashingtonPost.com, "Akira Kurosawa's Dreams" by Hal Hinson.

 

 

Japan's Economy Likely to Recover Without Lengthy Downturn, According to the OECD

 

A BIT OF ECONOMIC hope here. Japan's battered economy likely will recover over the next year-and-a-half in the wake of the country's earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster, according to the OECD's Economic Survey of Japan 2011 released today. The survey says that a downturn should not last long, as government reconstruction picks up, as business and trade returns to normal, and as Japanese consumers start spending again. The OECD projects that the economy will slow to 0.8% this year, then see 2.3% growth in 2012.

 

Cherry Blossom Images Take on New Meaning in Aftermath of Earthquake and Tsunami



 

"Spring Will Come" by hide99 (no real name given), under a Creative Commons license on flickr.

 

THE FAMILIAR SIGHTS of spring cherry blossoms take on new meaning after last month's earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Here are a few photographers on flickr who look beyond the traditional image to find a bit of hope, humor and uplift.

 

 

 

"Cherry Blossoms at Dawn" by prsphoto (Paul Seegars) at PRS Photography, under a Creative Commons license on flickr.

 

 

 

 

"Can you say cheese?" by JamesCalder at JamesCalder.com, under a Creative Commons license on flickr. The Cherry Blossom Bombshells are a roller derby team in Washington, D.C.