August 14, 2010
Belatedly, today, even Asahi’s editorial began to address the yen’s appreciation.
Its general argument is that the government and the Bank of Japan must not remain idle.
Asahi’s failing is… I would even go so far as to say that it is the true cause of our country’s present condition…
At the end, it says the opposite…
I do not mean that everything always has elements that contradict one another…
It says what is, in a certain respect, the worst possible thing to say.
It warns against something like the prewar competition to drive down exchange rates.
Over the past 20 years, this country has lost roughly 900 trillion yen in national wealth, and even now, in the stock market, its decline over the past year is the worst among developed countries… a fall of nearly 17%…
Even the United States, where the current great financial turmoil began, has seen a decline of only around 4%.
There is not the slightest possibility that the world would return to the prewar era simply because a country in that position took measures to defend itself against the yen’s appreciation.
In finance, Japan has been something of a nonentity for these past 20 years.
A country that has spent 20 years being taken advantage of by the world says, “Enough is enough,” or starts selling yen…
And this is something that might even be settled by verbal intervention.
What sort of people are on the other side?
They are opponents who have constantly pushed the yen upward with the kind of “cunning” seen in soccer.
They are not opponents mounting an attack with their entire force, as in American football.
They are the sort of opponents who pretend to fall when the other side puts up a proper defense.
And yet Asahi says something foolish about the prewar era.
What will be the result?
“Well, that’s true too. Let’s wait and see a little longer”… The people at the heart of the Bank of Japan and the Ministry of Finance are Asahi’s classmates, after all.
In Japan, which even 60 years after the war could not produce a single magazine like Newsweek, Asahi wields the greatest influence.
Asahi, your needless airs and mistaken intellectualism have shaped the bureaucrats and government offices we have today.
Unless you finally realize that what you say fosters the attitude of doing nothing, I think you, too, will head straight toward being sold off.
Before you eagerly call for information about actual cases of bureaucrats taking postretirement positions and the waste of tax money, saying that you welcome the views of anyone who has such information, as though you were the one who would set these things right and uphold justice,
you must realize, Asahi, that it is you yourself who have deprived bureaucrats and officials—including those at the Bank of Japan and the Ministry of Finance—of the intelligence to deal boldly and proactively with matters; otherwise, I think Asahi has no future.
My close friend, a graduate of the T University Faculty of Law whom I mentioned earlier, now says, “I don’t read newspapers. Especially Asahi,” and indeed lives a life in which he reads neither newspapers nor magazines.
Let me say it once more.
A foolish country that has lost roughly 900 trillion yen in national wealth over the past 20 years, a country that has gone without any financial policy, acts to stop the yen’s appreciation in order to prevent any further destruction of national wealth…
In reality, a forceful declaration of intent would be enough… and yet the world could never return to the prewar era because of it.
Lately, I find myself thinking this more and more.
Might you be the greatest sinners of all?
I say this because Asahi has wielded the greatest influence among Japan’s media.
I am not criticizing it blindly.
If you read what I have written, you will understand when the prewar era will return…
It will return only when Japan continues its foolish inaction, truly goes into decline, and comes to suffer humiliation after humiliation at the hands of the world and other countries.
There is no conceivable way that the prewar era could return because Japan does what it naturally should to deal with the yen’s appreciation.
Who is steering this country down such a path, and who steered it there?
It is an undeniable fact that a member of your economic department was at the forefront of the arguments made 18 years ago.
Pushing that fact into oblivion and pretending not to know is precisely the path toward it.