During the last decade, there has been increasing research on Corporate Sustainability, whereby most of such research was undertaken in the Western world. This paper is aimed at analysing the contribution of Japanese Business terms to Corporate Susta...
Hanko or signature seals are widely used by Japanese companies to sign business contracts. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused Hanko culture in Japan to become ineffective, especially in teleworking. The pandemic has also negatively affected th...
Environmental problems at the global level have become a critical issue in today’s fashion industry. However, small-and medium-sized fashion business (SMFBs) encounter barriers in promoting green business owing to finances, professional experti...
This study examines the relationship between the business sentiment of Japanese companies regarding promising or potential countries for investment and macroeconomic statistics, such as economic or population growth in Thailand, using data from the S...
The choice between domestic and foreign production is one of the most important decisions not only for international business management but also for economic diplomacy and industrial policy. The reality is not a binary choice, but some firms use bot...
This study extracts the common factors from firm-based credit spreads of major Japanese corporate bonds and examines the predictive content of the credit spread on the real economy. Instead of employing single-maturity corporate bond spreads, we focu...
This study answers four research questions by contextualising the background to Japan’s “carbon neutrality and net-zero” (CNN) policy, which was announced in October 2020, and identifying important changes in Japanese climate policy...
One of the most promising business models towards economic circularity is product-service system (PSS). Despite its great potential benefits, shifting the traditional business model of a manufacturer into PSS business model commonly refers to service...
This study aimed to reveal the actual state of Japanese firms’ logistics outsourcing, and examine their relationship with LSPs. This study addressed the following issues by conducting a case study of six leading manufacturing firms. First, it c...
This study examines the performance of Japanese electric power companies from 2003 to 2020. We use an observed data set from 2003 to 2015 and a forecasted data set from 2016 to 2020. The Japanese deregulation of the industry needs to be completed by...
(1) Japanese universities have an important role in the sustainability of the students who are “oppressed” by social norms, while some of the Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) practices take a conventional approach. The purpose...
Farmlands in Japan’s hilly and mountainous (HM) areas face the critical challenges of aging farmers, depopulation, and disadvantageous conditions for farm management and economic performance, leading to the abandonment of farmland. Rice farming...
This study examined the urban structure of colonial Seoul in the 1930s, the capital city of Korea under the rule of the Japanese empire, by adopting quantitative geographical methods. We utilized a job accessibility index to operationalize the urban...
Passenger transportation in Japan’s main metropolitan areas is operated by the JR companies, which were privatized and divested from Japan National Railways (JNR) in 1987 and by 16 major private railway companies with large-scale operations. Al...
This study investigated consumer attitudes and the motivation of small business owners who participated in the 2019 anti-Japan boycott in South Korea (hereafter, Korea). The main areas of inquiry involved self-expression, the realization of justice,...
The Digital Transformation (DX) megatrend is fundamentally disrupting and changing the nature of work, business, and industry at a rapid pace. Although the notion of DX has garnered much research interest from practitioners, scholarship on this topic...
The stock prices of a company are significantly influenced by changes of its business relationships. However, the effectiveness of stock price prediction based on such inter-firm business relationships has been partially confirmed in limited region a...
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic seriously affected railway businesses. The motivation of this study is to provide vital information to railway company management and policymakers by quantitatively assessing the cost efficiency of railway operat...
Although the sizes of business firms have been a subject of intensive research, the definition of a “size” of a firm remains unclear. In this study, we empirically characterize in detail the scaling relations between size measures of business firms,...
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become popular worldwide after technological breakthroughs in the early 2010s. Accordingly, many organizations and individuals have been using AI for various applications. Previous research has been dominated by case...
3 February 2022
The hygiene hypothesis assumes a low incidence of allergic diseases in families engaging in farming work. However, a few studies have indicated rural life as a potential risk factor for atopic dermatitis (AD). Using a large Japanese birth cohort data...
Biotech startup firms developing pharmaceutical seeds from scientific and technological innovation are burdened by significant Research & Development (R&D) expenses, long-term R&D operations, and low probability of R&D success. To add...
This study demonstrates the mechanisms by which the pragmatic characteristics of legitimacy influence the promotion of corporate social responsibility activities, focusing on firms and investors. We hypothesize that the more aggressive a firm is in i...
1 November 1999
This article summarizes issues related to myofunctional disorders/dysphagia and focuses upon social and economic changes within Japanese culture affecting eating habits and behaviors in children. The authors suggest that unfavorable environmental fac...
In the light of several national advanced manufacturing strategies such as Industry 4.0 in Germany or the Made in China 2025 initiative in China, this article examines the challenges of Industry 4.0 adoption of Japanese small and medium-sized manufac...
This article discusses how to enhance corporate sustainability by simultaneously measuring operational and environment achievements. In past decades, most companies have made steady efforts to enhance their sustainability levels. However, they still...
In the field of vegetable farming, it has become a common approach for farmers to advance into the secondary and tertiary industries to increase their income, an initiative known as the sixth industrialization. Under these circumstances, a growing tr...
This study introduces a novel forecast combination method for monthly Japanese tourism demand, analyzed at both aggregated and disaggregated levels, including tourist, business, and other travel purposes. The sample period spans from January 1996 to...
Vertical farming (VF) is a method of indoor agricultural production, involving stacked layers of crops, utilising technologies to increase yields per unit area. However, this emerging sector has struggled with profitability and a high failure rate. P...
Complexity and information theory are two very valuable but distinct fields of research, yet sharing the same roots. Here, we develop a complexity framework inspired by the allometric scaling laws of living biological systems in order to evaluate the...
Undoubtedly, it is important to have an empirically effective credit risk rating method for decision-making in the financial industry, business, and even government. In our approach, for each corporate bond (CB) and its issuer, we first propose a cre...
This article discusses a business-school collaborative learning partnership in the Regional Centre of Expertise (RCE) on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in Greater Sendai. This partnership is further linked to a broader context of multi-s...
This paper explores the role of boundary objects in the translation and transformation process of a sustainability concept—Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs)—into a firm’s business practices. The qualitative case study describe...
This paper examines a Business Model (BM) from a socio-economic system perspective to discern key factors and understand its interactions resulting in the Scaling of Social Impact (SSI) in Social Entrepreneurship (SE). Previously, studies have explai...
This paper aims to unbundle the antecedents of competence-based synergy in the strategic alliance formation process by employing the ARCTIC framework. The current research provides a new empirical application of the ARCTIC framework to reveal the suc...
As automobiles are major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, the technological shift towards vehicle powertrain systems is an attempt to lower problems such as emissions of carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxides. Patent data are the most reliable m...
Currently, lean construction has become very important, with lean manufacturing, a philosophy of production that in the most basic sense refers to the elimination of waste and tries to eliminate anything that does not add value to the product or serv...
The trade distance is an important constraining factor underpinning the emergence of social and economic interactions of complex systems. However, agent-based studies supported by the granular analysis of distances are limited. Here, we present a com...
31 December 2017
After the nuclear disaster in Fukushima on 11 March 2011, some businesses were permitted to continue operating even though they were located in the evacuation area designated by the Japanese government. The aim of this study was to examine difference...
Each year, a large amount of waste paper (WP) is generated in Japan, and due to the change in lifestyle with the COVID-19 pandemic, the WP collection and recycling system in Japan faces new challenges. Although the government of Japan has installed W...
Willow is a promising biomass resource for addressing the challenges of securing stable domestic biomass fuels in Japan and utilising abandoned agricultural land. Among the willow species, Salix pet-susu Kimura KKD (known as ezonokinu willow, EW) sta...
Adaptive reuse of vacant houses in Japan offers an innovative and sustainable solution to the increase in vacant houses. This approach aligns with principles of sustainable architecture and the circular economy by reducing waste, lowering energy cons...
Rural tourism, which is often interpreted as rural development initiatives, has been extensively studied in a Japanese context; however, this has been typically observed at a community level, and the host households were assumed as homogeneous. There...
The business event sector expects large economic impact as MICE (Meeting (M), Incentive Travel (I), Convention (C), and Exhibition and Event (E)). Some guidelines for MICE sustainability include the requirement for carbon management (carbon neutral,...
Temperatures have fluctuated dramatically throughout our planet’s long history, and in recent decades, global warming has become a more visible indicator of climate change. Climate change has several effects on different economic sectors, espec...
Certain features of socioeconomic models can be distinctly determined in different countries and regions. However, such models are quite flexible under external and internal influences. Their changes can be observed under the impact of unpredictable...
After the global financial crisis, the Japanese government enacted the Financing Facilitation Act in 2009 to help small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that had fallen into unprofitable conditions. Under this law, when troubled debtors asked fina...
The present article explores the flow-oriented and routine-based concept of organizational capability in manufacturing and proposes a practical method of measuring it by using the flow map of material and information (FMMI), including the value strea...
Background: Developing and cultivating mindfulness exerts a positive effect on psychological and cognitive performance. Sharpening the skill requires continuous mindfulness-based training (MT), which can be challenging for people leading busy lives....
Lumbini—the birthplace of Buddha—was declared a World Heritage Site (WHS) in 1997. This recognition came following sustained efforts by many international organizations and the UN-led master plan that was prepared in the 1970s. Almost 50 years in the...
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