Tokyo

"Japan as number one. We became one of the richest countries in the world. We had nothing to fear. The people and the politicians thought it was the case. However, it was just a temporary bubble economy. As soon as the inflated bubble beyond its substance burst entering the 1990s, the Japanese economy began to shrink rapidly. The Nikkei average stock price, which hit a high of 38,915 yen at the end of '89, plummeted to nearly half in just over nine months. The land prices in large urban areas such as Tokyo and Osaka also fell rapidly. At that point, the Japanese should have awakened from the dream and made up their minds. They should have needed to take the first step towards the future by restructuring companies with excess debt and employees, reconfiguring the old industrial structure, and actively paying the price of the bubble. However, Japan did not do that."

"I was much happier to live in Shanghai, where many streets have remained human-scaled rather than being built for cars. The French Concession, where I lived, remains leafy and full of cafés. Shanghai is highly walkable, and one is rarely more than a fifteen-minute walk from one of the city’s many subway stations. Shanghai has vowed to open [120 new parks every year](private://read/01k3jwt46q240aq6fe12mqkyr0/16_Notes.xhtml#_idTextAnchor307) until 2025, when the city will reach 1,000 green spaces. The city of twenty-five million people works remarkably well. Like Tokyo, it has flourishing spaces for commerce, where little dumpling shops are tucked away even in subway stations. And Shanghai is superbly connected by high-speed rail to nearby cities—for example, Hangzhou, home to tech companies like Alibaba, and Suzhou, where many multinationals have manufacturing operations—which are themselves some of China’s most successful cities."

"“I would have been interested in buying 7-Eleven,” Bouchard acknowledges. He even flew to Tokyo to meet with the CEO of the group, in the hopes that he would agree to sell the American portion of his empire, which had more than 20,000 stores around the world. “But the Japanese aren’t sellers,” he discovered. He would have to take them on in a different way, and using patience."

"By the end of the decade the market for business books seemed to be dominated by two groups: (1) computer-armed academics who had spent their lives studying market condi- tions and had the printouts to prove conclusively that garbage in still means garbage out; (2) Japanese soothsayers—or their fans—weighing in with good advice if you happen to be Japa- nese, have the government in Tokyo behind you to cut out foreign competition, and employ docile zombies who smile through eleven-hour workdays, execrable pay, and zero job satisfaction before going home to apartments the size of your standard American golf cart."

"As Apple established more of a presence in the country, Joe O’Sullivan from operations moved to Tokyo in 1993 to head up supplier quality—meaning he was to oversee production and ensure it was up to snuff. “I was in Japan about five minutes, and it was like, ‘Apple can teach the Japanese nothing,’ ” he says."

"Establishing “Japan SoftBank” In September of 1981, Masayoshi Son established “Japan SoftBank” (with a capital of 10 million yen) and started the wholesale business of packaged software for personal computers. Among the people he met at a seminar in Fukuoka, there was someone who had created “Management Comprehensive Research Institute Co., Ltd.” on a corner of Japan TV Street in Ichigaya, Tokyo. Masayoshi Son invested 50% with this company to establish a new company."

"At that time, the last order was at 9:30 PM, but when it got too busy, we would stop the line at 9:00 PM, saying, “Today, we ask you to end here.” Even then, we wouldn’t finish until past 11 PM. During dinner hours, we had three full turnovers of customers. Once in the sushi preparation area, I was constantly making sushi without any break and even earned the nickname “Sushi Machine” from customers around that time. I was once again reminded of the good fortune of having trained in a busy shop in Shibuya, Tokyo. Such prosperity owed much to the spread of the internet."

"Knoetze first attended a congress on small business in Berlin, where he built up valuable contacts from Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea. After visiting each of these countries as well as Singapore and Tokyo in Japan, he returned with a wealth of information about the flourishing small businesses of the Far East."