Japanese Start-Ups Channel Samurai Spirit: The Samurai Startup Island, in a low-rent office district built on a landfill on Tokyo Bay, is at the vanguard of what many hope is a new generation of innovators.

By Martin Fackler, New York Times
Published: December 25, 2013

TOKYO — The 20-somethings in jeans sipping espresso and tapping on laptops at this Tokyo business incubator would look more at home in Silicon Valley than in Japan, where for years the surest signs of success were the gray suits of its corporate salarymen. But for those hoping the nation’s latest economic plan will drag Japan from its long malaise, the young men and women here at Samurai Startup Island represent a crucial component: a revival of entrepreneurship.

The signs of that comeback are still new, and tentative enough that the statistics on start-ups and initial public offerings have not caught up. But analysts and investors report that hundreds of new Internet and technology-related companies have sprung up in the last two to three years, creating an ecosystem of incubators like Samurai Startup Island and so-called accelerator new venture investment funds, which invest in early-state start-ups in hopes of cashing in.

Some top universities — the same ones that have long defined success as a job in an established company or elite government ministry — have begun not only to create their own incubators and venture funds, but also to develop curriculums on birthing start-ups. And while some young entrepreneurs say real progress will come only if Prime Minister Shinzo Abe acts as promised to shake up Japan’s hidebound corporate culture, they say the stock market rally and broader optimism created by the economic plan known as Abenomics are already making it easier to find investors and customers.

“This is the beginning of something that could rejuvenate Japan,” said Mitsuru Izumo, the founder of Euglena Corporation, a biotechnology start-up valued at $1 billion, and one of the country’s most prominent new entrepreneurs. “If we don’t unleash our youth, then Japan will become too weak to survive another blow like Fukushima. Entrepreneurship is Japan’s last chance.”

For years, sagging entrepreneurial spirit has been cited as a major reason for Japan’s inability to save itself from a devastating deflationary spiral. The nation that produced Sony, Toyota and Honda has created few successors.

By Mario Gamper, VentureVillage
Published December 24, 2013 4:00 PM 

It may be time to say goodbye to a well-trodden cliche. Young entrepreneurs are proving that Korea can do more than copy. The number of tech startups has surged by 80 per cent since 2011. The number of accelerators went from one to more than 50. Here marketing consultant Mario Gamper, who has worked for Platoon Kunsthalle in Berlin and Seoul, gives us a glimpse of  how Korea is building a new culture of business creativity – that apparently rivals Silicon Valley.

There’s no need to look for suburban garages — the next generation of Korean businesses is born downtown. Many startups are home in the now-famous Gangnam district, a landscape of 400 ft glass towers, expensive suits, and women with fashionable noses. Some of the startups, like online deal siteCoupang, have already succeeded in sticking their own logo on an office tower. But even young hopefuls who are still demoing enjoy prime real estate. In brand new coworking space Dreamcamp, teams polishing PowerPoints look out over a beautifully landscaped park.

“This is the best time ever to start your company in Korea,” said Dreamcamp Manager Ryu Hahn. The coworking space and incubator is funded with more than $450m by 20 Korean banks who have formed the “Banks Foundation for Young Entrepreneurs”. Offering a wide range of support, from pitch clinics to funding, Dreamcamp is just one example of the structures for new business ideas that popped up in the last couple of years.

After taking office in 2013, South Korean President Park Geun-Hye swiftly announced a more “creative economy” and launched the new Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning, and endowed it with a bunch of cash. For 2014, the ministry’s budget increased to more than $12bn, with over two billion going directly into beefing up the startup ecosystem.

“Korea is now the biggest startup in the world,” smiles Richard Min, cofounder of the SeoulSpace incubator and brand new Fashion Tech (FT) Accelerator. “60 per cent of all venture capital here is government-backed. In the US it’s one per cent,” said Min.

This creates a unique startup ecosystem: “Korea has always been a top-down economy. The government has now decided to merge it with bottom-up creativity. We’re creating a completely new business culture, one that’s not even seen in Silicon Valley, or anywhere else,” added Min.

By James Santagata
Principal Consultant, Career OverDrive!

Dear James,

How can I gain employment in Japan, specifically in Tokyo? I have a Bachelor's degree, 30 grad hours earned and a TESOL certificate (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages). I am not a native English speaker and I am over the age of 35. I tried in 2012 to find a job while I was in Tokyo for 9 months and lost a lot of money that way.
What are the chances of teaching German there?

Kind Regards,

- TN

Skills Inventory:
1. Bachelor's Degree
2. Graduate School: 30 hours earned
3. TESOL Certification
4. Languages: 
     (a) German: Native speaker
     (b) English: Native Level Fluency
     (c) Japanese: Advanced Beginner

By Chikako Mogi and Masaaki Iwamoto

Takashi Nakajima earns $100,000 a year growing lettuces, employs Chinese laborers to harvest them, and has four months off in winter to indulge his passion for speed skating. He’s the result of a protected farming system that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is about to dismantle.

“I don’t trust the government at all,” said Nakajima, 35, whose village of Kawakami in the picturesque valleys of Nagano prefecture boasts incomes five times the national average. “They want to streamline Japan’s farming business. Small farmers won’t be able to survive and the community will die.”

Government support, including payments to some farmers for not producing, accounted for 56 percent of the total earnings for Japanese agriculture last year, behind only Norway and Switzerland, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. Abe plans to cut the 161 billion yen ($1.6 billion) support for rice farmers’ incomes and reduce import barriers, forcing thousands of hand-tended smallholdings like Nakajima’s to consolidate.

“The current system is so unproductive that it’s hurting the nation as a whole,” said Robert Feldman, head of Japan economic research at Morgan Stanley MUFG Securities Co. “The price of some agricultural goods is higher than it should be. Changing the agricultural laws is a good way to promote the conversion of land to more efficient use.”

At the heart of the battle is the Japan Agricultural Cooperatives group, or the JA, which has unique powers to finance and insure farms, supply them with equipment and fertilizers and buy their produce. With almost 10 million members, that makes the JA the country’s fourth-biggest financial services provider, its largest political lobby and the supplier of nearly half of rice distributed across the country.

....
“In the absence of fundamental reform, the agricultural sector will continue to wither, trapped in a cycle of low productivity, low earnings and dependence on subsidies and import protection,” OECD economists Randall Jones and Shingo Kimura wrote in a May report.

Japan’s proliferation of small farms was the result of a postwar restructuring of land ownership under General Douglas MacArthur during the U.S. occupation, which broke the power of the landlord class and allocated plots to tenant farmers that tilled about one third of the nation’s fields and rice paddies.
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By Kirk Spitzer, Special for USA TODAY

Some top hotels and high-end department stores admitted serving cheaper alternatives instead of the pricey items ordered from menus.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Some restaurants admit mislabeling menu items
• Prized Shiba prawns from Tokyo Bay were just shrimp from India
• Some companies have received the ultimate penalty in Japan: public shaming

TOKYO — This is a city where people spend hours in line for the trendiest bowl of ramen, drop $100 on a gift box of fruit or entertain clients several nights a week at chic restaurants.

So the news that prestigious restaurants have been swapping cheap substitutes for pricey menu items has created a major scandal that threatens to taint Japan's coveted worldwide reputation for exquisite cuisine.

"This is a foodie nation," says Jeff Kingston, professor of Asian Studies at Temple University's campus in Tokyo.

"People are proud of all the Michelin stars, and they generally eat very well, so the scandal has provoked outrage," he says. "People believe that this is simply a scam to improve the bottom line by selling cheap food as expensive cuisine."

Some of Japan's top hotels and high-end department stores in Tokyo, Sapporo and elsewhere admitted to a shocking transgression of ethics. The bait-and-switch was accidental, malefactors say, but at some spots it's alleged to have gone on for years.

People who ordered prized Shiba prawns, a rare and expensive delicacy from Tokyo Bay, were sometimes served bulk shrimp caught off India.

Wagyu beef refers to a special breed of cattle in Japan that is sometimes massaged by hand and fed beer to give its meat a highly marbled look and fattier content.

Some who ordered it got Australian beef. Organic vegetables from small Japanese specialty farms were actually shipped in from China.

The scandal has riled Japan's Consumer Affairs Agency, which says it will prosecute any business that intentionally misled diners. The agency said it will head off damage to Japan's reputation by proposing tougher penalties for food labeling violations, perhaps even jail time.

Japan's luxury Okura hotel chain executives bow their heads at a news conference Nov. 7 in Tokyo to apologize after the hotel served meals made with ingredients falsely labeled as being of top-end quality, such as Pacific white shrimp advertised as the much pricier Shiba variety.(Photo: Getty Images)


Some have received the ultimate penalty in Japan: public shaming.
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By Stephen J. Smith | NEXT CITY


When New Yorkers imagine real estate development in their city, they tend to imagine voracious builders – they think about the crop of towers rising in downtown Brooklyn, in Williamsburg and around the High Line, the construction sites that litter the far west side and Hudson Yards, and the Billionaire’s Row of supertall skyscrapers massing south of Central Park on 57th Street, and they imagine a city overcome by developers.


The narrative of New York as captive to builders overrunning any rational bounds to growth is a popular one, but the statistics – annual housing production numbers so meager that they’d surprise even Amanda Burden, New York’s chief city planner – tell a different story.

According to numbers compiled by James Gleeson for a paper released by Greater London Mayor Boris Johnson’s office on the need to build more housing, New York’s housing production lags far behind its main “world city” competitors, London and Tokyo. In fact, despite New York’s skycraping reputation – it has more high-rises, however you count, than relatively squat Tokyo and London – it actually has more in common with Paris, a city with a reputation for being frozen in its 19th century urban form, when it comes to current growth.