Akira Okazaki

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pages: 534 words: 15,752

The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy by Sasha Issenberg

air freight, Akira Okazaki, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, call centre, company town, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, Dutch auction, flag carrier, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, haute cuisine, means of production, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, telemarketer, trade route, urban renewal

MacAlpine included an additional piece of information as something of an afterthought. “What they did after they caught them is they had their picture taken with the fish and dug a hole with a small bulldozer and buried them,” MacAlpine reported back. It was long after MacAlpine’s reponse arrived in Tokyo that Akira Okazaki decided to make his way to Canada. Akira Okazaki was born in prewar Japan and spent his pre teen years in Shanghai with a father sent there to represent the Bank of Japan during that country’s imperial occupation of northern China. Kaheita Okazaki had been trained as a lawyer, but he found utopian potential in business; high-school friendships with Chinese students in Japan convinced him that commercial ties between nations could “create peace within Asia.”

At the time, JAL did not even have flights out of Toronto, but MacAlpine’s assignment was to discover untapped exporters in eastern Canada whose products could be transferred onto Tokyo-bound JAL flights from Vancouver and Los Angeles. His target list included products such as business equipment, chemicals, aircraft parts—nonperishable goods that the industry calls “hard cargo”—that would find willing buyers in booming Japan. The Teletype arrived in late summer from JAL’s headquarters in Tokyo. It was written by Akira Okazaki, whom MacAlpine had never met but knew was the man responsible for uncovering new markets for cargo worldwide. The message had a simple request: What could MacAlpine find out about tunafishing along Canada’s eastern coast? The inquiry confused MacAlpine, who had entered the air-freight business thinking that the one-way problem would be sorted out in a factory, not on a pier.

Kaheita Okazaki had been trained as a lawyer, but he found utopian potential in business; high-school friendships with Chinese students in Japan convinced him that commercial ties between nations could “create peace within Asia.” Once, after learning that his son had sprayed a Chinese boy with a water pistol, Kaheita dragged young Akira across Shanghai so he could apologize—in the formal Japanese style of kneeling on the ground—to his damp victim. In his twenties, Akira Okazaki went to work for Japan Airlines, a company born amid Japan’s postwar recovery and initially so modest that in its first offices, in Ginza, executives sat on tatami mats. But its international expansion was swift: Two years later, JAL opened offices in New York and Honolulu and, in 1954, inaugurated its first international flights, to San Francisco.


pages: 603 words: 182,781

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Fifty years ago, sushi was a snack of rice balls pickled in soy sauce and vinegar, while the silvery-skinned fish was so worthless Canadian fishermen regularly dumped their catches in a hole and bulldozed them. Sushi’s elevation to a paragon of freshness and yuppie emblem—headlined by the fatty toro carved from the bluefin’s belly—can be traced to a Japanese Airlines executive named Akira Okazaki. Okazaki worked in the airline’s cargo division in the early 1970s, when his job was to fill the empty bellies of JAL’s 747s on their return legs to Tokyo. The home islands were already overfished by then, and pollution was taking a toll on the seabed. Okazaki hit upon the idea of adapting the cool chain to tuna, converting a nuisance in Nova Scotia into a delicacy in Osaka.

Additional details on Kenyan rose farms and the loss of business to Ethiopia were found in “Roses Are Red” (The Economist, February 9, 2008). The path my tulips took through the auctions was explained in an e-mail from Hilverda De Boer’s Chicago representative Susan Tock. And plans for the futuristic Aalsmeer appeared in From Green to Gold. Japan Airlines sent me Akira Okazaki’s final report on the events leading up to “the day of the flying fish,” which also appears in Sasha Issenberg’s The Sushi Economy. Tom Asakawa of NOAA’s Fisheries Service was kind enough to lead me on a tour of Tsukiji. Dane Klinger and Kimiko Narita explained why the Atlantic bluefin tuna is likely doomed in their article “Peak Tuna” (ForeignPolicy.com, February 12, 2010).


pages: 1,205 words: 308,891

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, Akira Okazaki, antiwork, behavioural economics, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, British Empire, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Costa Concordia, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, crony capitalism, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, Ford Model T, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, George Akerlof, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Harrison: Longitude, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, land reform, liberation theology, lone genius, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, open economy, out of africa, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, Pier Paolo Pasolini, pink-collar, plutocrats, positional goods, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, rent control, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, very high income, wage slave, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yogi Berra

You could also call it, and Klamer does, the “conversation” of the culture. In other words, the Third Sphere depends (as the other spheres also do) on Klamer’s master concept, the conversation—the conversation about being an American woman or a Dutch merchant or a person who values modern art or an executive developing trust in a business relationship. Akira Okazaki of Japan Airlines played cards for months with fisherman from Prince Edward Island in Canada during the 1970s in order to develop a backhaul business in bluefin-tuna-on-ice for the sushi market back home.4 Talk, talk, talk. Realize social values. Okazaki made friends. And did a little business on the side.