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This paper offers new theoretical contributions and practical knowledge to existing leadership theories. Through a detailed study of the major corporation SoftBank, a Japanese company achieving business innovation at a global level in recent years, and insights gained on the leadership for organizational adaptability of practitioners driving strategic innovation, this paper presents a framework for 'holistic leadership' with a fractal nature as a complex adaptive system. In the three 'practice layers' of the 'formal organizational layer', 'psychological boundary layer (adaptive space)' and the 'informal organizational layer', practitioners (in the three management layers of top management, middle management and staff) dynamically use 'centralized leadership', 'dialectical leadership' and 'distributed leadership' and combine them depending on the situation, to achieve a balance between various contradictory elements such as the 'tug‐of‐war between efficiency and creativity', and demonstrate organizational adaptability. Through an in‐depth case study, this paper illustrates that holistic leadership in modern companies is a source of business innovation. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of medical care, technological advances, and the ageing of society have led to rising medical costs. As a result, there is a demand to improve the efficiency of healthcare delivery systems, including public healthcare institutions, in order to ensure the sustainability of healthcare functions. In 2004, as part of national civil service reform in Japan, national hospitals were merged in order to form the National Hospital Organization (NHO). The NHO used new public management methods and was required to be self-financing and to maintain critical functions under a five-year management plan. The objective of this study was to examine whether the NHO was able to maintain its key function in the national infrastructure in terms of management. An analysis of the business conditions of the NHO was performed based on the financial statements from FY 2004 to FY 2018 using evaluation indexes. In the first and second periods, the NHO achieved its targeted management improvements. However, since FY 2014, even with the utmost restrictions on capital investment, the profits have not increased, and the free cash flow has been negative. Our results suggest that further organizational reforms are needed in order to sustain the NHO infrastructure in the long term and to withstand health crisis management during periods such as the COVID-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explores four themes at the 1998 APJRA conference - critical perspectives of accounting, organizational and institutional perspectives, public sector accounting in Japan and international accounting issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the Second Asian Pacific Interdisciplinary Research in Accounting (APIRA) Conference held at the Osaka City University, Japan, during August 4-6, 1998. This conference was held in association with "Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal" and followed on from the inaugural APIRA network conference held in Sydney in 1995. Second APIRA Conference, the local Japanese organising committee and Osaka City University attracted over 160 delegates from 15 countries representing Europe, North America and the Asian-Pacific Region. The refereed papers programme had a strong interdisciplinary focus with research papers and forums addressing the relationship between accounting, auditing and accountability and their social, institutional, economic and political environment. An important outcome from the conference is the publication of the commentaries on several important areas including management accounting, public sector accounting, social and environmental accounting, critical perspectives on accounting, Japanese and international accounting, and accounting history.

Background: COVID-19 has a direct impact on the employment of older people. This adds to the challenge of ageism. The World Health Organization has started a worldwide campaign to combat ageism and has called for more research and evidence-based strategies that have the potential to be scaled up. This study specifically aims to identify solutions to combat the adverse effects of COVID-19 on the global ageing workforce. Methods: We present 15 case studies from different countries and report on what those countries are doing or not doing to address the impact of COVID-19 on ageing workers. Results: We provide examples of how COVID-19 influences older people's ability to work and stay healthy, and offer case studies of what governments, organizations or individuals can do to help ensure older people can obtain, maintain and, potentially, expand their current work. Case studies come from Australia, Austria, Canada, China, Germany, Israel, Japan, Nigeria, Romania, Singapore, Sweden, South Korea, Thailand, United Kingdom (UK), and the United States (US). Across the countries, the impact of COVID-19 on older workers is shown as widening inequalities. A particular challenge has arisen because of a large proportion of older people, often with limited education and working in the informal sector within rural areas, e.g. in Nigeria, Thailand and China. Remedies to the particular disadvantage experienced by older workers in the context of COVID are presented. These range from funding support to encouraging business continuity, innovative product and service developments, community action, new business models and localized, national and international actions. The case studies can be seen as frequently fitting within strategies that have been proven to work in reducing ageism within the workplace. They include policy and laws that have increased benefits to workers during lockdowns (most countries); educational activities such as coaching seniorpreneurship (e,g, Australia); intergenerational contact interventions such as younger Thai people who moved back to rural areas and sharing their digital knowledge with older people and where older people reciprocate by teaching the younger people farming knowledge. Conclusion: Global sharing of this knowledge among international, national and local governments and organizations, businesses, policy makers and health and human resources experts will further understanding of the issues that are faced by older workers. This will facilitate the replication or scalability of solutions as called for in the WHO call to combat ageism in 2021. We suggest that policy makers, business owners, researchers and international organisations build on the case studies by investing in evidence-based strategies to create inclusive workplaces. Such action will thus help to challenge ageism, reduce inequity, improve business continuity and add to the quality of life of older workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We provide evidence of private information in the foreign exchange market. The evidence comes from the introduction of trading in Tokyo over the lunch hour. Lunch-return variance doubles with the introduction of trading, which cannot be due to public information since the flow of public information did not change with the trading rules. We then exploit microstructure theory to discriminate between the two alternatives: private information and mispricing. Four key results support the predictions of private-information models. Three of these involve changes in the intraday volatility U-shape. The fourth is that opening trade causes mispricing's share in variance to fall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a new point of view regarding the knowledge management of new product and service development (NPSD), a high-tech field requiring the merging and integration of different technologies and business models. As case studies, we examine the dynamism of the knowledge creation process in NPSD at traditional Japanese telecommunication companies, as they merge and integrate the different elements of broadband wired and wireless network technologies and business models, and we analyse the new knowledge creation process of NPSD in two cases. In a short period of time, strategic teams at the companies formed strategic communities outside the company including customers, and then formed a network that transcended the strategic communities' boundaries. The synthesizing capability of the leadership-based strategic communities comprising community leaders inside the networked strategic communities enabled strategic teams to build new business models aimed at customers and achieved successful NPSD ahead of other competitors. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability of small businesses to make and adjust to the paradigm shift needed to benefit from Japanese production theory has been questioned in the literature. Zangwill (1992) questioned limits of the Japanese Production Theory (JPT) and in a subsequent paper (Zangwill. 1994) to his argument about the limits of the Japanese Production Theory. In this paper, the Japanese Production Theory is first discussed, followed by a discussion of the consistency between traditional EOQ theory and the Japanese production theory, critique of the Zangwill's argument, and issues related to the relevance of the Japanese production theory to small businesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at Japan's international trade practices, noting the tension between Japan and the U.S. as Japan's economic status grows closer to becoming a competitive threat. The author notes that the Japanese market is significantly more closed than the markets of most of the other advanced industrial nations. The unique character of Japanese business organizations and their distinctive relationships with one another and with the Japanese government provide major impediments to Japanese market accessibility. The entry of Motorola into the Japanese telecommunications market and their interaction with Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) is discussed.

This paper extracts several dualistic constructs from the anthropological literature on Japan and interprets them in terms of recent understandings of paradox in organizational behaviour. Two historical and one contemporary illustration of these dualities within the Japanese business macroculture are offered. Each is interpreted using a normative, critical and paradox approach, and the different approaches are shown to constitute competing explanations of the phenomena. The findings are discussed in terms of how the dualities affect the dynamics of Japanese business conduct and how they reproduce a macroculture among the large business conglomerates. Insights are offered into how individual firm behaviour is shaped by dualistic features of the macroculture. Implications are drawn for how the conduct of cross-cultural business relationships and government policy may be informed by paradox. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a study of the reconsidered intra-industry trade wile referencing to Singapore's bilateral trade with Japan and the United States. Examination of the intra-industry trade between Singapore and Japan; Purpose of the paper; Development of a reformulated indexes to recompute Singapore's bilateral intra-industry trade with Japan and the United States.

This paper examines the role of the exchange rate in U.S. external adjustments. The results show that the ex change rate is an important transmission channel of influence on prices, and with longer lags, on income and the trade balance. The effects of the exchange rate and relative prices on the trade balance are not symmetric even in the long run. Exchange rate feedback is insignificant and makes little difference in trade balance adjustment. There are also indications that the response of relative prices to the exchange rate shifted in recent years. Such changes seem to help explain the persistence of the U.S. trade deficit in recent years for multilateral trade, but not bilateral trade, with Japan or Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract--Many attempts to estimate trade elasticities for Japan have yielded statistically insignificant or implausible results. One reason is that most previously estimated models have undoubtedly misspecified the adjustment of trade volumes to changes in relative prices. In this paper a generalized gamma distributed lag model of Japanese trade is estimated. The estimates confirm that the lags on responses to price changes are much longer than previous estimates have allowed. The estimates are then used to construct a "J-curve" for Japan [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To investigate the actual phenomenon of transport on a complex network, we analysed empirical data for an inter-firm trading network, which consists of about one million Japanese firms, and the sales of these firms (a sale corresponds to the total in-flow into a node). First, we analysed the relationships between sales and sales of nearest neighbourhoods, from which we obtained a simple linear relationship between sales and the weighted sum of sales of nearest neighbourhoods (i.e. customers). In addition, we introduced a simple money transport model that is coherent with this empirical observation. In this model, a firm (i.e. customer) distributes money to its out-edges (suppliers) in proportion to the in-degree of destinations. From intensive numerical simulations, we found that the steady flows derived from these models can approximately reproduce the distribution of sales of actual firms. The sales of individual firms deduced from the money-transport model are shown to be proportional, on an average, to the real sales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the case of a virtual education business in Japan. Progression of the multimedia business; Details on virtual education business; Information on the expansion of the virtual education business through the customer value creation-type business.

In his 1915 essay "The Opportunity of Japan," Thorstein Veblen theorized that traditional Japanese institutions would undergo evolutionary change as Japan exploited borrowed industrial technology and became integrated into the global business enterprise system This article explains the recent liberalization of Japanese financial markets which followed Japan's rise to economic prominence within the context of Veblen's theory of institutional development of the enterprise system. The Japanese process of financial deregulation is reviewed. Veblen's predictions for Japan are Presented and an explanation provided for the liberalization of Japanese financial markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Business ethics in Japan has developed in five stages. Especially in the last stage (in the 1990s), there have appeared two clear-cut trends in business ethics activities: positive and passive. For the rise of business ethics, the passive trend is much more important. Once entered the 1990s, an increasing number of business scandals have been revealed. Because of this, the Japanese business community cannot but help take business ethics much more seriously than it ever has. Not only business practitioners but also business ethicists have inaugurated a variety of ethics-related studies and activities. This article mainly puts focus on the studies, which have been done in the 1990s. At the end of the article, ethical challenges, which the Japanese business and academia meet presently, are described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To analyze business fixed investment in Japan, which has been unusually volatile in recent years, we develop and apply a log-linear flexible accelerator model. We find that movements in business fixed investment are consistent with movements in output and the tax-adjusted cost of capital, both on average during our entire 1961-1994 sample and during the recent 1986-1994 business cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Proper age verification can prevent minors from accessing tobacco products. For this reason, electronic locking devices based on a proof-of age system utilising cards were installed in almost every tobacco vending machine across Japan and Germany to restrict sales to minors. Objective We aimed to clarify the associations between amount smoked by high school students and the usage of age verification cards by conducting a nationwide cross-sectional survey of students in Japan. Methods This survey was conducted in 2008. We asked high school students, aged 13-18 years, in Japan about their smoking behaviour, where they purchase cigarettes, if or if not they have used age verification cards, and if yes, how they obtained this card. Results As the amount smoked increased, the prevalence of purchasing cigarettes from vending machines also rose for both males and females. The percentage of those with experience of using an age verification card was also higher among those who smoked more. Somebody outside of family was the top source of obtaining cards. Surprisingly, around 5% of males and females belonging to the group with highest smoking levels applied for cards themselves. Conclusions Age verification cards cannot fully prevent minors from accessing tobacco products. These findings suggest that a total ban of tobacco vending machines, not an age verification system, is needed to prevent sales to minors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]