TILEFILE - Transfering TILEFILEsBy Willhemina Wahlin
A creative avenue for the maverick Japanese

There are plenty of reasons why some Japanese might wish to escape the grind of their more traditional corporate workforce. Long hours and extreme dedication to the company are the norm, not the exception. A late-afternoon surf when the working day is done, perhaps, might be as remote a pleasure as the annual four-week sabbatical. It’s not surprising then, that an attraction between the more maverick Japanese professional and foreign companies is growing.

Hisashi Misawa displays his 'Germ Heat'.By Burritt Sabin
Heating everything at half the cost

Traveling northeast from Naka-Meguro (a Tokyo station) on the Hibiya Line you reach a sartorial watershed. The yonder side of Higashi Ginza the men in Burberry suits and women in Prada have vanished, and workers in overalls and seniors with small shopping carts fill the car. You have passed through the business and fashion centers and are moving into the Shitamachi, the eastern quarter, where Old Edo is said to survive. Indeed this low-lying district along the Sumida River is home to the sumo arena, the city’s liveliest festivals, public baths and cottage industries. In the last named labor the shokunin (the artisans) fashioned things with pride and stubborn persistence.

By Natasha Thompson, Researcher for J@pan Inc
In a Yahoo! dominated marketplace Google has its work cut out

According to whatis.com, a search engine is a coordinated set of programs that uses a spider, or 'a bot', to search and read every page on a website, creates a huge index, or database, of information from web pages, process search requests, and returns results to you. In other words, when you are 'searching' the Web using a search engine, you are not searching the Web at all, instead you are reading information that has been gathered on its huge database.

Photo by Andy RainBy David Meredith, President, Bates Asia Japan Inc
New technology is more than noise and bright lights

In 1950 the world’s biggest companies were all industrial manufacturers and raw materials suppliers. It was an era when Ford and General Motors were ‘kings of the castle’ and in Japan, the Mitsubishi Corporation was founded and became the country’s largest general trading house. Shortly after, in 1953, the Bridgestone Corporation, originally established in 1928 by tabi manufacturer Shojiro Ishibashi, diversified to become Japan’s largest tyre manufacturer. It was a time when men, for it was mostly men back then, got their hands dirty in factories and produced goods we could see and touch.

By Chris Cleary
Why would you want to?

I was told when requested to write this article that ‘property is a hot topic in Japan’. Hmm. I am not sure that emerging from dormancy qualifies as ‘hot’, but yes in the last couple of years there has been a lot more tone to the residential property market; and ‘in Japan’ perhaps if that designates certain prime areas of Tokyo, and even of Nagoya.