In an upland valley in Kumamoto Prefecture, a huge, dark-silver-colored flat building is home to silkworms that are raised all year round. Believed to be one of the world's biggest bioclean silkworm factories, it was completed in April 2017 at a cost of ¥2.3 billion ...
A century-old Japanese-style inn in Kanagawa Prefecture that nearly went bust amid outdated management practices has made a recovery thanks to an injection of modern technology. Jinya is a 20-room hot-spring inn in the city of Hadano's Tsurumaki spa resort, about an hour by train ...
The concept of "creating shared value" is gradually but steadily finding its way into corporate Japan as an increasing number of managers recognize the importance of community-based business strategies. The CSV concept was proposed by Harvard University scholars, including Michael Porter, a professor at Harvard ...
An innovative distribution method has made it possible to bring fish to consumers in Tokyo on the day they were caught, not via the controversy-mired Tsukiji or Toyosu markets, but through Haneda airport. At 10:20 a.m. one day in late May, a container of fresh ...
Though it only has 13 employees, an auto parts manufacturer in central Japan boasts a 50 percent share of the market for auto racing seats in Asia, and is regarded as one of the five biggest global brands. "We are pursuing products that can make ...
Heisei Corp., a small construction company in Shizuoka Prefecture, has a pool of 220 carpenters comprising many who finished graduate programs at the country's top schools, including the University of Tokyo. Carpentry is by no means a magnet for new graduates on the job front ...
Seaplanes used to be a common form of transport in the Japanese archipelago, with scheduled cargo and passenger flights operating mainly in western Japan until the mid-1960s. But as shinkansen trains and regional airports, which enable faster transport links with greater capacity, developed, seaplanes were ...
With traditional family farms on the wane, corporations are increasingly entering the agriculture sector, taking advantage of an updated law allowing them to lease farmland across the country. At the end of 2015, more than 2,000 companies were operating in the farm sector, a roughly ...
The "smallest distiller in Japan" operating on a mountainous site about 100 km northwest of Tokyo has won recognition from whisky lovers at home and abroad. Venture Whisky Ltd. was established only 11 years ago. But some of its products won high marks as Japanese ...
Reviving Japan's once-extinct stork population is not just a story of conservation in the city of Toyooka, Hyogo Prefecture. It is also the tale of a provincial region reinventing itself to prevent its population following the species into endangered status. In common with many regions ...
