The Wuhan virus crisis exposed Japan’s dependence on China, especially the danger of allowing China to hold control over pharmaceutical supply. Japan must face the reality that China has acquired the power to influence the lives of people in many countries through control of global medical supplies, and must rebuild national security, including supply chains.

May 4, 2020
We must engrave in our minds the frightening fact that China has acquired the power to control the world’s supply of pharmaceuticals and to influence the lives of the people of other countries.
The following is from an essay by Yoshiko Sakurai, published at the beginning of this month’s issue of the monthly magazine WiLL, which is filled with essays essential for every Japanese citizen to read, under the title “Worrying about the Weakness of Our Nation.”
Yoshiko Sakurai is one of the representative figures of the “national treasures” as defined by Saicho.
Everyone should be grateful for her arguments, which are also a supreme contribution to Japan.
At the same time, compared with Ms. Sakurai, who is truly a patriot and a journalist, one must feel, with anger from the bottom of one’s heart, that the people who call themselves editorial writers and anchors at Asahi and television media such as NHK are so terrible in quality that it is no exaggeration to call them criminals against the nation.

We must have not only “kindness” but also “strength.”
Let us be reborn as a nation capable of independence, starting with constitutional revision.

The risk of dependence on China.
The vulnerability of our country exposed by the Wuhan virus is not limited to domestic problems.
It has also become clear that the economic structure of dependence on China exposes the people to danger in an emergency.
Until now, Japan’s business world and government have viewed Japan-China relations mainly from an economic perspective.
But the time has come to change that perspective.
For some time, “China plus one” has been discussed as a review of supply chains.
However, that was ultimately an idea based on economic factors such as labor costs.
Even if history is fabricated, intellectual property is stolen, and territory is targeted, Japanese companies do not withdraw and do not fight in court.
When advancing into China, our country’s companies have been so captivated by immediate profits that they have not thought about the future risks brought by dealings with China.
But the novel virus problem has clearly drawn the risk of dependence on China.
What suddenly came to the surface was pharmaceuticals as a powerful weapon of China.
Xinhua, the official organ of the Chinese Communist Party, threatened in an editorial, “China can also impose export controls on pharmaceuticals. In that case, the United States would sink into the great sea of coronavirus.”
It is taking the lives of the people hostage.
We must engrave in our minds the frightening fact that China has acquired the power to control the world’s supply of pharmaceuticals and to influence the lives of the people of other countries.
To depend overwhelmingly on Chinese pharmaceuticals means to hold a decisive weakness in security.
Looking at the entire supply chain, Japan, like the United States, is excessively dependent on China in areas beyond pharmaceuticals.
In what fields are we dependent, and to what extent?
How important is each of those fields?
The first step is to analyze these matters in detail and recognize the weaknesses of our country.
On that basis, both Japan and the United States must free themselves, in every sense, from the structure of dependence on China.