July 22, 2022
Because being only an industrial nation and a technological superpower is dangerous.
When Ken Sakamura, who had been a professor at Keio University, discovered and developed a concept that everyone acknowledged was superior to Microsoft’s windows, and it had been decided that it would be adopted for PC education in Japan’s elementary and junior high schools, …TRON is the collective name for a grand project proposed more than twenty-five years ago in anticipation of the future computerized society.
Its proponent was Ken Sakamura, who is currently a professor at the University of Tokyo.
Among the TRON projects, the one that is world-famous is ITRON, while BTRON was developed far beyond the concept of today’s celebrated Windows.
When it was first proposed, it took the world by storm, and BTRON came close to being adopted as Japan’s educational OS, but it was placed in unfortunate adversity and abandoned.
After more than ten years of patient endurance, TRON was still alive.
Like a mammal surviving the age of the dinosaur called Windows, it finally began to emerge into the light of day.
It is currently sold under the product name “Cho Kanji” (from Cho Kanji 4 to Cho Kanji V), and it has sometimes performed so well that it ranked among the top five in Yahoo Japan’s weekly sales survey.
(What is TRON?)
Bill Gates, who intended to conquer the world with windows and make it the global standard—and naturally, the U.S. government as well—was determined not to yield on this point and exerted intense pressure on the Japanese government…it is also said that there was someone who helped Bill Gates in this effort and has now established himself as a major businessman…Japan capitulated because it was given to understand that, unless it complied, high tariffs would be imposed on automobiles and other products that constituted the heart of the Japanese economy, which had advanced as an industrial nation.
Or, even if one were to take the position that, when the “Turntable of Civilization” revolved toward Japan and Japan became an overwhelmingly powerful global economic superpower second only to the United States in GDP—the United States then at 750 trillion yen and Japan at 550 trillion yen—Europe and the United States had absolutely no intention of preventing Japan from growing any larger…
According to Wikipedia, the collapse of Continental Illinois Bank in the United States was the catalyst…the implementation of the BIS regulations coincided with the period when our country was burdened with the disposal of an enormous volume of nonperforming loans because of mistakes in the method used to bring what our mass media called the bubble to an end…
At such a time, if Japan had been a great financial power standing shoulder to shoulder with the United States, and the world had moved while watching the Tokyo and Osaka stock exchanges together with the NYSE and Nasdaq, Japan would have been able to make its circumstances understood.
Even in the field of sports, which has nothing to do with economics, when Japan had advanced into the world’s top class in ski jumping, it swept the podium at the Sapporo Olympics.
At that time, Europe, which prided itself on being the home of skiing, hastily decided upon a rule change that would make it physically impossible for Japan ever to become champion again…the length of the skis would be determined according to the jumper’s height…
At that time, Japan’s opinion must have been treated as being worth no more than a fart.
However, if ten trillion yen had been moving through Japan’s stock market every day, if one hundred trillion yen had been directed toward the acquisition of shares in Japan’s outstanding corporations, if Japan had become an overwhelmingly powerful nation rivaling the United States in total stock-market capitalization, and if it had possessed many enormous global corporations through acquisitions and partnerships involving major companies in every field, I am convinced that such a thing would never have happened.
Because of Japan’s presence in sporting equipment, its presence in advertising, and other factors, Europe would have been unable to defy Japan and would have had no choice but to improve its ski-jumping techniques.
Because of the memory of the worst war in history, experienced by the world in the middle of the twentieth century—the century of fascism—an absolute intellectual consensus was formed throughout the world that such a great war must never be repeated.
In arenas such as economic competition, however, every country other than Japan gives the highest priority to its own national interests.
At such a time, what ultimately carries weight is the possession of all three: overwhelming power as a financial nation, overwhelming power in stock-market capitalization, and overwhelming technological power.
Military force is something that a hegemonic nation—a country whose currency also circulates throughout the world—maintains in case of the worst, but in reality, I believe that both people and nations are moved by economics and obey the demands of a large economy.
Note: This was my judgment as of July 2010.
Naturally, I would not write this way now.
With three countries that it would be no exaggeration to call the worst dictatorships in history—all of them nuclear-armed states—and with China, in particular, investing enormous sums of money to expand its military power and nuclear weapons, one cannot even utter the kind of irony-laced humor expressed above.
To remain surrounded by evil while possessing the so-called flower-garden mentality is merely to contribute to the ruin of one’s own country.
To put it in the clearest intellectual terms, unless Japan possesses nuclear weapons in some form, it cannot confront evil beyond all reason.
Moreover, the people raised in China, where Nazism under the name of anti-Japanese education continues even now, are citizens of a nuclear-armed state.
As a person who graduated at the top of his class from the Faculty of Law at Kyoto University, became an international lawyer, converted to Judaism as the first Japanese person to do so, and acquired Israeli citizenship publicly declared—or, rather, proposed to his native country—amid a situation in which people manipulated by China are leading this country, unless Japan becomes a nuclear-armed state, Japan will merely be destroyed.
After all, the other side is a country of which it would be no exaggeration to say that “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies” constitute its very essence.
Acquire nuclear weapons as quickly as possible.
There is no time for hesitation.
That was his proposal.
It goes without saying that his public declaration was even more severe and dispassionate than this.
There are countless examples of this close at hand.
SoftBank, like Orix and others, was once a leading advocate of deregulation and market opening, but it made enormous advances through the tremendous success of the i-phone and other factors.
Now that it has become an indisputably major corporation, it opposes the latest opening of SIM-card regulations.
Yet not a single mass-media company would criticize it by saying, “Your position is inconsistent, isn’t it?”
Enriching a company means expanding employment, and making a nation enormously wealthy means expanding domestic demand…and expanding employment both at home and abroad…there is no one who will complain about a person or a country that has accomplished these things.
As I stated earlier, the trap into which the mass media has fallen lies in its incorrigibility: although it has cast aside, as though it were no more than a fart, the daily and lifelong cultivation of intellect that it ought to undertake as an elite, it nevertheless believes such things as, “We have been consistently correct.”
With minds that have become so feeble that they cannot even understand the obvious fact that “every statement made by a person who merely pursues each individual phenomenon and looks only at the present will fluctuate,” they continue to say that they are correct and unwavering.
The world of stocks is not merely full of people who fluctuate; it is a gathering of people who fluctuate enormously.
Yet the Japanese mass media complacently assumes that today’s market, dominated by short selling driven by greed, is correct, and it worships the market fundamentalism that declares that the market is always right.
True market fundamentalism should mean that money created by the market is returned to the market, making the market steadily larger and more stable, so that money flows like water even to the impoverished half of the world, with what begins as a small stream becoming a great river after one hundred years…
It is only natural that the more stable it is, the better.
Therefore, as the country toward which the Turntable of Civilization has revolved, and as the country that still possesses the world’s largest private financial assets, Japan should create its own distinctive form of capitalism as quickly as possible.
Japan must realize this as quickly as possible, swiftly become a financial power, and spend the next 170 years continuing to send water flowing throughout the world.
At the same time, this means that even America is not one hundred percent perfect…the recent Toyota incident made me think…“What is this?
Isn’t this just like McCarthy’s Red Scare?”…The moment I saw on television the scene in which a middle-aged Midwestern woman was testifying before Congress, that was what immediately occurred to me.
It also made me realize that America, too, has plenty of politicians who act merely to win votes.
How mean and impoverished the faces of those politicians looked…
Toyota, a representative player that led Japan through the sixty postwar years and that has now become a major global corporation, is also, as anyone who has ever driven a car knows, a representative producer of the finest automobiles…
Even Germany, the country of Mercedes-Benz and BMW, was astonished by Japanese cars, which neglect not even the smallest details, and above all by the astonishing narrowness of the gaps around their doors, and imitated them…
The president of such a major global corporation, one that has represented Japan, must never again be exposed to such a vulgar setting resembling the so-called judgment seat.
Naturally, it would be justified in a case of clearly grave negligence such as that of BP, which caused a massive oil-spill disaster.
Was I the only person who detected in the attitude of the U.S. Secretary of Transportation who visited Japan something resembling America’s attitude toward Japan sixty years ago?
If the state of our country—especially that of its mass media and politics—were viewed from outside as having changed nothing at a fundamental level, there would be nothing strange about that perception.
The missing piece of the puzzle…the earliest possible realization of Japan as a financial power…would immediately change the world’s attitude.
Surely the members of the mass media would understand this instantly, because it is precisely the attitude they themselves have always taken, from long ago until recent years.
People strike at what is small, but they do not strike at what is enormous.
No, they obey it.
When someone becomes a scholar, they listen reverently; when someone becomes a prominent figure, they show respect.
If this writing of mine were read by as many people throughout Japan as possible, I am convinced that Japan could, as early as tomorrow, assume the position it ought to occupy—as an economic power standing shoulder to shoulder with the United States (or, more precisely, complementing it), or as a global hegemonic power in civilization—and contribute to the world for another 170 years.
Next will probably be Brazil, and then, immediately afterward or after one more country, the Turntable of Civilization will revolve toward Africa.
Until that happens, peace on Earth in the true sense will not exist.
This is no time to waste time with hypocritical pretenses.
First, ten trillion yen must be brought into the market every day, while at the same time one hundred trillion yen must be directed toward the acquisition of shares in the many major corporations possessing the outstanding technologies of which Japan is proud before the world (as stated above, dividends and trading profits should be made tax-free, provided that receipts are submitted proving that the money was spent on consumption).
The age in which mere politicians use these private assets for their own purposes ended long ago.
We must repay, support, and protect from futile greed and unreasonable criticism arising from other countries’ prioritization of their own national interests the major corporations that created this wealth—the ten percent who are the true elite (learning new things by studying the past is the foundation of intellect; they have devoted themselves day and night to research and technological innovation)—and the collective body of the ninety percent who are the so-called workers, who are diligent, neglect no detail, and possess one of the world’s finest aesthetic sensibilities.
That is what Japan must do now.
To use the expression favored by politicians and bureaucrats, this is precisely the urgent task before us.
Let us produce children in great numbers, become a major consumer nation rivaling the United States in population as well, and finally leave no room for anyone to complain.
The flourishing of regional cities will also advance at tremendous speed.
Capitalism, as its name indicates, is an ideology in which human beings are absent; it is not an ideology in which human beings are the protagonists.
Where are we?
We are here, in democracy, exactly as its name indicates.
There is no need to remain forever bound by twentieth-century capitalism.
If the country possessing the world’s largest private financial assets creates a twenty-first-century form of capitalism, not only will no one complain, but doing so should be precisely what Japan, the country toward which the Turntable of Civilization has revolved, ought to do, as I have already stated.
Even the United States will welcome it this time and will not complain.
Even if it does complain, this time there will be no need to listen.
Together, we will save the world through the only economy capable of saving it.
Even at this age, I own virtually nothing.
I have lived far removed from the life promised to an elite—marrying a young woman from a good family and enjoying a happy life as a family of four or five—and the trials that continued to be imposed upon me had nearly defeated me.
This was an event that once again gave me energy.
A commentator whom the mass media began to value at a certain point described the workers who supported our country throughout the sixty postwar years as “corporate livestock.”
I used to think, “Then aren’t you livestock of pseudo-moralism—no, livestock of Marxism?”