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,
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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, however, some worries remain. One concern is that if economic growth st rengthens and more full-time jobs are created, would-be entrepreneurs may be tempted to take the safer option of a job instead. Japan's recent wave of en trepreneurship, s ralph lauren outlet ggests Randa ll Jones at the OECD, was caused in part by the la ck of job opportunities for talented graduates dur ing the hiring freeze of the 1990s. But Mr Hori in sists that times have changed, and “the best and b rightest are now going into the entrepreneurial fi eld, which has never happened before.”
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,
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IN THE summer of 2007 Toshifumi Mori moved back to Japan, having spent 14 years in America, Canada, Britain and Germany working for Mitsubishi, one of Japan's big industrial groups. He was struck by s o kobe bryant shoes me of the advertisements he sa w on the Tokyo subway. Such hoardings, he feels, “ tell you what's in”. Alongside the posters promoti ng mobile phones and beer he was surprised to see advertisements for headhunters and recruitment fir ms. “There was nothing like that 15 years ago,” he says. He joined Heidrick & Struggles, one of seve ral companies both promoting and profiting 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,
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Tory Burch On Sale, and only at large Japanese firms; it was never u niversal. The system is now slowly crumbling, but only at the edges, notes Akira Kawamoto, the direc tor 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.