Remarks by Charles Stevens:

1973 ◽  
Vol 67 (5) ◽  
pp. 253-255
Author(s):  
Charles Stevens

I ought to point out first that my own practice is primarily corporate practice dealing with international business between Japan and the United States. Contract drafting is probably what I do most of, that and contract negotiations. In my field, many of the negotiations are not polite; they involve role playing on both sides and often extreme misunderstandings on both sides. I think, in addition to a good law background, the most important element in practice, especially in relations between Asia and the United States, is knowledge of an Asian language and a cultural familiarity with the countries where you specialize. To be able to communicate with your own client, and to be able to communicate for your client with the Japanese company across the table, knowledge of the language is absolutely essential. Also, I think my type of practice—that is practice with Asia—illustrates something that has happened in American law practice during the last ten years. The causes are primarily the revolution in transportation and something called the telex machine. Before 1960 it was impossible to get to Tokyo from New York in less than 26 hours. Now I go almost every month; it takes 16 hours. If you are representing Japanese clients in the United States it is necessary, I think, to meet the people in the Tokyo home office. Japanese abide greatly by this type of personal contact. It also helps to eliminate misunderstanding between a lawyer and his client. More and more lawyers, especially out of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington are traveling around the world with their practices following them. If you have support services in various cities, there is usually no problem. You can travel, especially if your secretary and the people you work with out of the office from which you originate can handle the minor problems that come up. The telex machine has become extremely important. This is partly because of the time lag. Japan is almost exactly twelve hours opposite from the United States. My clients’ legal departments can handle minor negotiations and telex questions to me or ask me to draft particular positions. By getting background by telex, I can do this on an overnight basis so that in effect their legal department works 24 hours a day. This has the added benefit that sometimes the Japanese clients are able to disguise from the opposing American side the fact that they are using a large New York law firm.

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-54
Author(s):  
Samuel H. Yamashita

In the 1970s, Japanese cooks began to appear in the kitchens of nouvelle cuisine chefs in France for further training, with scores more arriving in the next decades. Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel, Joël Robuchon, and other leading French chefs started visiting Japan to teach, cook, and sample Japanese cuisine, and ten of them eventually opened restaurants there. In the 1980s and 1990s, these chefs' frequent visits to Japan and the steady flow of Japanese stagiaires to French restaurants in Europe and the United States encouraged a series of changes that I am calling the “Japanese turn,” which found chefs at fine-dining establishments in Los Angeles, New York City, and later the San Francisco Bay Area using an ever-widening array of Japanese ingredients, employing Japanese culinary techniques, and adding Japanese dishes to their menus. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the wide acceptance of not only Japanese ingredients and techniques but also concepts like umami (savory tastiness) and shun (seasonality) suggest that Japanese cuisine is now well known to many American chefs.


Author(s):  
Tom Wolf

Artists of Asian descent made substantial contributions to the artistic culture of the United States, incorporating practices that were different from the European-based traditions—like painting with water-soluble pigments rather than oil paint, choosing Asian subjects, and signing their works in the Asian fashion. Coming across the Pacific Ocean, some immigrants settled in Hawaii where Isami Doi, born of Japanese parents, became an influential artist. Doi typifies characteristics that are found in many Asian American artists in that he excelled at several media: printmaking, painting, and jewelry design. And he traveled extensively, spending time in Paris and over a decade in New York. The West Coast of the United States became a center for people coming across the Pacific, and major cities like Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles developed Asian communities with active artistic cultures. Chinese immigrants were drawn to the San Francisco area because of the economic boom around the gold rush and the building of the railroads, but they also inspired prejudice, and harsh immigration laws were enacted in 1888. This halted immigration from China and bolstered it from Japan, until another law in 1924 restricted that as well. Yun Gee, of Chinese descent, in San Francisco made aggressively modern, brightly colored, and geometrically abstracted portraits before moving to Paris and then New York where his style became more expressionistic. The Asian communities in Seattle and Los Angeles included artists who worked in photography as well as painting, and some moved further east across the United States to pursue their careers in the Midwest or, more commonly, New York, the artistic center of the country. In the 1920s and 1930s, Yasuo Kuniyoshi became well known in the New York art world for his sensitively handled, sometimes humorous, sometimes erotic paintings and prints. Nevertheless, he and his peers who were born in Asia were forbidden by law from becoming citizens, something he desired, as his entire artistic career was in the United States. The sculptor Isamu Noguchi came to prominence after being nurtured by some of the Japanese American artists in Kuniyoshi’s circle, particularly Itaro Ishigaki. Noguchi is best known for the organically shaped carved stone sculptures he made after World War II, but he was also famous as a designer of modernist furniture and lamps using Japanese materials. Both he and Kuniyoshi suffered after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, while on the West Coast Japanese Americans were herded into detention camps, often losing their jobs and their homes in the process. Chiura Obata, for example, was removed from his prestigious teaching position at the University of California at Berkeley and put in a camp where he taught art. There he switched from making luminous landscapes of Yosemite to painting camp scenes of confinement and regimentation—once he was allowed to paint at all. The postwar years were a period of recovery, and new generations of Asian American artists emerged, exploring abstract styles and creating new incarnations of the multicultural art that was pioneered in the works of their Asian American predecessors.


2002 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael M. Smith

Throughout the era of the Mexican Revolution, the United States provided sanctuary for thousands of political exiles who opposed the regimes of Porfirio Díaz, Francisco Madero, Victoriano Huerta, and Venustiano Carranza. Persecuted enemies of Don Porfirio and losers in the bloody war of factions that followed the ouster of the old regime continued their struggle for power from bases of operation north of the international boundary in such places as San Francisco, Los Angeles, El Paso, San Antonio, New Orleans, and New York. As a consequence, Mexican regimes were compelled not only to combat their enemies on domestic battlefields but also to wage more subtle campaigns against their adversaries north of the Río Bravo. The weapons in this shadowy war included general intelligence gathering, surveillance, espionage, counter-espionage, and propaganda; the agency most responsible for these activities was the Mexican Secret Service.


Author(s):  
Paula T. Morelli ◽  
Alma Trinidad ◽  
Richard Alboroto

Filipinos are the second largest group of Asians in the United States; more than 3.4 million Filipino Americans live primarily within the largest U.S. continental cities (including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York) and Hawaii. Annexation of the Philippines, following the Philippine-American War (1899–1902), granted Filipinos unrestricted immigration to the United States as “American nationals” without right to U.S. citizenship. Throughout this more than one-hundred-year relationship, Filipinos in the United States endured discrimination, race-based violence, and a series of restrictive federal legislation impacting civil rights and immigration. Filipinos may present with a distinctly Western orientation in areas such as values and contemporary ideas; however, their traditional social and cultural characteristics contrast considerably with mainstream American culture. This entry provides a brief historic, geopolitical and cultural context to facilitate the work of social work practitioners.


2000 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-426 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew A Zook

This paper provides a description and analysis of the clustering behavior of the commercial Internet content industry in specific geographical locations within the United States. Using a data set of Internet domain name developed in the summer of 1998, I show that three regions—San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles—are the leading centers for Internet content in the United States in terms both of absolute size and of degree of specialization. In order to understand better how the industrial structure of a region impacts the formation of the Internet content business, I provide an analysis of how the commercialization of the Internet has changed from 1993 to 1998 and explore the relationship between existing industrial sectors and the specialization in commercial domain names. Over time there appears to be a stronger connection between Internet content and information-intensive industries than between Internet content and the industries providing the computer and telecommunications technology necessary for the Internet to operate. Although it is not possible to assign a definitive causal explanation to the relationships outlined here, this paper provides a first step in theorizing about the overall commercialization process of the Internet.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony D Mancini ◽  
Gabriele Prati

How does the prevalence of COVID-19 impact people’s mental health? In a preregistered study (N = 857), we sought to answer this question by comparing demographically matched samples in four regions in the United States and Italy with different levels of cumulative COVID-19 prevalence. No main effect of prevalence emerged. Rather, prevalence region had opposite effects, depending on the country. New York City participants (high prevalence) reported more general distress, PTSD symptoms, and COVID-19 worry than San Francisco (low prevalence). Conversely, Campania participants (low prevalence) reported more general distress, PTSD symptoms, and COVID-19 worry than Lombardy (high prevalence). Consistent with these patterns, COVID-19 worry was more strongly linked with general distress and PTSD symptoms in New York than San Francisco, whereas COVID-19 worry was more strongly linked with PTSD in Campania than Lombardy. In exploratory analyses, media exposure predicted and mapped on to geographic variation in mental health outcomes.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1972 ◽  
Vol 50 (5) ◽  
pp. 833-833
Author(s):  
John D. Nelson

Almost two years ago a group of eminent international authorities in the field of infectious diseases gathered near Cologne, Germany, for a week of reflection and discussion concerning the changing patterns of bacterial infections in recent decades and the possible reasons for the changes. The United States was represented by Drs. M. Finland and E. H. Kass of Boston, F. Daschner of Los Angeles, and A. von Graevenitz of New Haven. Other scientists were from Germany, France, Sweden, Great Britain, Switzerland, and Denmark.


Author(s):  
Hans Tammemagi

Our society has reached a frustrating impasse: everyone wants consumer goods, but nobody wants the associated waste. In all levels of society from the grass-roots to the highest level of politics, enormous public opposition has developed to siting landfills, incinerators, or transfer stations. With complex judicial and political systems that promote empowerment of the people, it has become common for opposition groups to delay or halt altogether the introduction of new waste management facilities. The NIMBY—Not In My Back Yard—syndrome has become a powerful force. This chapter explores the process by which the sites for landfills and related waste facilities are selected. This fascinating topic goes far beyond technical issues: it provides insight into human behavior and the ways political decisions are made. An understanding of the NIMBY phenomenon is essential for anyone who wishes to pursue a career in waste management. In some regions there is already a crisis. In New Jersey, for example, the number of landfills has dropped from more than 300 to about a dozen in the past two decades. As a result, more than half of New Jersey’s municipal solid waste must be exported to other states. In New York state, 298 landfills were closed and only 6 new ones opened in the decade since 1982. The same story is unfolding in almost all jurisdictions in North America; the number of landfills in the United States dwindled from 20,000 in 1979 to about 5,300 in 1993 (Miller, 1997). There is a very strong trend toward fewer—but much bigger—landfills. In the United States it is estimated that 8% of the existing landfills handle 75% of the country’s garbage. As the number of landfills decreases, their heights grow, casting dark shadows across the land. There is no doubt that new landfills are safer than old ones: they are generally better sited and incorporate better engineering and modern technology such as liners, covers, and leachate and gas extraction systems. However, people still do not want them next door. Thus, the few new landfills that are being developed are getting larger and larger; the megadump is the trend of the future.


Genealogy ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Min Zhou ◽  
Jun Wang

Confucian heritage culture holds that a good education is the path to upward social mobility as well as the road to realizing an individual’s fullest potential in life. In both China and Chinese diasporic communities around the world, education is of utmost importance and is central to childrearing in the family. In this paper, we address one of the most serious resettlement issues that new Chinese immigrants face—children’s education. We examine how receiving contexts matter for parenting, what immigrant parents do to promote their children’s education, and what enables parenting strategies to yield expected outcomes. Our analysis is based mainly on data collected from face-to-face interviews and participant observations in Chinese immigrant communities in Los Angeles and New York in the United States and in Singapore. We find that, despite different contexts of reception, new Chinese immigrant parents hold similar views and expectations on children’s education, are equally concerned about achievement outcomes, and tend to adopt overbearing parenting strategies. We also find that, while the Chinese way of parenting is severely contested in the processes of migration and adaptation, the success in promoting children’s educational excellence involves not only the right set of culturally specific strategies but also tangible support from host-society institutions and familial and ethnic social networks. We discuss implications and unintended consequences of overbearing parenting.


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