By far the most entertaining side of negotiating benefits is for foreign hires coming in as expatriate managers (“expats”). These people are generally already well advanced in their careers and typically occupy CEO and director positions. They are dispatched by head office to fill an oversight and parent company representation role, and by virtue of the high profile of these people, status and comfort figure high in the remuneration package, as does tax work-arounds.

In a move reminiscent of Livedoor's Horiemon, at 04:00 am on March 1st this year, mobile content company For-side.com announced that it would downgrade its earnings for FY2006 (ending Dec. 31, 2006) to a massive JPY60.6bn (US$51.4m) loss. The company blamed the result mostly on an extraordinary JPY71.3bn (US$60.4m) loss on its sale of UK subsidiary iTouch. For-side's stock price as of last Friday (April 20th) was just JPY3,780, about 85% lower than a year ago, and less than 2% of the company's peak back in October 2002. So what went wrong with this once high-flying firm? Most analysts agree that...

The Gist: Logitec aims to replace even your alarm clock with the new 'LDS-iALARM,' a take-off on the standard iPod dock. The iALARM more closely resembles an alarm clock than it does anything else. The concept is straightforward: just insert your 4th gem or greater iPod or 1st/2nd generation iPod nano into the
iALARM's Dock connector. The iPod itself has an alarm function, but such a function is slightly hard to use with headphones alone. The iALARM acts as a speaker, so you... Read Now

Ten days ago, the foreign Vice President of Dior Japan and his wife were charged with possession of drugs here in Tokyo. Apparently he tried mailing cocaine from a Paris address to his home in Tokyo and Customs tipped off the
Police. The Police raided his home and arrested his wife after...