Did China’s rapid economic rise truly make Japan and the wider world more prosperous?
Written on July 29, 2020, this essay questions economic dependence on China through the relationship between China’s growth and Japan’s GDP, the concentration of wealth, Japan’s inbound tourism policy, and the author’s own experiences as a businessman and frequent visitor to Kyoto.

2020-07-29
In July 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic had caused the number of foreign visitors to Japan to collapse, while the Japanese government continued to maintain its target of attracting 60 million inbound visitors annually by 2030.
Drawing on the author’s experience in business and his repeated visits to Kyoto, this essay raises, in deliberately aphoristic form, questions he had not previously addressed at length: what China’s economic rise had actually brought to Japan, whether dependence on Chinese tourism served Japan’s interests, and who had truly benefited from China’s extraordinary growth.
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2020-07-29
It is only natural that this would be the result produced by an unprecedented and anomalous populous nation whose head is a totalitarian state ruled by the one-party dictatorship of the Communist Party while its body operates as a capitalist economy—a combination that would have left even Marx utterly astonished.
I am not a professional commentator who earns his living by receiving fees for writing, so I have never before written a full essay on what follows.
For now, I will confine myself to writing it as a warning, but just as my arguments have proved almost 100 percent on the mark, I believe this one also strikes the heart of the matter.
It is hardly an exaggeration to say that China’s economic development and Japan’s GDP moved in opposite directions.
At the height of my career as a businessman, I received absolutely no benefit from China’s economic development.
I believe that this was the reality for a great many Japanese people.
It is no exaggeration to say that what China’s economic development actually brought to the world was an expansion of the gap between rich and poor.
In other words, only a tiny minority acquired fortunes so enormous that they could never spend them all even if they were born again many times.
It is only natural that this would be the result produced by an unprecedented and anomalous populous nation whose head is a totalitarian state ruled by the one-party dictatorship of the Communist Party while its body operates as a capitalist economy—a combination that would have left even Marx utterly astonished.
It was Abenomics that halted the decline of Japan’s GDP.
It was not the result of China’s economic growth.
Mr. Suga, you have done outstanding work among Japan’s successive Chief Cabinet Secretaries.
But I believe it would be better to stop counting on the inbound-tourism effect produced by increasing numbers of visitors from China, and the same applies to South Korea.
This is something I have never written in this work before, partly because I took your policies into consideration.
As I have mentioned several times, I am a person who visits Kyoto more often than anyone else in the world.
I always tell the friends who accompany me that Kyoto is the garden of my own home.
Three years ago, I spent 100 days of a single year visiting Tenryu-ji, Daikaku-ji, and Arashiyama, continuing to photograph the flowers, birds, winds, moon, and changing beauty of all four seasons.
Then came an incident last year.
I was taking photographs from Togetsukyo Bridge as I always do.
To my astonishment, a middle-aged Chinese woman rebuked me.
She told me to move because I was getting in the way of her photograph.
Mr. Suga,
This, I wrote at the time, was the reality I believed I was seeing.
I had had enough of encounters like this.
To borrow President Trump’s phrase, “Enough is enough.”