Rising labor costs are casting shadows over Japanese businesses amid escalating manpower shortages. According to a labor ministry survey for June released late last week, the average hourly pay of part-time workers rose 3.1 percent from a year earlier, up for the 64th straight month. With ...
Summer bonuses at major Japanese companies fell for the first time in five years this year, according to a final tally by the Japanese Business Federation (Keidanren). The average bonus fell 2.98 percent from a year earlier to ¥878,172, the first drop since 2012, after ...
For decades, boards allowed former executives to linger on as highly paid advisers, without offering shareholders much detail about their roles. Now, there are signs that cushy retirement gigs may no longer be a sure thing. Japan's largest drugmaker, Takeda Pharmaceutical Co., in an unusual ...
Business sentiment among major companies worsened in the quarter that ended in June, according to a government survey released Tuesday. The business sentiment index for companies with capital of ¥1 billion or more stood at minus 2.0, down from plus 1.3 for the previous quarter, ...
Japanese ramen shops are thriving in Malaysia, where locals are embracing the noodle dish with gusto. Famous Japanese ramen brands have been entering the Malaysian market one after another in recent years following the entry of sushi and shabu shabu hot pot restaurant chains in ...
Japanese companies have grown wary about possible adverse effects from the Saudi-Qatar crisis on their businesses. Some companies have started considering how to cope with the heightened tensions between the Saudi Arabian camp and Qatar, both major energy exporters to Japan, people familiar with the ...
There were 3,866,537 companies in Japan as of June 2016, marking a 6.3 percent decrease from the previous survey released in February 2012, according to a government survey. Meanwhile, the number of business locations, including offices and branches, dropped 2.5 percent in the same period, ...
Capital spending by Japanese companies rose 4.5 percent year-on-year in the January-March quarter, reaching the highest level in nine years, the Finance Ministry said Thursday, providing evidence that the economy has been picking up momentum. Business investment by all non-financial sectors for purposes such as ...
Combined group net profits at major Japanese nonfinancial companies soared 21.1 percent in fiscal 2016, which ended in March, according to a Jiji Press analysis. The survey covered 1,117 nonfinancial companies listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange's first section that have already released their earnings ...
Corporate Japan achieved a rare feat in the fiscal year that ended last week. None of its almost 4,000 publicly-traded firms filed for bankruptcy protection. Yet that's no reason to celebrate, according to analysts who see easy credit conditions standing in the way of a ...
"The Blue-eyed Salaryman" is Irishman Niall Murtagh's account of working for Mitsubishi. It's not quite a tell-all: colleagues' names are disguised with cute monikers — sometimes a little too cute — such as Kawaii (cute), and Majime (straight-laced), and in keeping with the time-honored tradition ...
The first Japanese winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1968, Yasunari Kawabata, deals with the gradual decline that comes with aging in "The Sound of the Mountain." The Sound of the Mountain, by Yasunari Kawabata, Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker. 276 pages TUTTLE, Fiction. Family patriarch ...
