by carterjmrn | Jun 26, 2019 | Carter Group Viewpoints, Women Power
In our 2019 CarterJMRN Japan Sentiment Study, we asked 1000 men and women across all 47 prefectures whether they felt that women are making progress toward equality in society. While almost half of the men at 47% felt that this is the case, women were rather less...
by carterjmrn | Jun 13, 2019 | Carter Group Viewpoints, Uncategorized
The LGBT community of Japan may go somewhat unnoticed by the general public, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been making waves in the media. When Liberal Democratic Party member Mio Sugita called homosexual couples “unproductive” and questioned whether it was...
by carterjmrn | Jun 11, 2019 | Carter Group Viewpoints
Whether you call it solo katsu, the super-solo life or ohitorisama (“doing things on your own”), living single is big in Japan. I’m not talking only about so-called parasite singles, either—I mean fully independent individuals who are putting a mostly...
by carterjmrn | Jun 7, 2019 | Carter Group Viewpoints
It was already in 2010 when JMRN pointed out that Japan’s online retail market had increased by 17% annually since 2005, At that time, Japanese consumers were more hesitant than the rest of the world to embrace e-commerce. Japan’s online retail market was...
by carterjmrn | Jun 4, 2019 | Carter Group Viewpoints
In the land of Japan Tobacco, is the smoky air clearing at last? Japan’s cities and office buildings have been gradually squeezing smokers into smaller confines, forbidding puffing away while walking on the street and creating smoking rooms that serve as havens and...
by carterjmrn | May 21, 2019 | Carter Group Viewpoints
It really shouldn’t be this way, but the lives and careers of Japan’s highly educated and capable women are still dictated by how the country’s grey patriarchy thinks and acts. The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report for 2018 shows just how wide the gulf...
by carterjmrn | May 15, 2019 | Carter Group Viewpoints
In a famous scene from the Oscar-winning 1967 movie The Graduate, a savvy businessman pulls Dustin Hoffman’s naïve and rudderless character Benjamin aside and utters a single word of advice: “Plastics.” He was right. Plastics were indeed the future, but as it...
by carterjmrn | Apr 16, 2019 | Ageing and Generations, Carter Group Viewpoints, Japan Market Entry
Whenever you read anything about demography in Japan the greying baby boomers come up time and again as being the key distinctive cohort. It is certainly true to say that to plot the course of the Japanese baby boomer generation, the so-called Dankai, is to plot...
by carterjmrn | Apr 4, 2019 | Carter Group Viewpoints
When you were a kid, did you ever have that one friend you thought was perfectly normal, just like you, until you got invited to the kid’s house and . . . WOW, you realized your friend was rich and possibly not like you at all? Appearances can certainly be deceptive....