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I was born and raised in occupied Japan. That’s under the great influence of American culture — the good old days at the peak of American culture. Shows such as ‘Laramie’ and ‘Rawhide’ and ‘Father Kno

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Tadashi Yanai, the 67-year-old founder of the retail clothing giant Uniqlo, explaining how the U.S. has had a deep influence on him. (Washington Post)

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This guy is 67 so born in '49 or '50. Except for Okinawa, the Americans I believe left in 1952.

So...I am confused. He was 2 or 3 when they left so how can he have been influenced by the occupation, unless he grew up in Okinawa?

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So I guess underpaying and overworking his employees to sell cheap, mass-produced merchandise is also something he learned from the "good old days of American culture"??

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Stephen Knight: "So I guess underpaying and overworking his employees to sell cheap, mass-produced merchandise is also something he learned from the "good old days of American culture"??"

Nah, man, the sweat shops are all in Asia, born and bread. It's their governments that keep them that way, despite said sweat shops being used by richer countries to produce cheaper goods. And just underpaying and overworking employees is not something Japan needs to learn anywhere, for the problem is far too rampant here. Why do you think they readily have the word "karoshi" but other languages do not?

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"Except for Okinawa, the Americans I believe left in 1952."

Uh, no they didn't in case you failed to notice. It is true that the Occupation of Japan officially ended on 28 April 1952, when Yanai was only 3 years old, but that doesn't mean the American soldiers just left--as if they would have done such a thing with the Korean War still raging across the sea.

I get the sense that the official end of the Occupation in April 1952 is a moment that holds little significance in the minds of Japanese who were alive at the time. PM Abe has tried hard to promote 28 April as "Restoration of Sovereignty Day" to instill patriotic pride in people's minds but I don't think the feeling has caught on at all. So no surprise that a Japanese man born in 1949 and whose first clear memories of life probably date from the mid-1950s is inclined to think that he grew up in occupied Japan. I'm pretty sure there were still over 100,000 American soldiers stationed in the country as late as 1960.

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