China’s Huawei technologies, the world’s third largest smartphone maker after Apple and Samsung, has announced plans to build new R&D facilities in Chiba, Japan.
This news shows the general trend of Chinese corporations becoming multinationals, but what struck Japanese people is not this news, but other news that Huawei Japan is offering the starting monthly salary of 400,000 Japanese yen.
Major Japanese agricultural machinery makers are developing self-driving tractors. The government plans to support the introduction of these tractors amid growing hopes that such machines will help farmers cope with labor shortages at a time when many are aging and face difficulties finding successors.
In June 2017, Kubota Corp. started selling the country’s first tractors with autonomous driving functions on a trial basis. Utilizing the Global Positioning System (GPS), the tractors can keep tabs on where they are operating.
Uniqlo has made the most of inexpensive labor in Asia to become a leading global SPA player. But making goods overseas is not necessarily compatible with responding quickly to customer needs. That is why the company is rethinking the typical approach of churning out products in emerging economies.
To more swiftly respond to customer needs, the company is working on a system for sending out goods in as few as 10 days. To achieve that, airplanes will be essential, although costly.
At SoftBank Group's annual shareholders meeting in Tokyo on Wednesday, founder and chief executive Masayoshi Son said: "Some say SoftBank is a mobile phone company, but that's wrong [...] We are an information revolution company. A cellphone is just a device. From now on, we will be in an age where all infrastructure will be connected by information networks."
Son has about 30 targets lined up in emerging sectors such as artificial intelligence, robotics and the internet of things. SoftBank, he made it clear, intends to be at the forefront of all these fields.
Yamato Transport Co. has modified its parcel delivery time slots to reduce the burden on overworked drivers handling a sharp increase in parcels.
As of Monday, the door-to-door parcel delivery firm no longer allows noon to 2 p.m. as a designated delivery time so drivers can take a lunch break.
In addition, the company replaced the latest time slot in the day of 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. with a new slot of 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. to avoid the concentration of delivery orders in the final one hour.
Japan began introducing bilingual traffic signs on Saturday as the number of foreign visitors increases ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics.
By the time the games open, about 35,000 of the 140,000 stop signs in the capital will have been replaced with ones in both Japanese and English near the Olympic venues and in other areas, the Metropolitan Police Department said.
Along with the new stop signs, bilingual slow-down signs will also be introduced.
The so-called sharing economy has spread to a variety of fields such as cars and homes, and Japan has seen another rising trend in recent years—bicycles.
A growing number of municipalities and private firms are providing bikes to gauge whether such services will catch on.
According to NTT Docomo Inc., which has been teaming up with municipalities to offer a bike-sharing service on an experimental basis, its bicycles were used about 1.8 million times in fiscal 2016, which ended March 31, up from 20,000 in fiscal 2012.
Japanese workers devoting themselves to working massively long hours for their employers might be becoming a thing of the past.
Nearly half of newly employed people said they would leave the office when their work was done even if their superiors or colleagues were working overtime, according to a survey released Monday.
Amazon Japan aims to build a team of 10,000 independent couriers in the Tokyo region by 2020 to continue offering same-day delivery service without relying on major parcel delivery companies.
An amateur historian has unearthed compelling evidence that the first Australian maritime foray into Japanese waters was by convict pirates on an audacious escape from Tasmania almost two centuries ago.
Fresh translations of samurai accounts of a “barbarian” ship in 1830 give startling corroboration to a story modern scholars had long dismissed as convict fantasy: that a ragtag crew of criminals encountered a forbidden Japan at the height of its feudal isolation.
Faced with slack consumption and soul-searching over Japan’s notoriously poor work-life balance, the government is asking companies to allow their workers to leave at 3pm on the last Friday of the month.
The hope is that they will use those extra hours of freedom to shop, make an early start to their Friday libations or go on a weekend break.
Toshiba Corp said it may have to book several billion dollars in charges related to a U.S. nuclear power plant construction company acquisition, sending its stock tumbling 12 percent and rekindling concerns about its accounting acumen.
