site. Mr Ito is heartened by Japan's latest crop o f inCoach Factory Outlet ernet entrepreneurs, such as Mixi's Kenji Kasahara. “The new generation of internet CEOs are very humble. They don't spend al l their money in Ginza buying cars,” he says.
It seems that entrepreneurs can do well in Japan a s long as they do not draw too much attention to t hemselves. Mr Hori thinks they have excellent pros pects. There are still relatively few of them, and productivity in Japan's service sector is notorio Polo Ralph Lauren sly low, offering plenty of opp ortunities for start-ups. He says 70% of his venture-capital investments are in services companies, fro m nursing homes to wedding planning. Apart from se rvices, says Mr Hori, “we are betting in areas whe re Japan has an edge,” such as
mobile technology, optics, robotics, digital anima tion and video games.
Despite these hopeful signs,
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Another concern is that too much government effort to encourage start-ups and promote innovation is concentrated on manu tory burch outlet
facturing and technology rather than services, whi ch is arguably where change is most needed. To kee p the momentum going, the OECD recommends reductio ns in capital-gains tax to encourage venture capital; more porta ble pensions and pe Ferragamo Outlet rformance-based pay for researchers to encourage mobility be tween academia and industry; a broader educational curriculum; and the promotion of cross-border trade and investment, since good ideas ofte n come from abroad. Changing Japanese attitudes to entrepreneurship will take time and further refor ms, but at least theFerragamo Shoes wheels have st arted turning.
Japan's labour market is becoming more flexible, b ut also more unequal
IN THE summer of 2007 Toshifumi Mori moved back to Japan,
Tory Burch 4jKxextremely high heels,pink hobo,5 st, having spent 14 years in America, Canada, Britai n and Germany working for Mitsubishi, one of Japan 's big industrial groups. He was struck by so kobe bryant shoes me of the advertisements he saw on t he Tokyo subway. Such hoardings, he feels, “tell y ou what's in”. Alongside the posters promoting mob ile phones and beer he was surprised to see advert isements for headhunters and recruitment firms. “T here was nothing like that 15 years ago,” he says. He joined Heidrick & Struggles,
Tory Burch Flats 2rPRTory Burch Sale Burch Shoes S, one of several companies both promoting and prof iting from a more flexible Japanese labour market.
Where he worked before, the traditional Japanese “ lifetime employment” model was deeply entrenched. It is often said that this model is now collapsing and that the era of “jobs for life” has come to a n end. But the reality is more complicated. For on e thing, the traditional lifetime-employment system existed for only a few decades, and only at large Japanese firms; it was never uni versal. The system is now slowly crumbling,
Tory Burch Sale, but only at the edges, notes Akira Kawamoto, the director of research at RIETI, a government think-tank. Most of the “salarymen” inside the tradition al system will stay there until they retire. But t he labour market is becoming more flexible in seve ral ways.