2010-8-12
Please read this week’s issue of Shukan Asahi… It is one of the few decent weekly magazines in our country.

In it, you will find everything that is wrong with Asahi in our country—and everything that is good about it.

One of the good things… It published an article by a Japanese woman, a schoolteacher who married a Swede and lives in Sweden, titled “Sweden’s High-Welfare Society Is Not the Utopia It Is Said to Be in Japan.”

One of the bad things… As ever, it has people who work for McKinsey and Credit Suisse discuss national strategy… Of course, nothing of the sort would happen in the United States.

Asahi, it is too late now, but if you wanted to discuss the economy, the heart and lifeblood of the country, you should have entrusted even one million yen to the most capable person in your company and had that person study the stock market for at least a year, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. (with a lunch break lasting a full hour and a half).

Both Credit Suisse and UBS mentioned above incurred enormous losses during the Lehman shock, each exceeding the Swiss national budget. The Japanese market must have been an important place for them to recover those losses in one stroke… A little investigation should make it clear… It would be easy to find out who repeatedly moved Nikkei futures deliberately over these past two years and made enormous profits.

The Credit Suisse employee, who also came from the Ministry of Finance and is presumably asked for comments in many places, made proposals that did not sound bad. But I think that while Japan considers the gradual recovery he proposes, its national wealth will be skimmed off still further by the cunning, greedy twentieth-century capitalism led by his company, until the country meets its end.

Countless times in these past two years alone… They drive up the yen and short stocks, short Nikkei futures, and short shares on the Tokyo Stock Exchange as well… The profits from this must be truly enormous.

Did you not wipe out those enormous losses with the profits you made in the Japanese market, your easiest prey, Mr. S?

Finally, to the person from McKinsey, a name that has suddenly become prominent over these past twenty years.
I cited Sweden as a comparison for the size of Osaka Prefecture’s economy… Its population and GDP are of a similar scale.
You do not even give Osaka Prefecture proper consideration—as the recent North Yard example makes clear—yet you cite Denmark, which is smaller than Osaka Prefecture, in making your proposal… Japan, the world’s second-largest economic superpower, has a role to play in the world that is entirely different from Denmark’s… Explaining this makes me feel as though I am speaking to a kindergartner.

Thinking of how to revive Osaka’s badly diminished economy, I pointed out that this region is equal in scale to the whole of Sweden.

By what philosophy do you seek to compare Japan, still the world’s second-largest economic superpower even after these foolish twenty years, with the small country of Denmark? I can see through the mind of someone who must have so little regard for Japan.