Few managers at other Japanese firms have figured this out.Thus, Canon's core engine technologies still hold nearly 60% of the laser-printer market, including machines sold through an alliance with Hewlett-Packard.
The results of the Tankan survey, which includes managers at 8,500 Japanese companies, suggest that without new impetus from the country's main sources of growth -- exports to the United States and Asia -- the Japanese economy could slip back into recession soon.
Suddenly Nintendo has become an AR-related stock," said a fund manager at a Japanese asset management firm, who declined to be named as he is not allowed to discuss individual shares.
Mr. Kang, who has served on the boards of both Japanese and American companies, said the majority of Japanese managers at large corporations viewed business knowledge learned at school with suspicion and skepticism, bordering on disdain.
Ms. Lopez says Japanese managers at the supplier, Kajiyama Tekko, routinely hurl verbal abuses at her cohort of six trainees, telling them to follow orders or "swim back to the Philippines".
After a series of strikes this year at companies supplying goods to Toyota and Honda, Komatsu, a maker of heavy machinery, pledged to replace all the Japanese managers at its 16 sites in China with Chinese bosses by 2012.Shiseido, a cosmetics-maker, has enjoyed a sevenfold increase in sales to China since 2000, says Shinzo Maeda, its chief executive.
Eventually she became a general manager at Geisha, a Japanese restaurant for which Eric Ripert was a consulting chef.
TOKYO — As a young sales manager at a leading Japanese department store company, Masayuki Miyake struggled to find the middle ground between frontline sales workers who did their best to please their customers and the higher-ups who were intent on trimming costs.
