The Superhero As Bank Auditor
American executives seeking insight into Japanese business culture should pick up a comic book. The thick volumes of cartoons called manga are highly popular among the office-worker class known as salarymen. While manga have long dealt with crime and romance, one of the best-selling topics now is business.
The Salaryman Kintaro series features a former gang leader who takes a desk job, pummels evil rivals, talks trash to his elders and scores with the ladies. Another popular series, Division Chief Kosaku Shima, is more realistic. It follows the evolution of a junior manager into a savvy world beater, as he confronts cost-cutting pressures and political corruption. Similarly, the hero of Shuhei Nozaki: Bank Auditor roots out venality at Blue Sky Bank with his superpower--a keen eye for bad loans.
Keiichi Makino, a manga expert at Kyoto Seika University, praises the comics' "complex story lines, characters, sophisticated dialogue and drawings. The amount of information is astonishing." In the U.S., Japanese bookstores such as Kinokuniya in New York City carry a bilingual version of Division Chief Kosaku Shima. A book about the comics, with samples, is called Bringing Home the Sushi, available at Amazon.com
ONLINE OFFICE POOLS
U.S. sports fans working abroad have found a new way to connect with colleagues Stateside: through online office betting pools. An estimated 3 million people worldwide entered online pools for last month's NCAA basketball tournament, says the sports gaming site Sandbox.com Dozens of sites offer private-pool areas for everything from hockey to rotisserie baseball. No one knows how many fans living abroad participate, but anecdotal evidence suggests plenty do, with many workers keeping in touch through pools that go back years. "I get e-mails from people overseas who carry on friendships through our site," says Colin Briosi, who runs the Officepools.com website out of Vancouver, Canada. "Some of these people communicate more through pools than through e-mail."
MaxiMuscle
Feel cramped in your SUV? Relief is at hand in the eight-ton, 9-ft.-tall MaxiMog Global Expedition Vehicle, designed by Bran Ferren, and now featured in the high-tech "Workspheres" exhibit at New York City's Museum of Modern Art. Crafted of stainless steel on a modified Mercedes-Benz Unimog truck chassis, the MaxiMog has a 360-h.p. engine. The vehicle is street-legal in the U.S. and Europe, yet it can ford a 6-ft.-deep stream and climb a 45[degree] slope. For a mere $500,000 to $800,000, you can order a customized Maximog from Unicat Fahrzuegbau www.unicat.net www.maximog.com in Hambrucken, Germany.
TECH GLOSSARY
WHY TREES? It's no coincidence that several prominent tech companies have named themselves for trees. The image of strength, shelter and growth helps temper the synthetic, volatile reality of computer chips and fiber optics, says David Placek, the head of Lexicon Branding, a corporate-naming agency in Sausalito, Calif. Of course, some trees weather storms better than others. Here is a guide to the tech jungle, with analysis by Placek:
CYPRESS SEMICONDUCTOR makes chips for mobile phones; telecom equipment; Internet hardware. "Cypress has the most high-tech sound with 'cy.' A tree known for its longevity."