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Despite the trend in many countries in their attitudes to fill in the pitfalls in their anti‐organised‐crime legislatures by broadening its scope, especially in money‐laundering provisions, there have been, quite surprisingly, no legislative efforts made in Japan to follow such a trend. However, Japan appears to try to combat organised crime in the same way as others in the wake of borderless and diversified activities of organised crime and in the need for international cooperation in investigations.

Historians may write that the 1980s were the decade when Japan proved itself to be an economic power competitive with other leading nations, and by the end of it, the power had became so gigantic that it dominated major properties in countries all over the world. In the 1990s, however, a number of economic scandals disproved this and people have realised that such power was a mere façade where nothing much, especially in the business environment, has changed behind the scenes.

Sago starch (Metroxylon sagu Rottb.) is one of the starches imported into Japan. Recently, sago starch has been promoted as a healthy type of starch because it is gluten-free and non-allergenic. This study aims to identify the factors affecting sago starch import demand during the period 1978–2017 in Japan by using a double logarithmic linear function. The study revealed that the price of sago starch, GDP, aging population rate and tariff-rate quota policy are significant factors influencing sago starch importation in Japan.

This paper explores the social-behavioral aspects of financial markets. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of social relations and networks which contributed to the market crash in the US telecommunications sector in the late 1990s.

A network theoretic approach is used to examine historical qualitative data. The authors suggest that the network characteristics of financial intermediaries allowed security analysts to control and manipulate information that was disclosed to the investing public.

The authors find evidence that brokerage locations in the network of actors within the telecommunications market allowed select individuals opportunities to engage in unethical behavior and malfeasance. The authors further highlight the harmful effects of over-embeddedness by illustrating that strong and dense network ties within the financial sector were exploited to distort the flow and reliability of information. The paper concludes with a note on the generalizability of this study and an examination of the current economic-legal structure of Wall Street.

Recently, some economists and network scholars have begun examining social relations more thoroughly in the financial sector. This paper is one of the first that focuses specifically on the role and network location of research analysts prior to a market collapse.

Flow control has a great potential to contribute to a sustainable society through mitigation of environmental burden. However, the high dimensional and nonlinear nature of fluid flows poses challenges in designing efficient control laws using the control theory. This paper aims to propose a hybrid method (i.e. machine learning and control theory) for feedback control of fluid flows, by which the flow is mapped to the latent space in such a way that the linear control theory can be applied therein.

The authors propose a partially nonlinear linear system extraction autoencoder (pn-LEAE), which consists of convolutional neural networks-based autoencoder (CNN-AE) and a custom layer to extract low-dimensional latent dynamics from fluid velocity field data. This pn-LEAE is designed to extract a linear dynamical system so that the modern control theory can easily be applied, while a nonlinear compression is done with the autoencoder (AE) part so that the latent dynamics conform to that linear system. The key technique is to train this pn-LEAE with the ground truths at two consecutive time instants, whereby the AE part retains its capability as the AE, and the weights in the linear dynamical system are trained simultaneously.

The authors demonstrate the effectiveness of the linear system extracted by the pn-LEAE, as well as the designed control law’s effectiveness for a flow around a circular cylinder at the Reynolds number of Re_D = 100. When the control law derived in the latent space was applied to the direct numerical simulation, the lift fluctuations were suppressed over 50%.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt using CNN-AE for linearization of fluid flows involving transient development to design a feedback control law.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how multinational enterprises have historically managed global patenting and to what extent the localization of patent management has supported the expansion of these enterprises. This study focuses on the electric appliance industry (one of the first industries to see the emergence of global companies) and consider the case of Siemens, a German multinational company, comparing it to General Electric (GE), an American company.

The work adopts a global business history approach. Taking GE’s global patent-management model, described by Nishimura (2004, 2009, 2016), as the benchmark, this study analyzed Siemens’ worldwide control of its intellectual property rights between 1890 and Second World War, using German, Japanese and American primary sources.

Patent management is a common means for firms to globalize and transfer technology internationally, but it can take various forms. While GE transferred patent management to its foreign subsidiaries (a process known as localization), Siemens kept worldwide patent management at its headquarters – except in Japan, where in time it transferred this activity to a joint venture. The transfer of production called for localization of patent management while focusing on exporting to other markets made it possible to keep patent management at headquarters.

Patents are usually a source for quantitative surveys. This paper uses them to discuss how multinational companies manage property rights globally. It is the first paper to address this issue by comparing two major actors in a similar industry.

This paper discusses how corruption, in its various manifestations, has had — and continues to have — a very serious impact on the economic and political stability of the Asia‐Pacific region.

This scholarly work aims to investigate the business career of Alfred J. Kohlberg, an American importer of hand-embroidered handkerchiefs in 1922-1957.

This paper uses archival resources from the National Archives, the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, the Hoover Institution Archives, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Custom Courts records, Japanese Government records and other government documents.

Scholars have focused on how Kohlberg’s political activities paved the way for McCarthyism. The sources of his vast wealth have not received attention. Kohlberg parlayed a 1922 trip to Asia into a highly lucrative importing business specializing in Chinese napery. By 1930, he mostly imported hand-embroidered handkerchiefs for sale in upscale American department stores. He employed as many 12,000 people in his Shantou godown and contracted for the employment of at least 100,000 embroiderers and perhaps many hundreds of thousands more. Despite American Government policy and the wishes of other importers, Japanese occupation authority documents show that Kohlberg negotiated a bribe to keep the port open. This paper concludes that Kohlberg’s business reflected traditional Chinese business organization. While he stressed his patriotic activities during the Second World War, Kohlberg promoted his business interest over the national interest. Finally, the Chaoshan Region prospered by providing the modern world with traditional hand-produced goods.

This work explains how the Chaoshan Region functioned in the global economy. It calls for a deeper examination of this entire industry in China and around the world.

This work uses documents from multiple archives, including Japan and the USA. It also includes declassified documents from the Federal Bureau Investigation. This work constitutes a template for international business history.

States that there is compelling evidence that the Japanese retail distribution system is changing. This study uses census data for ten years (1985 to 1994) to understand past changes in the structure of the retail distribution system. To understand the likely changes to the distribution system in the future, data were collected from 136 Japanese manufacturers and retailers. Results suggest significant future changes in the number of retailers, specialty stores, general merchandise stores, discount stores, and non‐store retailing.