Tokyo Zangyo

Tokyo Zangyo PDF Author: Michael Pronko
Publisher: Raked Gravel Press
ISBN: 1942410247
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 447

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Book Description
In Tokyo, your job can kill After a top-tier manager in Japan’s premier media company ends up dead in front of company headquarters, Detective Hiroshi enters the high-pressure, hard-driving world of Tokyo’s large corporations. Hiroshi quickly finds out the manager fell from the roof at the exact same spot as an employee suicide three years before. With little more to go on, Hiroshi can’t tell if the manager’s death was a guilt-ridden suicide, a careless accident, or a grisly personnel decision. The only certainty is that Japanese workplaces rely on “zangyo,” unpaid overtime that drives employees to quit—or to kill. Teaming up with his mentor Takamatasu, Hiroshi scours the off-record spending, lavish entertaining and unspoken agreements that keep Japan, Inc. running with brutal efficiency. Working overtime himself, Hiroshi probes the dark heart of Japanese business, a place he’s tried to avoid all his life. Tokyo Zangyo is the fourth in the Detective Hiroshi series.

Tokyo Zangyo

Tokyo Zangyo PDF Author: Michael Pronko
Publisher: Raked Gravel Press
ISBN: 1942410247
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 447

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Tokyo, your job can kill After a top-tier manager in Japan’s premier media company ends up dead in front of company headquarters, Detective Hiroshi enters the high-pressure, hard-driving world of Tokyo’s large corporations. Hiroshi quickly finds out the manager fell from the roof at the exact same spot as an employee suicide three years before. With little more to go on, Hiroshi can’t tell if the manager’s death was a guilt-ridden suicide, a careless accident, or a grisly personnel decision. The only certainty is that Japanese workplaces rely on “zangyo,” unpaid overtime that drives employees to quit—or to kill. Teaming up with his mentor Takamatasu, Hiroshi scours the off-record spending, lavish entertaining and unspoken agreements that keep Japan, Inc. running with brutal efficiency. Working overtime himself, Hiroshi probes the dark heart of Japanese business, a place he’s tried to avoid all his life. Tokyo Zangyo is the fourth in the Detective Hiroshi series.

Tokyo Tempos

Tokyo Tempos PDF Author: Michael Pronko
Publisher: Raked Gravel Press
ISBN: 1942410336
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Tokyo Tempos In Tokyo Tempos, award-winning mystery writer Michael Pronko writes about the mystery of everyday Tokyo life. He takes his three decades of living, writing, and teaching in Japan and delves into what it’s like living with Japanese food, seasons, ceremonies, rules, and trains. The pithy, pointed writings in Tokyo Tempos offer a reminder of how even huge cities like Tokyo live and breathe with the loves, hopes, pleasures, and puzzling meanings of the people who live there. Tokyo Tempos is the fourth in the Tokyo Moments Series. Motions and Moments “Pronko takes the sweeping size, bustle, and chaos of Tokyo and makes it small, introspective, and personal.” Independent Publisher Tokyo’s Mystery Deepens “A rare glimpse of the structure and nature of Tokyo's underlying psyche.” Midwest Book Review Beauty and Chaos “An elegantly written, precisely observed portrait of a Japanese city and its culture.” Kirkus Reviews As for the Detective Hiroshi series set in Tokyo: “If there’s a better crime series set in Japan, I’ve not yet read it.” Crime Thriller Hound “The city of Tokyo is very much a character in its own right. It's not the tourist hotspots we see, but the real city with the food and drink which the locals consume. It's glorious.” The Bookbag review of Tokyo Traffic. BookLife Review wrote that Pronko’s sixth novel, Shitamachi Scam, “does as good a job of taking us on a trip through Tokyo as Simenon does through Inspector Maigret's Paris.” So, join Pronko on an enlightening non-fictional trip through Tokyo.

Shitamachi Scam

Shitamachi Scam PDF Author: Michael Pronko
Publisher: Raked Gravel Press
ISBN: 1942410301
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 439

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Book Description
In Tokyo, there isn't always respect for older people. Sometimes, it's the opposite. After the suspicious deaths of a seventy-something woman and a student recluse, Detective Hiroshi tracks down a gang of scammers who target retirees, robbing them of their pensions, life savings, and even the deeds to their homes. Hiroshi teams up with Detective Ishii, who’s been running a women’s crime task force. Together, they find out who has been ripping off the pensions, life savings, and deeds to homes in shitamachi, the older, eastern side of the city. With his personal life on hold (almost), Hiroshi finds out how complex the traditional life of Tokyo still is. With old-school Detective Takamatsu and ex-sumo wrestler Chief Sakaguchi watching his back, he finds out who’s behind the scams, and who’s behind the scammers.

Azabu Getaway

Azabu Getaway PDF Author: Michael Pronko
Publisher: Raked Gravel Press
ISBN: 1942410263
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
Money isn’t everything. It’s the deadly thing. After the murder of a high-flying executive in one of Tokyo’s wealth management firms, Detective Hiroshi finds himself investigating the financial schemes that secure the money of Tokyo’s elite investors. His forensic accounting gets sidetracked, though, by a second murder and the abduction of two girls from the home of a hotshot wealth manager. The abducted girls are the daughters of an international couple who seemed to have it all—a large apartment in the high-end Azabu district, top schools for the children, and a life of happy affluence. Their life falls apart and they are swept up in threats and pursuits for reasons they cannot fathom. Tracking the money and tracking the two daughters leads Hiroshi into Tokyo’s murky financial past and outside Japan’s borders as he discovers how overseas investments and tax shelters are really managed. Hiroshi works with Sakaguchi and Takamatsu and others on the homicide team, including an assertive new detective, as they confront greed and violence in one of the wealthiest cities in the world. Azabu Getaway is the fifth novel in the award-winning Detective Hiroshi series.

The Spirit Phone

The Spirit Phone PDF Author: Arthur Shattuck O'Keefe
Publisher: BHC Press
ISBN: 164397324X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
"Startlingly original and strangely engrossing… We are no doubt witness to a new talent in the speculative fiction genre…” —Rex Pickett, author of Sideways Aleister Crowley and Nikola Tesla confront the enigma of Thomas Edison's new invention: a phone to communicate with the dead. It is August 1899, and Thomas Edison proclaims his most amazing invention yet: the Spirit Phone Model SP-1. At nearly the same time, a cocksure young mage named Aleister Crowley inexplicably teleports into the home of Edison’s archrival, renowned inventor Nikola Tesla. As insanity and suicide multiply among spirit phone users, Crowley and Tesla combine their respective skills in “magick” and technology to investigate the device’s actual origin and ultimate purpose. Embarking upon an adventure of astral travel, demonic invocations, and high-speed airship journeys, they are soon embroiled in a desperate race to stop the spirit phone's use by an unknown adversary to inaugurate a hell on earth from which none shall escape.

Tokyo Traffic

Tokyo Traffic PDF Author: Michael Pronko
Publisher: Raked Gravel Press
ISBN: 1942410204
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Running from a life she didn’t choose, in a city she doesn’t know, Sukanya, a young Thai girl, loses herself in Tokyo. With her Bangkok street smarts, and some stolen money, she stays ahead of her former captors willing to do anything to recover the computer she took. After befriending Chiho, a Japanese girl living in an internet café, Sukanya makes plans to rid herself of her pursuers, and her past, forever. Detective Hiroshi Shimizu leaves the safe confines of his office to investigate a porn studio where a brutal triple murder took place. The studio’s accounts point him in multiple directions at once. Together with ex-sumo wrestler Sakaguchi and old-school Takamatsu, Hiroshi tracks the killers through Tokyo’s teen hangouts, bayside docks and crowded squares, straight into the underbelly of the global economy. As bodies wash up from Tokyo Bay, Hiroshi tries to find the Thai girl at the center of it all, whose name he doesn’t even know. He uncovers a human trafficking ring and cryptocurrency scammers whose connections extend to the highest levels of Tokyo’s power elite.

The Origins of the Modern Japanese Bureaucracy

The Origins of the Modern Japanese Bureaucracy PDF Author: Yuichiro Shimizu
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135007957X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
What is a bureaucracy, from where does it come, and how does it develop? Japanese have long described their nation as a “kingdom of bureaucrats", but until now, no historian has fully explained the historical origins of the mammoth Japanese executive state. In this ground-breaking study, translated into English for the first time, Yuichiro Shimizu traces the rise of the modern Japanese bureaucracy from the Meiji Restoration through the early 20th century. He reveals how the making of the bureaucracy was none other than the making of Japanese modernity itself. Through careful political analysis and vivid human narratives, he tells the dynamic story of how personal ambition, new educational institutions, and state bureaucratic structures interacted to make a modern political system premised on recruiting talent, not status or lineage. Bringing cutting-edge Japanese scholarship to a global audience, The Origins of the Modern Japanese Bureaucracy is not only a reconceptualization of modern Japanese political history but an account of how the ideal of “pursuing one's own calling” became the foundational principle of the modern nation-state.

Tokyo's Mystery Deepens

Tokyo's Mystery Deepens PDF Author: Michael Pronko
Publisher: eBook Partnership
ISBN: 1942410069
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
What happens when large bugs get trapped on crowded Tokyo trains? How does allergy season affect Tokyo's millions? Ever wonder why Japanese love to take photos together or how everyone feels during rainy season? How is Tokyo made so compact and made as much from imagination as from concrete and steel? Longtime resident, writer and professor Michael Pronko shows just why Tokyo life is equal parts trial and joy. This collection offers up essential skills for living in the vastest, most crowded city in the world-sweating politely, suffering noise and glancing in mirrors--and muses over the minutest of daily details-window flowers, eye contact and small gestures of thanks. If you're traveling to Tokyo, these essays point you toward the undercurrents of life and if you've ever considered visiting Tokyo, these essays will give you more reasons to go. Tokyo's Mystery Deepens brings together essays from Pronko's monthly column in Newsweek Japan, which has remained highly popular with Japanese readers for the last ten years. Originally published in Japanese, these concise, pointed essays are available in English for the first time. As with the first collection, Beauty and Chaos, Pronko examines Tokyo as a city, a culture and an overpowering experience. Tokyo's Mystery Deepens taps into the enigmatic sides of Tokyo with humor, delicacy and a large dose of healthy confusion. Praise for Beauty and Chaos:"e;Japanese who are used to Tokyo are caught off guard by his conclusions derived from careful observation, and are struck dumb...Tokyo, the city we are so careless of, suddenly starts to become glorious. It is a wonder!"e; Chunichi Shimbun (Newspaper) (translated from Japanese version) "e;Giving up the bias and seeing the city with completely different standards, you will see the unexpected, attractive face of Tokyo. This book is a guide for rediscovering Tokyo that lets us see the city with unique new features."e; Nikkan Gendai (translated from Japanese version) Japanese version available from KADOKAWA Publishers as: a E a aa a aeZaaSae-aae*aa a zaaa a a -a -a ae'-)

An Ode to Tom

An Ode to Tom PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 96

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Book Description
"An Ode to Tom" is a catalogue for an exhibition by the Japanese homoerotic artists Goh Mishima, Gengoroh Tagame, and Jiraiya at The Container, Tokyo. The catalogue is fully bilingual (Japanese / English) and includes an introduction by the gallery director, Shai Ohayon, among a reflection by Georgie Ichikawa, the chair person of Mr. Gay Japan about LGBTQ rights in Japan, and illustrations from the artists. The exhibition was curated as a satellite exhibition for Japan's first exhibition of the iconic homoerotic artist Tom of Finland (also curated by Ohayon), and presents contemporary Japanese art that was influenced by Tom's works and activist work. The publication explores two generations of contemporary homoerotic Japanese artists and the visual and philosophical development of their practice. The exhibition at The Container in Tokyo, took place 21 September-30 November, 2020. The Container is a contemporary exhibition space in Nakameguro, Tokyo. The space opened in March 2011 to create a site that encourages people to engage with art installations and works, where the emphasis is on curation and the accessibility of contemporary art and ideas to the general public. As the name suggests, the physical space is no more than a constructed shipping container (485x180x177cm), made to measurements of old Japanese shipping containers, in one of Tokyo's most beloved and trendy neighbourhoods, Nakameguro. The Container invites Japanese and international artists to make site-specific installations four times a year. Each installation remains on view to the public for two-and-a- half months. Since 2013, The Container also started to publish full-colour, bilingual (Jap/Eng) exhibition catalogues, available online and at the gallery. The exhibition space receives extensive international coverage, including ArtAsiaPacific, Artforum, Hyperallergic, Glass Magazine, Art & Antiques Magazine, Ocula, Port Magazine, Dazed & Confused, Blouin Artinfo, Art-iT, Bijutsu-Techo/BT, CNN, NHK, WIRED, The Japan Times, The Sunday Times, travel guides and in-flight magazines, to mention only a few. www.the-container.com

Notes from Toyota-land

Notes from Toyota-land PDF Author: Darius Mehri
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801442896
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
"Mehri documents the sophisticated "culture of rules" and organizational structure that combine to create a profound control over workers. The work group is cynically used to encourage employees to work harder and harder, he found, and his other discoveries confirmed his doubts about the working conditions under the Japanese Miracle. For example, he learned that male employees treated their female counterparts as short-term employees, cheap labor, and potential wives. Mehri also describes a surprisingly unhealthy work environment, a high rate of injuries due to inadequate training, fast line speeds, crowded factories, racism, and lack of team support. And in conversations with his colleagues, he uncovered a culture of intimidation, subservience, and vexed relationships with many aspects of their work and surroundings.