Abstract:Japanese women entrepreneurs and their predominately family-owned firms are a growing economic segment in Japan. The number of entrepreneurs of both genders in Japan is proportionately very small compared to other countries. The purpose of this research is to investigate the characteristics of Japanese women entrepreneurs and their family firms, identify barriers and resources that affect their success. A customized long-term support system with strong connections between family business supporters and women business owners by both the governmental and private agencies was identified as important for further growth of Japanese women entrepreneurs. Implications are discussed.

The water sorbed in a series of poly( para -phenylene terephthalamide) (PPTA) fibers (regular Kevlar, Kevlar 49, Kevlar 149, and a heat treated PPTA fiber) was characterized by analyzing the moisture sorption isotherm and thermodynamic quantities derived from calorimetric measurements of heat of moisture sorption. The maximum volume of adsorbed water in Langmuir's monolayer fashion per unit mass of dry material v m normalized by the degree of noncrystallinity was much larger for the series of PPTA fibers than that for nylon fibers, such as 6, 66, and 46, possessing almost the same concentration of peptide groups as the PPTA fibers. The number of water molecules adsorbed in monolayer fashion per each peptide site in the noncrystalline region was around 0.4 moles/mole for the PPTA fibers and about 2.2 times larger than that for the nylon fibers, all at 30°C. The hydration enthalpy ΔH L at dryness and the hydration entropy TΔS L near dryness were -25 ∼-35 and -10 ∼ -12 kJ /mol, respectively, both at 30°C, when liquid water was taken as the reference. These values are about 1.5 times larger than those of nylon 6 fibers, large enough to assign the initially sorbed water in the PPTA fibers as doubly hydrogen bonded and in a highly ordered state like the crystal lattice of ice. These results indicate that the bulky and rigid phenyl ring in the aromatic polyamide chain opens the space for each peptide site to adsorb moisture more efficiently than the site in the aliphatic polyamide chain.Poly (para-phenylene terephthalamide ) ( PPTA ) is a liquid crystalline polymer developed by E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company in 1971 to produce a series of aromatic polyamide fibers using a wet spinning process from an anisotropic solution in sulfuric acid [ 1 ] . The fibers, commercially named Kevlarf), exhibit high tensile strength and elastic modulus in bulk [ 7 ] . The tensile modulus in bulk has reaches as high as 125 GPa for Kevlar 49 and 180 GPa for Kevlar 149 [ 8 ] , values that are fairly close to the crystal lattice modulus in the c-axis direction observed by x-ray diffraction as 156 GPa [ 28 ] and to that calculated theoretically from chain conformation as 182 GPa [ 35 ] . The fact that the tensile modulus in bulk is fairly close to the lattice modulus must be interpreted in terms of a high degree of crystal orientation toward the fiber axis as well as a high degree of crystallization, possibly in extended chain fashion, both arising from flow-induced orientation and crystallization of PPTA during the wet spinning process of the liquid crystalline solution.PPTA fibers such as Kevlar 29 and 49 have hygroscopicity as high as nylon 6 and 66 fibers, attaining moisture regains of around 4% (g/g) and 7% (g/g) at 65 and 100% relative humidities, respectively, at 30°C [23]. These moisture sorption behaviors are consistent with the fact that PPTA fibers have almost the same molar concentration of peptide linkages ( which must act as moisture adsorption sites) as nylon 6 and 66, but are inconsistent with t...

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