This essay examines the confusion surrounding Osaka’s North Yard project,
the contrast between Tokyo and Osaka,
and the global reality driven by power politics.
In that context, not a single person claimed that “two percent of people are villains” was an exaggeration.

2016-08-03
It is obvious even to an elementary school student that if tenants were not largely secured by the completion date of the Nakanoshima high-rise twin towers, into which the Asahi Shimbun Company had staked its corporate fate, this would deal a serious blow to its business performance and cause that gamble to backfire.
The completion schedule of this building, constructed by Takenaka Corporation, was originally the same as that of the Osaka Umeda North Yard project.
During the Koizumi administration, the corporate executive who served as chairman of the Council for Regulatory Reform likely desperately wanted the North Yard in order to elevate his own company, and thus organized twelve prestigious Kansai firms, led by Hankyu Railway, under the name “Kansai Twelve-Company Alliance,” engaging in what amounted to tacit collusive behavior in the bidding process.
Not only that, he began making strange claims that if a high price emerged through open bidding, it would risk a resurgence of the bubble economy.
As a result, by applying his company’s creed of “half price, then eighty percent,” he successfully acquired this so-called “land that will never appear again,” a phrase taboo in real estate advertising.
Because Osaka’s economy had already suffered a severe decline since the collapse of the bubble, I did not question this at the time.
However, this executive then begged the mayor of Osaka City Hall to delay the designated construction start by a year and a half.
The mayor of Osaka at the time, with the city on the brink of becoming a fiscal reconstruction municipality like Yubari, accepted the request without hesitation.
This entire process was later published as a massive full-page feature in the Asahi Shimbun, alongside an article of the same size on the completion of a Mori Building project in Shanghai.
The article even stated that at this rate, the Shanghai Stock Exchange would overtake the Tokyo Stock Exchange within five years—yet it happened not in five years, but the very next year.
The Tokyo Stock Exchange, filled with market participants who neither knew nor perceived that Japan’s “Turntable of Civilization” was turning, had no conception or aspiration of becoming a world-class market on par with the New York Stock Exchange, and thus was overtaken in no time.
Before moving on to the next essay, I return to the opening statement.
The other day, I was genuinely astonished.
I realized that not a single person said that my “two percent villain” theory was excessive.