I've followed this in the past and have been a bit slow to blog on. The workforce and work culture in Japan is slowing changing and evolving into one where sarariman lifers steeped in corporate loyalty are giving way to a more dynamic mobile and flexible workforce including freeters. Even within the traditional corporate culture, there's the slow shift from recognizing only the team to rewarding individual accomplishment.
In this story from Marketplace Public Radio (Oct. 2006), the shift has occurred with intellectual property - where the Supreme Court ruled in favor of former Hitachi employee Seiji Yonezawa against Hitachi for technology he invented for reading CDs and DVDs. For 3 patents he held, Hitachi only compensated him 118,000 yen (that's about US$1000 folks!). This "historic ruling" awarded Yonezawa 163 million yen (US$1.4 million) thereby paving the way for Japanese scientists and inventors entitlement to intellectual property rights and royalties.




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