PROGRAM

The session creates a forum for open dialogue regarding the practical dimensions of anthropology-business collaborations, encompassing client communication, project implementation, and value creation. This session, jointly convened by Meshwork (an anthropological consultancy) and the Japan Research Institute (a business consultancy), builds on our three-year integrating anthropology with business consulting in Japan. We welcome participants to share their own experiences in applying anthropological insights into business contexts, including the challenges encountered. Through collective sharing and discusion, we aim to explore diverse approaches to successful collaboration between anthropology and business.

Animation has become a pillar of the Japanese economy, with an immeasurable influence on the modern global pop culture scene in recent years. As the demand for animated content continues to grow worldwide and the value of the greater anime industry rises, we must not overlook the fact that the lack of skilled workers is becoming more evident in the core sections of the production – without which all other derivatives would suffer, as the quality of the animated content itself is the main driver of the intellectual property’s potential prosperity, and thus the key to future revenue.

We would like both researchers and business managers to understand what the life and work of an animator in the Japanese animation industry specifically entails, what some of the hurdles looming in the horizon for the animator workforce are, and how a reorganization and training regime could potentially benefit both those in executive positions and creators within the industry.

This session explores the localization of management practices within Japanese-owned firms operating in the United States. Based on interviews with Japanese managers, locally hired American managers, and workers in Japanese transplants in the southeastern United States (Virginia and North Carolina), as well as Japanese managers at corporate headquaters in Japan, this research centers on the recruitment and retention of locally hired American employees.

My primary concern is how these transplant companies navigate and blend Japanese corporate culture--characterized by long-term job tenure, consensus-based decision-making, punctuality, and a work-centered lifestyle--with American corporate values, such as career mobility, short-term time orientation, mily life. This blending of cultural elements creates a unique "third-culture" plant, reflecting a sysnthesis of Japanese and American practices.

This research seeks to create heightened awareness, understanding, and consideration pertaining to the global significance and influence of racialized myths across business and society created by marketing communications depicting Afro-Descendants in Japan and China.

Through this research, we hope to promote an increased awareness and sensitivity to the cultural legacy of racialized myths in marketing materials among anthropologists and business leaders involved in the development of marketing communications.

Our research will strive to assess how classical racialized myths in Japan and China have informed contemporary depictions of Afro-Descendants in marketing communications.

This research aims to explore innovative methods with regards to representation of Afro-Descendants within Japanese and Chinese mediascapes by examining how various art forms reflected in marketing communication (1) challenge stereotypes, (2) promote cultural appreciation, and (3) foster deeper understanding across communities through visual, auditory, and tactile dimensions.

The goal of this session is to analyze and possibly explain the social mechanisms that made Japanese companies dominate interna:onal business tops during the late 20th century, a rapid ascension followed by a similarly abrupt “fall from grace” in the beginning of the 21st century. We shall try to correlate Japanese business trends with social characteris:cs, in an aDempt to clarify how cultural aspects influence business models—a phenomenon that held in the Western world a significance similar to that of the Japanese art on the art trends of the 19th century. The “original” Japonisme was represented by Europe’s and America’s discovery of an en:rely new form of art, a different aesthe:c perspec:ve that changed the evolu:on of Western art. Our objec:ve is to elucidate whether Japanese business models can s:ll affect a correspondingly powerful influence on the business world.

Drawing from the conceptualization made by José Ignacio Cabrujas and Fernando Coronil of the Venezuelan state as a "magical state," this saloon proposes to borrow the word "magic" to ask how modern business corporations use enchantment and artifice to produce collective hallucinations. In particular, this session aims at unveiling myths and realities of businesses by paying attention to the ethnographic study of corporate rituals. Myths, discourses, and performative sequences are often used to transform uncertainty and chaos into safe and harmonious horizons, ordinary individuals into powerful creatures, and working relationships into filial and intimate ones. This saloon proposes to examine these modern rituals as exotic spaces through the classic lenses of the anthropological discipline.