Hardcover. UK, Cambridge University Press, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 407 pages. Color and b&w illustrations. Details the history of cotton and how it has impacted the textile and garment trade. Today's world textile and garment trade is valued at a staggering $425 billion. We are told that under the pressure of increasing globalisation, it is India and China that are the new world manufacturing powerhouses. However, this is not a new phenomenon: until the industrial revolution, Asia manufactured great quantities of colorful printed cottons that were sold to places as far afield as Japan, West Africa and Europe. Cotton explores this earlier globalized economy and its transformation after 1750 as cotton led the way in the industrialization of Europe. By the early nineteenth century, India, China and the Ottoman Empire switched from world producers to buyers of European cotton textiles, a position that they retained for over two hundred years. This is a fascinating and insightful story which ranges from Asian and European technologies and African slavery to cotton plantations in the Americas and consumer desires across the globe. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 191 pages. Matthews Hamabata got off to an unpromising start when he first arrived in Japan to study influential business families. An unmarried, third-generation Japanese-American graduate student, he was there to learn about business executives in their roles as male principals and heads of households. In this engaging and personal narrative, we watch Hamabata in the first disappointing six months of his fieldwork as he attempts to map the boundaries of culture, class, and sexuality. "I became my own biggest fieldwork problem," he writes. "Was I inside or out? When I thought I was in, I was actually out, but when I acknowledged the fact that I was out, I was let in." He soon recognized the importance of marital and filial relations in transmitting power in the business world, and he began to direct his study to examining the social and emotional lives of all members of the Japanese ie (household) and the way they affect business activity and ownership. He takes us behind the scenes of the family enterprise to see how the multiple "layers of reality"-biological, social, religious, emotional, and symbolic-relate and cause dilemmas for ie members. (Names, locations, and other details have been altered for the sake of anonymity.) Clean copy.
Hardcover. London, Fourth Estate, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 362 pages, SIGNED BY AW on title page. Set in Malaysia in the 1930s and 40s, with the rumbling of the Second World War in the background and the Japanese about to invade, The Harmony Silk Factory is the story of four people: Johnny, an infamous Chinaman -- a salesman, a fraudster, possibly a murderer -- whose shop house, The Harmony Silk Factory, he uses as a front for his illegal businesses; Snow Soong, the beautiful daughter of one of the Kinta Valley's most prominent families, who dies giving birth to one of the novel's narrators; Kunichika, a Japanese officer who loves Snow too; and an Englishman, Peter Wormwood, who went to Malaysia like many English but never came back, who also loved Snow to the end of his life. A journey the four of them take into the jungle has a devastating effect on all of them, and brilliantly exposes the cultural tensions of the era. Haunting, highly original, The Harmony Silk Factory is suspenseful to the last page. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1st, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a price-clipped dust jacket, 162 pages. Japan's economy enjoyed unprecedented technological growth in the decades after World War II. At first stereotyped as an exported of shoddy goods, Japan enjoyed a worldwide reputation as an efficient manufacturer of high-quality products. This comprehensive analysis of Japanese management treats four related but distinct subject matters: the economic, social, cultural, and political environment pertinent to Japan's industrial and managerial system; the ideologies and background to the Japanese business elite structure and the relationship between government and business; and managerial practices (organizational structure, personnel practices, decision making). The book first describes the postwar technological environment in and outside Japan. It identifies the Schumpeterian characteristics of economic development and the particular set of relationships that Japan had with the United States and with developing nations in Asia that provided it with the incentive and the necessary mechanisms to advance technologically. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.
Hardcover. New York, Atheneum , 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, In the early 1950s, Katie Takeshima and her family live in Iowa, where her parents own a Japanese supermarket. When the store goes out of business in 1956, the family moves from Iowa to an apartment in Georgia, where Katie's parents work at a chicken hatchery with other Japanese families. Hardcover, 244 pages. Newbery Award winner. Very good pictorial dust jacket without award medal present, unclipped. SIGNED NEWBERY AWARD BOOKMARK ENCLOSED signed "Cynthia".
Hardcover. Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 388 pages, hardcover. B&w plates. INSCRIBED BY ECKERT. Light foxing to edge and light wear to bottom edges of cover. According to conventional interpretations, the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910 destroyed a budding native capitalist economy on the peninsula and blocked the development of a Korean capitalist class until 1945. In this expansive and provocative study, now available in paperback, Carter J. Eckert challenges the standard view and argues that Japanese imperialism, while politically oppressive, was also the catalyst and cradle of modern Korean industrial development. Ancient ties to China were replaced by new ones to Japan - ties that have continued to shape the South Korean political economy down to the present day.Eckert explores a wide range of themes, including the roots of capitalist development in Korea, the origins of the modern business elite, the nature of Japanese colonial policy and the Japanese colonial state, the relationship between the colonial government and the Korean economic elite, and the nature of Korean collaboration. He conveys a clear sense of the human complexity, archival richness, and intellectual challenge of the historical period. His documentation is thorough; his arguments are compelling and often strikingly innovative.
Softcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 2nd pr., 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 421 pages, b&w illustrations. Located only blocks from Tokyo's glittering Ginza, Tsukiji-the world's largest marketplace for seafood-is a prominent landmark, well known but little understood by most Tokyoites: a supplier for countless fishmongers and sushi chefs, and a popular and fascinating destination for foreign tourists. Early every morning, the worlds of hi-tech and pre-tech trade noisily converge as tens of thousands of tons of seafood from every ocean of the world quickly change hands. Clean, bright copy.
Hardcover. NY, Hobart Company, 1st, 1904, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth stamped in orange and black. Three introductory pages of text; balance of book consists entirely of 77 black and white photographs with descriptive captions. Plates showing temples, traditional Japanese residences and businesses, Japanese people at work and at play, a karuma carriage, Yokohama Bay, etc. Clean, bright copy.