* Uniqlo's Lifewear revolution to take over the world

Japanese clothing chain Uniqlo has become the envy of retailers worldwide.

The company has exploded in  the past decade, becoming Asia's biggest clothing retailer. And Uniqlo's leaders have ambitious goals to make the brand the leader in retail worldwide, according to The Wall Street Journal. Uniqlo, which focuses on mass-producing affordable basics in dozens of colors, got its start in the Japanese suburbs. Less than 20 years later, it's laid its stake along swanky shopping streets in major global cities.

What's the story behind the company's success? 


The first Uniqlo opened its doors in Hiroshima, Japan in 1984.

The company is a division of Japanese retail holding company Fast Retailing, with Tadashi Yanai at the helm. The company originally called itself "Unique Clothing Warehouse." By joining those words together, Uniqlo was born. Although Uniqlo started as a suburban chain, it now has more than 800 stores worldwide, many in urban centers around the globe. 

Most of Uniqlo's stores are in Japan, but it also has locations in the U.S., France, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, China and Taiwan, among other countries. Prime locations include major shopping streets in New York, London, and Paris. Uniqlo has become the biggest apparel chain in Asia. 

But company executives have said they want Uniqlo to be "the world's No. 1 casual brand." In late 2012, the company was the fourth-largest retailer behind Gap, H&M and Zara-owner Inditex, according to Forbes. So far, there are only seven stores in the U.S. But there plans to open 1,000 Uniqlos in America, according to Forbes. 

So far, there are four locations in New York, two in New Jersey and one in San Francisco. The SoHo store was the first to open in 2006. Uniqlo's slogan is "made for all," and the store is known for its rainbow-colored casual wear for men, women and kids.

Most of its clothing is mass produced in every color a shopper might want. Some people have called the chain "Japan's answer to Gap." The clothes are cheap and aim to be affordable for every consumer. Despite being a Japanese company, about 70% of its clothes are manufactured in China. 

That's caused some problems recently because of China's anti-Japanese protests. But Yanai has no plans to move, and told Forbes he wants to open hundreds more stores in China. It also keeps prices low by buying products directly from suppliers. And it can buy in mass since it focuses on clothing that doesn't go out of style and pumps each item out in an array of colors.Facts and Details reports that Uniqlo admits to keeping clothes on the shelves longer than most rivals, and will sometimes make one item in up to 50 colors.

Yanai, Uniqlo's founder, is one of the richest people in Japan. His net worth is estimated at $15.5 billion.In the latest Forbes rankings, he's listed as Japan's richest man and No. 66 on the worldwide billionaire list. Yanai is married and has two children. He is said to have intensely studied Gap and used the American company as a basis for its business model.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Yanai called former Gap CEO Mickey Dressler "professor" when the pair first met because he held him in such high esteem.In late 2011, the company was valued at 1.4 trillion yen ($14 billion), according to Bloomberg. And Yanai wants to increase that to 5 trillion yen  (around $65 billion) by 2020, according to Bloomberg. 

Some features of Uniqlo's business stand out among other retailers. For example, Yanai has proposed a global pay system in which managers worldwide would receive the same wage. And Yanai told Forbes that Uniqlo sets itself apart by not chasing trends. Instead, they focus on basics, like Oxfords and polos, and make them affordable.

Blouses, slim-fitting bottoms and lightweight outerwear also are Uniqlo staples. In March, Yanai told Women's Wear Daily that he "might not be able to retire" because there is no one who yet meets his expectations as a successor. 

He's currently 63, according to WWD. Some employees have said he isn't very good at delegating and can be a micro-manager. But his business mind is a big part of what's led the company to success. The store was virtually untouched during the recession and saw profits climb 17% between 2009 and 2010.

They may have benefited from the world's drop in spending power, since they capitalize on consumers looking for cheap clothing. And it hasn't stopped yet. Profits jumped 13% in the past six months, according to the Wall Street Journal, and its overseas sales continue to come in strong.

The company's sales are still only half as big as Zara's parent company, but it continues to make gains. If Uniqlo's rapid growth continues, its ambitious plans to be the leader of retail in the U.S. and worldwide could become a reality.

"If it wins decisively in Asia, the world's growth driver, it is not inconceivable that it could become No. 1 without a big acquisition and without becoming No. 1 in the U.S.," an analyst told the Wall Street Journal.

* Do white people have a future in South Africa?

 
John Simpson

Apartheid South Africa looked after white people and nobody else. Now some of its white communities face a level of deprivation, or of violence, which threatens their future in the country.

The Sunshine Corner squatter camp has no running water or electricity

Everyone here, regardless of colour, tells you that white people are still riding high.

They run the economy. They have a disproportionate amount of influence in politics and the media. They still have the best houses and most of the best jobs.

All of this is true but it is not the only picture.

Look below the surface and you will find poverty and a sense of growing vulnerability.

The question I have come to South Africa to answer is whether white people genuinely have a future here.
The answer, as with so many similar existential questions, is "Yes - but…"

It seems to me that only certain parts of the white community really have a genuine future here: the better-off, more adaptable parts.

Working-class white people, most of them Afrikaans-speakers, are going through an intense crisis. But you will not read about it in the newspapers or see it reported on television because their plight seems to be something arising out of South Africa's bad old past - a past which everyone, black and white, would like to forget.

According to one leading political activist, Mandla Nyaqela, this is the after-effect of the huge degree of selfishness and brutality which was shown towards the black population under apartheid.

"It is having its effect on whites today, even though they still own a share of South Africa's wealth which is entirely disproportionate," he said.

That may all be true. But the people who are suffering now are the weakest and most vulnerable members of the white community.

Ernst Roets, a leading Afrikaans campaigner from the AfriForum organisation, took me to a squatter camp outside the country's capital, Pretoria. A white squatter camp.

It has been set up on the property of a sympathetic white farmer and is called, optimistically, Sonskyn Hoekie - Sunshine Corner.

There are broken-down cars and bits of discarded furniture everywhere. Beyond the wooden shacks lie ditches and pools of dirty, stagnant water where mosquitoes breed. Two basic toilets serve the whole camp.

According to Roets there are 80 white squatter camps - many of them bigger than this - in the Pretoria area alone. Across South Africa as a whole he believes there could be as many as 400,000 poor whites in conditions like these.

Sonskyn Hoekie has no water and no electricity. The inhabitants live on two hand-out meals of maize porridge a day, which is provided by local volunteers. There is no social security for them, no lifeline - any more than there was for non-whites when apartheid ruled.

"I don't want to live in a place like this," said Frans de Jaeger, a former bricklayer, who with his beard and wrinkled face looks like one of the old Voortrekkers.

"But I can't get out."

His wife died suddenly of cancer a few years ago and it sent him into a downward spiral of binge drinking and destitution.

Semi-skilled white people have little chance of getting a job when so many black South Africans are unemployed.

There is another group of white Afrikaners, far higher up the social scale, who are deeply threatened - in this case, literally. Virtually every week the press here report the murders of white farmers, though you will not hear much about it in the media outside South Africa.

In South Africa you are twice as likely to be murdered if you are a white farmer than if you are a police officer - and the police here have a particularly dangerous life. The killings of farmers are often particularly brutal.

Ernst Roets's organisation has published the names of more than 2,000 people who have died over the last two decades. The government has so far been unwilling to make solving and preventing these murders a priority.

I went to a little town called Geluik - happiness. A few weeks ago gunmen burst into the farm shop there and opened fire, killing one farmer outright and injuring one of his sons and a shopworker.

They stole next to nothing. It seemed to be a deliberate, targeted killing. Soon afterwards the son died of his injuries.

Belinda van Nord, the daughter and sister of the men who died, told me how dangerous the lives of white people in the countryside have become. The police, she said, had seemed to show little interest in this case.

In the little graveyard where her father and brother are buried there are two other graves of farmers murdered recently. The wonderful landscape which surrounds it has become a killing ground.

There used to be 60,000 white farmers in South Africa. In 20 years that number has halved.

In the old days, the apartheid system looked after whites and did very little for anyone else. Nowadays white people here are on their own.

Those who fit in and succeed will certainly have a future. As for the rest, there are no guarantees whatsoever.

* Le multiculturalisme canadien est une entreprise de construction nationale à méditer

Xavier Landes est chercheur en philosophie politique et économique au Centre for the Study of Equality and Multiculturalism (CESEM) de l'Université de Copenhague (Danemark)

L'Europe est dans la tourmente. La croissance stagne, le chômage bat des records et l’État-providence recule. Mais la crise ne se limite pas au domaine socioéconomique, c’est aussi une crise de l’identité européenne et de l’institution qui l’incarne: l’Union européenne.

En ce sens, le prix Nobel obtenu l’année dernière est le cache-misère de l’intégration européenne. À défaut d’avoir su créer une coopération plus poussée dans le champ politique, l’Europe s’interroge sur ce qu’elle est et où elle s’embarque. La question fondamentale est de savoir si l’UE est condamnée à demeurer un bricolage politico-économique ou si elle est porteuse d’un projet plus ambitieux.

Dans ce climat de doute identitaire, certains dirigeants politiques (à l’instar de David Cameron, Angela Merkel ou Nicolas Sarkozy), journalistes et intellectuels ont claqué la porte, à peine entrouverte, du multiculturalisme au titre que celui-ci aurait failli. La condamnation est néanmoins problématique, car elle traduit une mécompréhension profonde de ce qu’est le multiculturalisme, qui hypothèque le recours à celui-ci à des fins politiques. 

Le multiculturalisme canadien
Quelques précisions s’imposent. Il n’y a, tout d’abord, pas un seul, mais plusieurs multiculturalismes, que cela soit en Europe (Pays-Bas, Royaume-Uni) ou ailleurs (Australie, Canada). Ces expériences ne sont ensuite pas identiques: elles impliquent des groupes culturels, ethniques, religieux ainsi que des arrangements institutionnels variables. Donc, si l’on veut absolument constater l’échec du multiculturalisme, il faut prouver l’échec de toutes ses variantes.

Enfin, parmi ces expériences, le Canada occupe une place à part pour deux raisons.

1. Il est le premier pays à avoir fait du multiculturalisme sa politique officielle en 1971 et un des rares pays à lui octroyer une valeur constitutionnelle (article 27 de la Charte canadienne des droits et libertés, préambule de la Constitution de 1982). Le multiculturalisme est l’idéologie du Canada, comme le républicanisme est celle de la France.

2. Le Canada est le pays qui a vu naître le multiculturalisme contemporain en théorie politique au début des années 1990 avec les travaux, entre autres, de Charles Taylor ou Will Kymlicka. Depuis, il est resté un foyer vivace des réflexions sur les aménagements institutionnels requis par l’idéal multiculturel.

Du point de vue européen, le multiculturalisme canadien est souvent décrypté comme une démarche, pouvant être sympathique (ou parfois inquiétante), qui consisterait à reconnaître les différences culturelles par souci de la diversité en tant que telle et qui aurait abouti au droit pour les enfants sikhs d’aller à l’école en portant le kirpan (décision de la Cour suprême en 2006), aux Québécois de disposer de leurs propres institutions en langue française et aux Autochtones de bénéficier de «droits ancestraux» garantis par la Constitution. 

Ce que le multiculturalisme est (et n’est pas)
Au Canada, le multiculturalisme institutionnel (celui qui est supposé avoir échoué) n’a jamais constitué une politique guidée par le seul respect des différences (ce qui n’implique pas qu’il ne puisse pas y mener et que cela soit une bonne chose). Le multiculturalisme a été conçu en premier lieu comme une entreprise de construction nationale initiée en 1971 pour lutter contre le nationalisme québécois.

L’idée était de noyer le souverainisme québécois dans le bain de la reconnaissance d’une diversité plus large qui inclurait l’ensemble des groupes issus de l’immigration (en provenance, par exemple, d’Europe du Sud et de l’Est, du Moyen-Orient ou de Chine) et les «Premières Nations» (plus de 600 officiellement reconnues).

Dès l’origine, le multiculturalisme canadien a donc été conçu pour servir de socle au développement d’un ersatz d’identité nationale, une identité nationale allégée si l’on veut. C’était la réponse du gouvernement Trudeau aux fortes tensions politiques des années 1960, qui avaient alors culminé avec les Lois des mesures de guerre canadiennes en octobre 1970 au Québec.

Alors qu’en Europe, on perçoit le multiculturalisme comme un exercice sympathique de reconnaissance des différences (ou un projet inquiétant de fragmentation de l’espace public), il s’agit en fait d’une authentique démarche pour donner à la nation canadienne une identité qui lui soit propre. Le multiculturalisme ne vise alors pas tant à diviser une communauté nationale qu’à en créer une sur la base de la reconnaissance (parfois purement déclaratoire) de sa diversité.

Loin d’avoir failli, le multiculturalisme canadien est une entreprise de construction nationale atypique qui peut se prévaloir d’un certain succès. En effet, le soutien à l’autonomie politique du Québec stagne, voire s’affaiblit (loin de ce qu’il était dans les années 1990), la confiance (mutuelle et institutionnelle) est parmi les plus hautes au monde, de même que d’autres indicateurs sociaux comme le bonheur (le Canada est second après le Danemark en 2012, selon le Gallup World Poll) et le bien-être subjectif.

Bien entendu, tout n’est pas rose au pays à la feuille d’érable, tant s’en faut (en ce qui concerne, par exemple, le respect du bilinguisme fédéral ou la situation des Autochtones). Mais on ne peut pas nier que l’adhésion au projet canadien a pris de la consistance depuis les années 1970. 

Quelle implication pour l’Europe?
L’UE partage deux caractéristiques avec le Canada, tout au moins avec celui des années 1960-70: une population fragmentée en différents groupes ethnoculturels ainsi qu’une faible conscience nationale/communautaire. Ainsi, en partant du principe que l’on est attaché au projet européen et que l’on considère que celui-ci doit prendre la direction d’une plus grande intégration politique, il est difficile de snober le multiculturalisme canadien.

Toutefois, rien dans ce qui précède n’implique que ce qui se passe de l’autre côté de l’Atlantique doive être transposé à l’Europe tel quel, ou même que l’Europe ait à se doter d’une idéologie officielle de même nature (bien que les linéaments soient là, en particulier sur le plan linguistique). L’expérience canadienne constitue néanmoins un exemple à méditer quant à la manière de forger une identité nationale dans une situation de division culturelle et linguistique et avec un fonds préexistant mince. L’intérêt du multiculturalisme canadien réside moins dans son contenu que dans la manière dont il a été formulé et les questions de modelage institutionnel auxquelles il entend répondre.

Dans le contexte européen, le discours de la fin du multiculturalisme obscurcit ce que peut être le multiculturalisme et ce à quoi il peut être utile. L’expérience canadienne doit être prise au sérieux par celles et ceux qui ont la conviction que l’UE doit aller de l’avant en termes d’intégration politique. Car, pour réaliser cette intégration, les institutions européennes auront probablement besoin de quelque chose de plus substantiel qu’une monnaie unique, une banque centrale, une bureaucratie, un Parlement et une Commission.

Si une identité doit être créée, la stratégie suivie par la plupart des pays européens au début de leur processus de construction nationale (imposition, souvent par la force, d’une langue unique, d’une histoire partiale et des symboles d’une majorité, etc.) n’est ni acceptable ni possible. Le temps est donc peut-être venu de considérer une autre voie.

* History lessons the West refuses to learn

Patrick Cockburn
In the aftermath of the First World War, Britain and France famously created the modern Middle East by carving up what had been the Ottoman Empire. The borders of new states such as Iraq and Syria were determined in keeping with British and French needs and interests. The wishes of local inhabitants were largely ignored.

Now, for the first time in over 90 years, the whole postwar settlement in the region is coming unstuck. External frontiers are no longer the impassable barriers they were until recently, while internal dividing lines are becoming as complicated to cross as international frontiers.

In Syria, the government no longer controls many crossing points into Turkey and Iraq. Syrian rebels advance and retreat without hindrance across their country's international borders, while Shia and Sunni fighters from Lebanon increasingly fight on opposing sides in Syria. The Israelis bomb Syria at will. Of course, the movements of guerrilla bands in the midst of a civil war do not necessarily mean that the state is finally disintegrating. But the permeability of its borders suggests that whoever comes out as the winner of the Syrian civil war will rule a weak state scarcely capable of defending itself.

The same process is at work in Iraq. The so-called trigger line dividing Kurdish-controlled territory in the north from the rest of Iraq is more and more like a frontier defended on both sides by armed force. Baghdad infuriated the Kurds last year by setting up the Dijla (Tigris) Operations Command, which threatened to enforce central military control over areas disputed between Kurds and Arabs.

Dividing lines got more complicated in Iraq after the Hawaijah massacre on 23 April left at least 44 Sunni Arab protesters dead. This came after four months of massive but peaceful Sunni protests against discrimination and persecution. The result of this ever-deeper rift between the Sunni and the Shia-dominated government in Baghdad is that Iraqi troops in Sunni-majority areas behave like an occupation army. At night, they abandon isolated outposts so they can concentrate forces in defensible positions. Iraqi government control in the northern half of the country is becoming ever more tenuous.

Does it really matter to the rest of the world who fights whom in the impoverished country towns of the Syrian interior or in the plains and mountains of Kurdistan? The lesson of the last few thousand years is that it matters a great deal. The region between Syria's Mediterranean coast and the western frontier of Iran has traditionally been a zone where empires collide. Maps of the area are littered with the names of battlefields where Romans fought against Parthians, Ottomans against Safavids, and British against Turks.

It is interesting but chilling to see the carelessness with which the British and French divided up this area under the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916. The British were to control the provinces of Baghdad and Basra and have influence further north. The French were to hold south-east Turkey and northern Syria and the province of Mosul, believed to contain oil. It turned out, however, that British generosity over Mosul was due to Britain having promised eastern Turkey to Tsarist Russia and thinking it would be useful to have a French cordon sanitaire between themselves and the Russian army.

Sykes-Picot reflected wartime priorities and was never implemented as such. The British promise to give Mosul to France became void with the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 and the Bolsheviks' unsporting publication of Russia's secret agreements with its former French and British allies. But in negotiations in 1918-19 leading up to the Treaty of Versailles, only the most perfunctory attention was given to the long-term effect of the distribution of the spoils.

Discussing Mesopotamia and Palestine with David Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau, the French Prime Minister, who was not very interested in the Middle East, said: "Tell me what you want." Lloyd George: "I want Mosul." Clemenceau: "You shall have it. Anything else?" Lloyd George: "Yes, I want Jerusalem too." Clemenceau agreed with alacrity to this as well, though he warned there might be trouble over Mosul, which even then was suspected to contain oil.

Those negotiations have a fascination because so many of the issues supposedly settled then are still in dispute. Worse, agreements reached then laid the basis for so many future disputes and wars that still continue, or are yet to come. Arguments made at that time are still being made.

Not surprisingly, the leaders of the 30 million Kurds are the most jubilant at the discrediting of agreements of which they, along with the Palestinians, were to be the greatest victims. After being divided between Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria, they sense their moment has finally come. In Iraq, they enjoy autonomy close to independence, and in Syria they have seized control of their own towns and villages. In Turkey, as the PKK Turkish Kurd guerrillas begin to trek back to the Qandil mountains in northern Iraq under a peace deal, the Kurds have shown that, in 30 years of war, the Turkish state has failed to crush them.

But as the 20th century settlement of the Middle East collapses, the outcome is unlikely to be peace and prosperity. It is easy to see what is wrong with the governments in present-day Iraq and Syria, but not what would replace them. Look at the almost unanimous applause among foreign politicians and media at the fall of Colonel Gaddafi in 2011, then look at Libya now, its government permanently besieged or on the run from militia gunmen.

If President Bashar al-Assad did fall in Syria, who would replace him? Does anybody really think that peace would automatically follow? Is it not far more likely that there would be continued and even intensified war, as happened in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003? The Syrian rebels and their supporters downplay the similarities between the crises in Iraq and Syria, but they have ominous similarities. Saddam may have been unpopular in Iraq, but those who supported him or worked for him could not be excluded from power and turned into second-class citizens without a fight.

US, British and French recipes for Syria's future seem as fraught with potential for disaster as their plans in 1916 or 2003. In saying that Assad can play no role in a future Syrian government, the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, speaks of the leader of a government that has still only lost one provincial capital to the rebels. Such terms can only be imposed on the defeated or those near defeat. This will only happen in Syria if Western powers intervene militarily on behalf of the insurgents, as they did in Libya, but the long-term results might be equally dismal.

* Beneath the snooty unfriendly façade, Paris is a snooty, unfriendly city

 
Simon Kuper
As we all climbed off the Eurostar on to the platform at the Gare du Nord the other evening, an electric luggage-truck rattled straight at us, hooting angrily. Welcome to Paris.

It’s the eternal paradox of Paris: why is the world’s most charming metropolis also the most unfriendly? As the universal phrase goes, “I love Paris. I just hate Parisians.”

When I moved here in 2002, I rejected that view. I was determined to learn Parisian codes. I knew this city has a complex etiquette. I thought that once I’d learnt the importance of saying bonjour at every encounter, or of not walking into a restaurant demanding dinner at 6pm while wearing shorts, I would gradually break through Parisian rudeness.

It was my mission. More than a decade later, I can say: beneath the snooty unfriendly façade, Paris is a snooty, unfriendly city. I can even explain why.

A good chunk of Parisian service-worker rudeness – exemplified by the luggage-truck driver – comes from the French Revolution. The storming of the Bastille culminated in a national motto of liberté, égalité, fraternité, which is understood by many French service staff to mean that they should never be friendly to a customer lest that be fatally misinterpreted as submission.

Overcrowding must take some blame too. More than two million people live in Paris proper, the bit inside the périphérique ringroad. The abyss beyond the périph is vaguely imagined by haughty Parisians as either hell or the void or both, and dismissed as “the suburbs”. Every day, hordes of suburbanites and tourists (Paris is on some measures the most visited city on earth) feed the throng inside the city proper. That was probably what the Parisian Jean-Paul Sartre meant by, “Hell is other people.”

In Paris, the only response is to fight them. Neighbours here seldom regard you as potential members of their circle. You are just people who happen to live in their building, and therefore potential sources of noise and hassle.

But the strongest explanatory variable for Parisian rudeness (and I’m aghast it’s taken me a decade to work this out) is Paris’s very perfection. If you overlay an intellectual capital on an artistic and fashion capital in a former royal capital, all of it in the country that invented how to eat, there are so many codes governing so many behaviours that the demands of sophistication become all-encompassing. No other city makes so many requirements. Every moment of their lives, even at family breakfast or in bed, Parisians must observe the rules that govern eating, talking, thinking, dressing, making love et cetera. There’s even a generally approved life-long pose: never seem surprised; bored is much better.

In Paris, Big Brother (often in the form of oneself or one’s spouse) is always watching to see if you commit a faux pas. Whenever you do, he’ll let you know – perhaps with a silence, or a pained glance away. There is no intimate Paris where you can slob out in old underpants. (Admittedly, Parisian dress codes are less strict than in, say, Italy. Most of the time here it’s OK to look dowdy – though never weird.) In all, Paris is a nightmare of sophistication. Only in one field of local endeavour do no rules apply: driving.

Nor are Parisians allowed to laugh off their codes. My native informant Sophie-Caroline de Margerie – top civil servant, writer, fashionable Parisienne et cetera – says: “I’ve never met a bona fide French eccentric.”

There is a right way to do everything in Paris, and it was probably decided before you were born. All the French provincials, Africans and romantics from everywhere who land here battle to adapt, sometimes forever. You try to be Parisian, to meet all the standards of perfection that mark this city, and so you sneer at anyone who falls short – for instance, by sitting down at the next restaurant table wearing the wrong jacket. Paris is a sneer. This attitude was summed up by the definitive Parisian film, Dîner de Cons (“Dinner of Fools”, 1998): a bunch of stylish Parisians hold a weekly dinner to which they each invite an unknowing con, “a fool”, in order to crow over their cons’ appearance, tastes, conversation etc. Parisian life is like a dîner de cons except that nobody would ever really invite the poor cons to dinner.

Especially in this most miserable month, when everyone has flu and you walk the children to school in the dark, you think: well, where else to go? Every city I’ve spent longer periods in has drawbacks. In New York it’s the battle for status that ceases only while you (briefly) sleep.

In Miami it’s the near absence of sentient conversation. Boston’s climate is uninhabitable. London is so big, grimy and unwieldy you often end the day feeling you have just paid a fortune to run a marathon in a coal mine. And so on. So I stay here (Paris has certain redeeming features), and every day I become older, ruder and more cantankerous.