This study examines how Japanese consumers’ awareness of multiple eco-labels, specifically Organic JAS and RSPO, affects their willingness to pay more for eco-labeled cosmetic products. Drawing on the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) and Signaling Theory, this study models the interaction between awareness of these two eco-labels and their influence on organic cosmetic buying intentions. Using statistical analysis of survey data from 505 Japanese consumers, the findings reveal that heightened awareness of the Organic JAS label significantly increases the willingness to pay more for eco-labeled cosmetics. However, when awareness of the RSPO label is also present, the positive effect of Organic JAS awareness diminishes, indicating that multiple eco-label signals may interfere with each other. These results underscore the complexity of consumer perceptions regarding eco-labels and suggest that the effectiveness of eco-labels as green marketing tools depends not only on raising awareness but also on understanding how different labels interact to influence consumers’ willingness to pay in the Japanese cosmetics market.

Rapidly changing business environments and fierce competition are making it increasingly difficult for modern companies to maintain competitive advantage and accomplish business longevity. This study can fill the research gap in mission research and longevity research, and provides implications on what form and content of mission should be selected when determining the direction of a company’s corporate strategy. Although a company’s mission is a communication tool that represents the company’s strategic priorities and unique values, it has rarely been considered an important factor in business longevity. This study conducts a content analysis of the mission statements of 43 companies in the Henokiens Association to clarify the linkage between a company’s mission and business longevity and the configurations of long-lived firms’ missions. Our results show most long-lived firms have clear missions and perceptions of familism expansion. The firms’ past, present, and future additions to their concern for products, business growth, unique philosophy, and stakeholders are highlighted in their mission statements. Therefore, the main theoretical contribution of focusing on the corporate mission as a factor of business longevity in this study is not only a new approach to the longevity factor, but also the discovery of new values of the mission in strategic management research. The practical contribution of this study is that it reveals that companies seeking long-term competitive advantage in the market need to design, possess, and share a high-quality mission from a long-term perspective and instill the ideology of extended familyism. It can also provide hints about strategic priorities for small, family-run businesses facing threats to their survival.

Corporate sustainability has become a central concern for business stakeholders, yet little is known about how premium product strategies shape firms' sustainability orientations and performance. Drawing on stakeholder theory, this study examines whether pursuing premium products is associated with firms' adoption of environmental and economic sustainability orientations and how these orientations, in turn, relate to corporate performance. Using survey data from 128 directors and managers responsible for overseas operations in manufacturing firms listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, analyzed with structural equation modelling, we find that a premium product strategy is positively associated with both environmental and economic sustainability orientations. However, their performance implications differ: economic sustainability is positively related to firm performance, whereas environmental sustainability shows a significant negative association. These results suggest that, among Japanese manufacturing exporters, premium product strategies simultaneously foster sustainability ambitions and expose firms to short‐term trade‐offs between environmental and economic outcomes.

Background/Objectives: Under fixed-fee reimbursement such as Japan’s Diagnosis Procedure Combination/Per Diem Payment System (DPC/PDPS), hospitals bear the cost of operations that run longer than planned, yet conventional time-driven activity-based costing (TDABC) reports a single cost per case. This study developed and validated a fuzzy-logic TDABC (FL-TDABC) model that expresses case-level time uncertainty as interpretable intervals. Methods: Data from 4674 gastrointestinal surgeries at a Japanese acute-care hospital (fiscal years 2020–2024) were analyzed. Four pre-operative attributes (surgical index rank, technical grade, number of anesthesiologists, and urgency) define 96 possible rules; for each rule, triangular fuzzy numbers for surgical, anesthesia, and room occupancy times were built from the observed minimum, mode, and maximum and defuzzified by the centroid method. Estimates were validated against realized costs in a temporal hold-out (rules from FY2020–2022 applied to FY2023–2024) and 5-fold cross-validation, and 21 alternative specifications were tested. Results: The FL-TDABC centroid exceeded realized cost by ¥36,080 per case (10.2%; Cohen’s d = 0.558). The premium arose entirely from the maximum-time vertex, vanished under percentile bounds, and did not improve point accuracy out of sample. The intervals were informative: the observed range of each rule covered the recorded room occupancy time of 97.5% of hold-out cases and the α = 0.5 cut 76%, interval width increased with surgical complexity, and planning room time at the α = 0.5 upper bound reduced overruns from 44% to 10% of cases. Conclusions: The value of FL-TDABC lies in interval information that can inform scheduling buffers, staffing, and risk assessment, not in a higher or more accurate point estimate.