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This paper aims to consider the current situation of relocation in Japan after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake (GEJE) in the context of past examples and post-disaster housing relocation projects in other countries.

Information about international cases of post-disaster housing relocation was gathered though desk and literature review, supplemented by field visits to the sites for direct observation and interviews with people involved in the relocation projects.

To be successful, residential relocation must consider livelihood, especially in regards to location. Involvement of the residents in the planning and decision making process creates housing relocation projects that better meet residents’ needs. Japan faces some unique challenges, yet shares commonalities with other countries, for example, in tsunami-stricken fishing areas. Housing relocation in Tohoku must strive to be accountable to the needs of the residents and the specific contexts of their communities.

There is still a limited amount of literature in English that considers the issues of relocation in recovery after the GEJE in an international context, especially comprehensive comparisons with multiple countries. Although this paper does not deal with each international case in great detail, the comparison provides a good overview of the key issues for residents in post-disaster relocation, and suggests how lessons from international cases could be applied to the challenges that Japan currently faces in relocation planning in the Tohoku region.

Examining aspects of organizational identity, this paper revisits McLuhan's media theory in connection with W.R. Scott's insight that organizations themselves are the medium. The purpose of this paper is to consider the history of the Tokyo‐based urban developer/media organization Parco Co., Ltd, which emerged from a department store bankruptcy in 1969.

Through exploring the process of how a bankrupted department store transformed into Parco, a harbinger of Japan's consumer culture, the identity of Parco is sought in connection to its marketing strategies and managerial discourses.

Examining the identity of Parco provides two insights. First, there is a reflexive dynamism between an organizational identity and the organizational strategies. Parco exemplifies this concept as its strategies are defined and articulated by its organizational identity, which is in turn influenced by its organizational strategies. Second, Parco's organizational efficiency is found in its “organizational symbioticity”, a new construct which extends not only within but also beyond the firm.

The Parco case provides an important lesson. The medium that acts as an entrepreneur on the cutting edge can also be the message. For a medium that is ubiquitous, the message is the content of the medium. This appears to be the reason why Parco continues to successfully redefine its identities and strategies.

This paper uses the case study method to exemplify contemporary organizational identity and its marketing strategies. Furthermore, it demonstrates how an understanding of the social significance of the medium shapes consumer culture today.

Journal articles and books on Toyota's competitive advantage abound. More recent analyses tended to focus on Toyota alone (Coriat, 2000; Liker, 2004) while earlier literature examined the competitive advantage of the Japanese automobile industry as a whole (Asanuma, 1989; Womack, Jones, & Roos, 1990; Fruin, 1992; Dyer, 1994, 1996a, 1996b). Intensive analysis on the Toyota Production System (TPS) notwithstanding, what exactly constitutes the system's inimitability remains elusive. This paper contributes to existing literature by examining how a post-war industrial policy might have given rise to Toyota and Nissan adopting two different strategic logics (or governance structures) as each had a unique set of resources and competences. Different governance structures however, did not appear to contribute to inter-firm performance variance between the two competitors for at least 15 years. What then could be the source of Toyota's competitive advantage and its inimitability? This paper unravels how causal ambiguity might have confounded Nissan, Toyota's only significant domestic rival for the second half of the last century.