From the back cover: Richard Wright's study chronicles and analyses the Japanese business presence in Canada. It reveals several distinguishing characteristics of Japanese investment, which should help allay some traditional Canadian concerns about foreign investment. Japanese investment is small in proportion to the total volume of Canada-Japan trade. Moreover, unlike other traditional foreign investors, who generally seek to gain direct control of affiliated companies in Canada, Japanese investors aim primarily to secure reliable flows of raw materials. Because the Japanese emphasis is on trade rather than on investment flows, a high proportion of Japanese investment is in the form of loans rather than equity, and the Japanese often take minority holdings or enter into joint ventures. The role of Japanese investment is thus a very different one from that which has been a source of concern about foreign ownership in Canada.

After two decades of reinvention, Japanese companies are re-emerging as major players in the new digital economy. They have responded to the rise of China and new global competition by moving upstream into critical deep-tech inputs and advanced materials and components. This new "aggregate niche strategy" has made Japan the technology anchor for many global supply chains. Although the end products do not carry a "Japan Inside" label, Japan plays a pivotal role in our everyday lives across many critical industries. This book is an in-depth exploration of current Japanese business strategies that make Japan the world's third-largest economy and an economic leader in Asia. To accomplish their reinvention, Japan's largest companies are building new processes of breakthrough innovation. Central to this book is how they are addressing the necessary changes in organizational design, internal management processes, employment, and corporate governance. Because Japan values social stability and economic equality, this reinvention is happening slowly and methodically, and has gone largely unnoticed by Western observers. Yet, Japan's more balanced model of "caring capitalism" is both competitive and transformative, and more socially responsible than the unbridled growth approach of the United States.

The Dutch East India Company was a hybrid organization combining the characteristics of both corporation and state that attempted to thrust itself aggressively into an Asian political order in which it possessed no obvious place and was transformed in the process. This study focuses on the company's clashes with Tokugawa Japan over diplomacy, violence, and sovereignty. In each encounter the Dutch were forced to retreat, compelled to abandon their claims to sovereign powers, and to refashion themselves again and again—from subjects of a fictive king to loyal vassals of the shogun, from aggressive pirates to meek merchants, and from insistent defenders of colonial sovereignty to legal subjects of the Tokugawa state. Within the confines of these conflicts, the terms of the relationship between the company and the shogun first took shape and were subsequently set into what would become their permanent form. The first book to treat the Dutch East India Company in Japan as something more than just a commercial organization, The Company and the Shogun presents new perspective on one of the most important, long-lasting relationships to develop between an Asian state and a European overseas enterprise.

Hiroshima Immigrants in Canada, 1891-1941 is a fascinating investigation of Japanese migration to Canada prior to the Second World War. It makes Japanese-language scholarship on the subject available for the first time, and also draws on interviews, diaries, community histories, biographies, and the author's own family history. Starting with the history of the feudal fiefs of Aki and Bingo, which were merged into Hiroshima prefecture, Ayukawa describes the political, economic, and social circumstances that precipitated emigration between 1891 and 1941. She then examines the lives and experiences of those migrants who settled in western Canada. Interviews with three generations of community members, as well as with those who never emigrated, supplement research on immigrant labour, the central role of women, and the challenges Canadian-born children faced as they navigated life between two cultures. This book is a must-read for scholars of migrations, diaspora, and transnationalism, and will also be of great interest to general readers who wish to learn more about the lives and experiences of Japanese Canadians.

Looking at Canada's public diplomacy abroad through culture, international education, and international broadcasting.

Today's headlines often feature stories about new trade agreements with Asian countries, but tapping eastern markets has long been a goal of Canadian commerce. When the Canadian Pacific Railway reached its terminus in British Columbia, which was seen as the launching point for trade in the Far East, particularly with China and Japan. The history of members of those cultures immigrating to Canada is well documented, but there has been little written on Canadians venturing across the Pacific from west to east. When adventurers first crossed the Pacific from BC in the 19th century, they encountered the closely guarded shores of Japan, a society emerging from 200 years of self-imposed isolation and transforming from a largely feudal country into a modern world power. Curious outsiders had for centuries been unable to penetrate the land of shoguns. This collection of stories begins with Ranald Macdonald, who tempted fate by intentionally shipwrecking himself off the coast of Japan in 1848, and takes readers through to 1945. As Japan slowly opened up to foreign influences, the new arrivals proved to be an intriguing and diverse cast of adventurers, missionaries, businessmen, social activists, soldiers and misfits.