Where They Create Japan

Featuring the work of photographer Paul Barbera, this book documents creativity in 32 Japanese studios. Photographer Paul Barbera presents his next volume in the Where They Create series – this time with a different approach, by exploring the theme of his series through geographical locales. Reinvigorated by his first visit to Japan in five years, he makes this country the starting point of this new volume. Through the lens of creative spaces, Barbera chronicles his journey as he uncovers how contemporary Japanese design, art and creative thinking, has influenced and inspired the world (and vice versa). Barbera's search is simple and clear: he only visits the studios of people whose work he loves and admires, and who have inspiring spaces. For this book, Barbera was invited to shoot the studios of 32 creatives like Anrealage, Kengo Kuma, Wonderwall, Nendo, Tadao Ando, Tokujin Yoshioka, Toyo Ito and many more. Interviews with these creators reveal how their daily environment influences their output. Features Successor to the first portfolio book of Paul Barbera, which was an inspiring publication created out the successful weblog (wheretheycreate.com)The subjects of this book come from all walks of life artists, architects and graphic designers to fashion designers and a flower artists – with engaging stories of how they have arrived at ‘where they create’.The book provides a rare view into the surroundings of some of the greatest Japanese creative minds of our time.Additional interviews with experts on Japanese design shed some light and personal insights on the country’s creative thinking.

Where they Create documents thirty studios where creativity takes place by showing the work of interior photographer Paul Barbera.

The authors contend that Japanese firms are successful because they are innovative--and not merely masters of imitation as some think--and because they create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. Illustrations.

Debates regarding corporate governance have become increasingly important in Japan as the post-war model of bank-based, stakeholder-oriented corporate governance faces the new pressures associated with globalization and growing investor demands for shareholder value. Bringing together a group of leading scholars from economics, law, sociology and management studies, this book looks at how the Japanese approach to corporate governance and the firm have changed in the post-bubble era. The contributions offer a unique empirical exploration of why and how Japanese firms are reshaping their corporate governance arrangements, leading to greater diversity among firms and new 'hybrid' forms of corporate governance. The book concludes by looking at what effect these incremental but transformative changes may have on Japan's distinctive variety of capitalism.

Since 1855, nearly half a million Japanese immigrants have settled in the United States, and today more than twice that number claim Japanese ancestry. While these immigrants worked hard, established networks, and repeatedly distinguished themselves as entrepreneurs, they also encountered harsh discrimination. Nowhere was this more evident than on the West Coast during World War II, when virtually the entire population of Japanese Americans was forced into internment camps solely on the basis of ethnicity.

"In this history of Japanese involvement in northeast China, the author argues that Japan’s military seizure of Manchuria in September 1931 was founded on three decades of infiltration of the area. This incremental empire-building and its effect on Japan are the focuses of this book. The principal agency in the piecemeal growth of Japanese colonization was the South Manchurian Railway Company, and by the mid-1920s Japan had a deeply entrenched presence in Manchuria and exercised a dominant economic and political influence over the area. Japanese colonial expansion in Manchuria also loomed large in Japanese politics, military policy, economic development, and foreign relations and deeply influenced many aspects of Japan’s interwar history."

The thirty-four stories included within this volume do not illustrate the bloody, revengeful or licentious elements, with which Japanese popular, and juvenile literature is saturated. These have been carefully avoided. It is also rather with a view to the artistic, than to the literary, products of the imagination of Japan, that the selection has been made. From my first acquaintance, twelve years ago, with Japanese youth, I became an eager listener to their folk lore and fireside stories. When later, during a residence of nearly four years among the people, my eyes were opened to behold the wondrous fertility of invention, the wealth of literary, historic and classic allusion, of pun, myth and riddle, of heroic, wonder, and legendary lore in Japanese art, I at once set myself to find the source of the ideas expressed in bronze and porcelain, on lacquered cabinets, fans, and even crape paper napkins and tidies.